Ten Things I Think After Watching Oppenheimer
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Promotional photo of Oppenheimer [Syncopy Inc. Atlas Entertainment]
Ten spoiler free things Andrew Donaldson thought on watching the latest Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer.
[1] Oppenheimer is a profound film.
I use profound on purpose as opposed to good or bad. It is a film I’m going to take time and think about. One person I was with thought it was the greatest film they had ever seen; another I was with was bored with it. There is a lot here, not just in run time, but in density, with Nolan’s time-jumping and the weight of the subject matter not just adding layers but creating compressive force to the proceedings. I really liked it, loved it really, and Oppenheimer is going to be on the short list of movies I watch multiple times because I want to dig through the layers here. Even the folks I saw it with that found it boring and long knew they were watching something very different. Christopher Nolan has really accomplished something special with this film.
[2] Oppenheimer is perfectly cast.
There are going to be award nominations galore here. Everyone is good. Robert Downey, Jr. will finally be able to remind folks he’s far more than just Tony Stark but everyone on the screen looks like they belong, no small feat with this many named actors sometimes only getting passing roles that pop up for moments of significance. Matt Damon is right on the fame precipice of playing “Matt Damon” in whatever role he is in, but balances enough Leslie Groves — a man who deserves his own biopic treatment one of these days — in here to make it work. Jason Clarke and Gary Oldman are so good they are almost unrecognizable, and it is nice to see Josh Hartnett and others getting key roles. The cast is so good you forget the great Rami Malek is in this movie at all until Nolan calls him out of the bullpen to close the narrative towards the end. Florence Pugh especially stands out, having to balance being the most emotionally interesting of the non-J. Robert characters while also being undressed nearly as much as she is dressed. Folks will debate this point, but to me not only is the exposure of her character not gratuitous, but it is one of the Nolan-esque tricks of storytelling that has the most visceral impact on the viewer, even more so than when Trinity really does change the world. Blunt and Pugh cut through a heavily male movie to great effect, and Nolan not only showcased what the actresses can do but used their characters like landmines to blow up any chance of hagiography in the complicated Oppenheimer story.
[3] Oppenheimer is visually amazing.
Nolan has his “dream” sequences and effects scenes galore, including the perfectly done “big bang” that is at the heart of the matter, but with just the right amount of accentuation without becoming overbearing or distracting as he sometimes has a habit of doing. For all the praise of Nolan pushing boundaries with films like Tenet, the use of landscapes in Oppenheimer shows the director’s total mastery of cinematography. New Mexico’s windy deserts, crowded government meetings, the halls of academia, and the period design of the film are all characters as much as the actors. Nolan eschewed CGI here for mostly practical shooting and it benefits the film. Historical films have to get the “feel” of the period right to tell the story, and the production here is lush and full and brilliantly executed.
[4] For all Oppenheimer‘s greatness, there are flaws.
Oppenheimer goes all in on being epic, and mostly gets there. The film is so good in most areas, the flaws stand out. There is one line of dialogue juxtaposed to a rather intimate moment between Murphy and Pugh’s characters centered around the first utterance of Oppenheimer’s famous quote foreshadowing when the bomb does go off, that brought an audible groan from the audience and eye rolling from me. The underlying relationship between Murphy’s Oppenheimer and Downey’s Strauss needed more on the front end to really lay in the delivery of the latter part of the film. Using black and white for some of the time jumping, but color for others, then not using it, while no doubt intended as emphasis seemed heavy handed and confusing.
[5] The music in Oppenheimer, however, is overbearing.
The score just doesn’t work. A three-hour movie with two and a half hours’ worth of music, most of the score is bothersome thudding noise, which is remarkable since there is almost no percussion used in composer Ludwig Göransson’s score outside of foot stomps and some explosions. Somehow the string-heavy score does more droning than soaring. Anecdotal, but one of my children was at the Barbie movie with friends and reported you could not only hear but feel the Oppenheimer score coming through the walls. It’s that insistent, and it hurts rather than helps this film.
[6] Got to be honest, Oppenheimer is too long.
As much as I enjoyed Oppenheimer, it was just too long. Nolan could easily get 15-20 minutes out of this film without changing much of the plot. Nolan is at the point of his career where he can do what he wants, but some extra guardrails and editing would have helped here.
[7] Despite the visuals and cast, some of the characters don’t connect.
The acting is good, the visuals are good, the writing is coherent, but something with the character development outside of Oppenheimer himself is just ever so slightly off. It took me a bit, but the time jumps are part of the problem here. Instead of weaving the story together as they can do, and as Nolan has done in other films, with this subject matter it felt more like smash cuts for emphasis than a flowing story with layers to it.
[8] Oppenheimer stays on the right side of the “challenge morals without moralizing” line.
