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Kino Review: Oppenheimer
Last week in the Friday Fun Thread, I posted my first reactions upon seeing the film, written literally from my car in the parking lot. My initial negative reaction was almost entirely because I sat down expecting to like the character of Oppenheimer. I went in mostly blind. The only thing I knew about J. Robert Oppenheimer was that he ran the Manhattan Project, said the meme words, and invented the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, so when he turned out to be a pretentious asshole from the first scene it colored my whole experience. I saw enough glowing reviews in the following week that I decided to see it again with fresh eyes, in IMAX this time, just in case that was the missing ingredient.
I liked it much more the second time. In fact, I think this is the best film I've seen since 1917 (2019). The nonlinear storytelling works well overall, but on first viewing some of the early sequences are confusing as it's not obvious when they occur chronologically. Not having to concentrate so much made it much easier to relax and let the music and cinematography wash over me.
I liked Nolan's treatment of science in Interstellar, and I like his treatment of science here. I'm the kind of guy who would have enjoyed a 30-minute sequence figuring out the fission cross-section of plutonium, so I was a bit disappointed in the lack of technical details. Still, the film adequately captures the feel of science. There's an early scene where Niels Bohr asks Oppie, "Can you hear the music Robert?" It sounds like the kind of cliché 'math isn't everything' line you would expect in a dumbed down Hollywood film, but everyone who's ever studied quantum mechanics knew exactly what he meant. The disbelief when the first reports of uranium fission come in is perfect; everyone knows splitting the atom is impossible. Next they'll telling us they've synthesized a room-temperature superconductor.
My favorite character in the movie was Ernest Lawrence. I felt a spiritual connection with how he too is pissed off that everyone in Berkeley is a communist. What's he gonna do, leave academia and live amongst the proles? Roll your eyes at the leftist Jews running the show all you want, they're legitimately the smartest people around. At least he, as a native-born American, was able to see which way the wind was blowing and bail on the Oppenheimer hearing, unlike Teller, who naively told the truth and ended up blackballed.
The one creative mistake that stands out (other than having the setup for the Bhagavad Gita be a sex scene) is the use of practical explosion effects for the Trinity test. The buildup to the test is fantastic -- I was on the edge of my seat both times -- but the explosion itself is a bit anticlimactic. It's very clearly a gasoline fire in certain shots. There's just no way to use practical effects to replicate a white-hot ball of glowing plasma growing by radiation diffusion. Nolan almost makes up for this by delaying the arrival of the shock wave. The observers were miles away, and it took a long time for the sound to reach them. By the time it finally hits you've almost forgotten it was coming.
There are some minor thematic issues, particularly in the last act. It's not entirely clear how we are supposed to feel when Oppie loses his security clearance. I had the same reaction as Richard Hanania to the plain text of what is on screen, but the subtext as conveyed by the score and cinematography is that his wife is a hero for pretending to not remember if she ever got an official Communist Party USA membership card. I do think we needed an extended sequence after the bomb test to wrap up the Strauss storyline, but they definitely could have cut 10-15 minutes out of it.
Overall 9/10. Surprisingly worth seeing in IMAX, despite most of the scenes consisting of guys talking in rooms.
How the fuck u make a movie about the invention of the atomic bomb and it has the most underwhelming depiction of an atomic explosion ever committed to film.
Nolan has zero confidence in his own dialogue and the performances of his actors, and uses music as a crutch. In a typical drama film, understated music is used sparingly to accentuate the emotions and actions onscreen. Most of the actors who appear in Oppenheimer express few if any emotions (even though all of them have shown an ability to do so in other, better films), so Nolan instead relies on a relentless bullying score to emphasise everything. If everything is emphasised, nothing is. There's a scene where Opp and the military brass are debating which cities to bomb (and one dude veto Kyoto, probably one of two times this movie made me laugh), and it occurred to me that it was the first time in the movie that Nolan had allowed the onscreen action to speak for itself for more than thirty seconds. This relentless musical score in service of admittedly stylish cinematography, disaffected performances and cliché dialogue produces an effect not unlike watching a really expensive music video that goes on for three hours.
And yet in spite of this obvious lack of confidence in his writing abilities, the screenplay is peppered with lines that sound like they're intended to be witty or clever. Maybe one or two them produced the intended effect in a trailer. In a movie of this length, no one in the cinema so much as chuckled.
The scene where Opp is speaking and imagines the people in front of him bursting into flames was cool (and then they spoiled it by using the same effects again at the end of Opp's appeal, in a context in which it made no sense). The sequence with Casey Affleck was great. The build-up to the Trinity test was genuinely exciting and gripping, but then the test actually happens and it's the most colossal cinematic cocktease of the year.
I think Nolan is autistic. He doesn't seem to understand or like people at all, a fatal flaw when directing an R-rated drama for grownups about a real people. The early sequences where it's Opp's character drama and strained familial relations drag. None of the characters seem like people - they're robots reciting words. Florence Pugh breaks up with Opp and it sounds like she's a little ticked off at him for forgetting to collect her dry cleaning for her. The pace of the film notably picks up when they get to Los Alamos, when the movie can get down and dirty into Boys' Own detonators and isotopes, then declines again after the war is over. For the last hour of the movie I got the distinct impression that nobody else in the cinema really cared what happened to Opp or Strauss. The strenuous efforts to maintain cinematic intensity during the end of Opp's appeal seemed, frankly, laughable. The pyrotechnics, quick cuts and omnipresent score might work for a sci-fi thriller or action film - they definitely do not work for what by now has become a legal drama. Nolan is ostensibly making a movie for grownups, but can't resist his natural instinct to try to get the attention of the teenagers making out in the back seats. Spielberg, by contrast, always knows what mode he's operating in and never gets them muddled.
Not as bad as Interstellar. Probably marginally worse than Dunkirk, which at least had the self-awareness to recognise that Nolan is hopeless at a) writing believable or punchy dialogue and b) getting the audience to care about his characters; and hence generally didn't really try to do either. Miles and miles from the still-wonderful Memento, which I'm increasingly confident will, years down the line, come to be seen as his only film really worth discussing.
I'm surprised to be saying this, but I'm Team Barbie 100% and it's not even close. Better screenplay, better performances, better production design, better cinematography, better makeup (seriously, that aged-up makeup in the appeal scenes, who do they think they're kidding?), at least some characters I can care about at least a little bit - and most importantly, it didn't outstay its welcome.
At least there was essentially no handheld camerawork. I was pleasantly surprised, given Nolan's reputation, to find the dialogue consistently intelligible, I think there were only one or two lines that slipped past me (and it wasn't because the music drowned them out).
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