Using two atomic bombs on Japan is something that humanity will not only always debate but should always debate and wrestle with. The film did a good job covering all the bases and arguments that went into the decision and not only the morals and strategy involved, but how personalities and fears both known and unknown played into it. Lending as much gravity as possible to something so momentous that resulted in so many deaths without getting preachy about is not easy, but Oppenheimer managed it.
[9] Cillian Murphy deserves all the praise he’ll be getting.
As mentioned, Downey might have stolen the whole movie, Blunt as Oppenheimer’s longsuffering wife smolders until she sizzles towards the end of the film, Pugh seers through the screen as a troubled lover, and the cast is stacked top to bottom. But it all revolves around Cillian Murphy’s embodiment of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Playing a troubled, complicated, highly flawed, but legendary figure like Oppenheimer is usually an actor’s ticket to awards season, and Murphy will be a contender for all the best acting awards. Justly so. It is easy to suspend disbelief in places that you strain towards the screen in your seat just a little really wondering what being present while Einstein and Oppenheimer shooting the breeze overlooking a pond would be like. Are they trying to save the world or just talking about the weather? Mostly, the task of “carrying the weight of the world” might be the most overused plot device in human history, but Oppenheimer is one of the humans in history who really did it. The fame and suffering, notoriety and infamy that comes with it comes across in Murphy’s performance.
[10] Oppenheimer is the kind of movie that needs to be praised, even with some issues.
In a time when folks are begging Hollywood to make something, anything, original and interesting, the bold decisions that made Oppenheimer should be lauded, even when some of those decisions didn’t work out fully. Oppenheimer is a movie that folks will have opinions on because it is A LOT to digest even with a three-hour runtime. I’m going to really pay attention to a few things when I watch it again and see if, and how, any of my opinion changes. Again, Oppenheimer is a profound movie, and beyond whether it was good or bad – and I think it was very good – it made me think more than any other film has in a long, long time. I don’t like the movie theater, and one of my older children who was with me actually reached over a few times to make sure I was still good with the environment of Oppenheimer‘s bombast and might. But I was. There are only so many directors like Nolan that can get the leash to do something ambitious like this film, so saying all movies should be like this is ridiculous. But it cuts through the onslaught of sequels, remakes, CGI sensory assaults, and just plain bad movies that are foisted upon the viewing public at ever increasing prices just to get the rare movie that is worth it. It can be done, if there is a will to get it done, and leadership to herd the proper cats into proper places to get it done. Nolan did that here, and for that Oppenheimer will be a movie talked about for a long, long time.
When do we get your ten things you felt after the Barbie pub crawl?Report
The daughters already got me Barbie tshirt for when we all go…Report
Thank you, this makes me want to see it even more.Report
Agree with most of this except I found the tits unnecessary, and I’m pretty oblivious to the score of movies but agree it was loud. At one point I thought the theatre’s fire alarm was going off. I love the movie and will watch again, even at three hours long.Report
Was the loudness specific to this movie, or was it part of the ongoing trend to pump up the volume at the theaters. I quit going to theaters years ago because for my aging ears, the volume was on occasion physically painful.Report
Louder than normal, IMO.Report
I saw the movie yesterday (did “Barbenheimer,” and let it be known that “Barbie” is fantastic). While I agree that much of the audio–music and otherwise–is loud, I saw it more as an audio representation of Oppenheimer’s mental state, the cacophony of thoughts and emotions contained within while doing his best to appear outwardly calm and in control.
The “tits” seemed out of place, but I saw their use as more a vehicle to communicate vulnerability. I concede readily that maybe another way could have been found.Report
I really want to see Rusty Venture as Kurt Godel.Report
I agree. Nolan hasn’t done nudity before and I think it detracts rather than adds to the film. When dealing with real people, especially one that apparently had deep issues, it seems gratuitous. It also makes it difficult to recommend to my rather conservative family.Report
Having seen the movie, I agree with what you have written here but had no firm opinions on the score. It felt kind of weird seeing Feynman portrayed but essentially be a cameo character who is generally seen but not heard.
Also, the entire Barbie marketing strategy appears to be aimed at needling Oppenheimer and Nolan for being self-serious. Barbie basically appears to be Poptimism the Movie.Report
I think Barbie and Oppenheimer coming out together is actually helping both films marketing wise, such different movies but a lot of folks want to see both so it has become its own thing online, which is priceless for studios selling in-theater movies now.Report
6. The Seven Hours directors. cut will consist of long drawn out teens of mathematics and Communist political meetings.Report
I went into the theater last night with high expectations and perhaps that is part of the reason I was terribly disappointed.
I think this movie could have been profound if focused on Oppenheimer’s inner conflict, transformation and regret and not a defending your life prism of a Senate confirmation hearings and a board review of a security clearance renewal. What is it with Hollywood compulsion to focus on the Red Scare? So much more to Opp’s story that is far more interesting. Half the film is about his connection with communists and that is not that interesting.
As for the score, it was a constant distraction. I don’t recall ever thinking that of a film. It was almost comical. I kept thinking “this is not nearly as dramatic as the music thinks it is.” So loud and so over the top. Kept taking me out of the film.
It was way too long. 45 minutes needed to be cut.
I laughed out loud at the board room sex scene.Report
I saw it over the weekend, and I enjoyed it a lot. While long, I didn’t really feel the runtime and the suspense building up tot the Trinity test was phenomenal. I also thought the movie did a good job of considering the ethical issues with nuclear weapons.Report
Wondering if anyone who’s seen the film remembers the TV miniseries with Sam Waterston.Report
No.Report
My biggest worry about Oppenheimer was that it would apothoeize the man. I’m okay with showing up a few good facets of his character and I’m very okay with highlighting the moral debate about using atomic weaponry at all. I just feared walking out of the theater with some rosy picture of the man who did more than anyone else to transform the postwar years into decades of nuclear terror.Report
That would be Edward Teller. He was intent on building H-bombs even before the A-bomb was done. (Oppenheimer’s hesitancy about building ever-bigger bombs was one of the things that lost him his clearance.)Report
There are apparently complaints about the misogyny and a call for justice for the women of Oppenheimer for being defined by their relationship to Oppenheimer rather than themselves:
https://www.vogue.com/article/justice-for-the-women-of-oppenheimer
I really don’t like the increasingly doctrinaire demands for ideological perfection in all areas on the online sphere.Report
Did it pass the Bechdel Test?Report
It did not. But Oppenheimer is about a particular man, so having something that passes the Bechdel Test would be really difficult.
One of the smartest observations on the Bechdel Test was that there are a lot of anime that are definitely aimed at cis-male heterosexual audience that pass the Bechdel audience because the entire cast is female.Report
Who made that observation?Report
I saw it on TvTropes.Report
It’s my understanding that this movie has a 3 hour run time. If the women in his life were given equal screen time, we could probably double that.Report
On the other blog, my brother had a good observation that the people calling Oppenheimer a “white male” movie are doing a very big “Jews don’t count.” Many if not most of the physicists at Los Alamos were Jews. More than a few of them were refugees from you know who. Considering the time period of Oppenheimer, we know what was happening. Yet, Oppenheimer is still the “white male” movie for some reason. There is a really sick double game going on where Jews are supposed to give support for this and that cause because of our history of oppression and persecution but Jews don’t really count as a true persecuted minority.Report
A smarter criticism from your brother would be to say that this line of art criticism is so utterly tired and pedestrian that anyone engaging in it should be assumed to be a boring, boring person.Report
I saw the movie today. We got good seats for the IMAX.
I agree with you 100% about the sound. *EXCEPT*.
You know the Trinity test? Well, when they went for complete and total silence, I found I was holding my breath. And then, when the noise hit, I started in my seat.
That was a fun experience. I don’t know that I would have gotten it if the sound mix wasn’t so awful for the movie up to that point.
When it comes to Florence Pugh, John Cena said it best:
THAT SAID: I remember a movie review a million years ago that talked about sex scenes in movies thusly: If you could replace the sex scene with a card that said “and then they had sex” and then switched to the post-coital denouement without changing anything about the plot or theme, then you knew that the scene was in the movie for reasons other than plot or theme.
IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.
When it came to the sex scenes in Oppenheimer, I don’t think that they could have been easily replaced with a card that said “and then they had sex”. So they had that going for them, at least.
Part of me wonders if it wasn’t a backhanded sleight against the type of folks who would be most likely to say “Of course we should have dropped the bomb!”
They go to see this movie, see this moral debate of bomb-dropping but they have to sit through some chesticles to get there.
As for the story, I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW MUCH TAIL OPPENHEIMER GOT. They went out of their way to introduce one character for 10 seconds so that Oppenheimer can say “Oh, yeah, I was down with O.P.P.” about yet another chick.
Seriously, I wondered “DID UPDIKE WRITE THIS?”
As for the dilemma at the core of the flick, yeah, Oppenheimer should have lost his clearance. Sure, he was loyal and loved America but he was not particularly careful about his bedfellows and that carelessness would have cost important information in his future even assuming that it lost none in his past.
Great flick. Glad I saw it.Report
Red Letter Media has dubbed Oppenheimer “The Last Movie”. (Jump ahead to 29:10)
I agree with about 80% of what they say here.
They, too, complain about the sound mix. They, too, are impressed with the fact that the movie cost a bajillion bucks because every single named character in the movie you see is played by an actor who got at least a “supporting actor/actress” nomination before. They, too, are troubled by streaming and what it means for the future.
Anyway. If you’ve seen it, check out RLM. Have a good laugh. They might agree with you.Report