You might be wondering what’s the point in talking about the arguably most popular movie of 2023. Subversive Rabbit is, after all, a movie recommendation site and we know everything about this movie. The reason why I wanted to talk about it is quite simple. Oppenheimer turned out to be a disjointed, overdrawn, and quite flat movie held together by strong performances and production values. First of all, as you can see, it took me a while to check it out. The running time of exactly three hours will do that. And no, I still haven’t watched Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon that’s three and a half hours long.
What’s up with these crazy running times of 2023 movies? It would appear that every other movie is two and a half hours long but I digress. I think that Christopher Nolan is an excellent director and I do enjoy his movies. Out of all of them, I think that Insomnia is my favorite along with Memento. After excellent Dunkirk, he sort of lost me with Tenet. Featuring non-linear storytelling and confusing structure, it was a bit style-over-substance. You could feel that Nolan was slowly going further inward, following his vision wherever it took him. And I think this was a problem. When you have such a talented and popular director, people tend to leave him to his own devices.
Moreover, since studios are making a lot of money, they also don’t offer almost any input. This leads us to the movie we’re talking about today. Oppenheimer spends the first hour and a half telling us that Mr. Oppenheimer is this brilliant scientist without ever showing us why. Can you tell me one thing the man came up with? I mean, I’m sure he was a brilliant and revolutionary scientist but the movie never demonstrates this. To make things even funnier, throughout the movie, we see contributions from almost all the other scientists but him. If you didn’t know anything about the Manhattan Project, you would think that Oppenheimer was just a manager there.
Speaking of other scientists, there are way too many of them. In fact, I can remember only Oppenheimer, Strauss, and ravishing Mrs. Tatlock. And I watched this movie last night, completely sober! It had my undivided attention and still the names of the other characters, played by great actors, elude me. Sometimes it’s a good decision to have a lot of characters in your movie. I offer you Baltasar Kormรกkur’s Everest as an example. And to get back to that brilliance part, I’m sure you remember Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, another movie about a brilliant scientist. That movie clearly shows you why John Nash was so respected in his field and how he came to his discoveries.
The closest thing to that in Oppenheimer was the abstract images in the first ten minutes. The script feels like a male fantasy that’s supposed to come off as dreamy and intellectual. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a hundred times more: show, don’t tell. This old movie rule seems to be intentionally broken by Nolan as the characters are machine-gunning the dialogue at a breakneck pace for the better part of the movie. We’re following not one but two mock trials, political and military schemes all the while trying to figure out how the fuck are they going to build an atomic bomb. At least I didn’t find the movie boring, I’ll give it that. Mostly because something was constantly going on, never letting you take a break and think about it.
Each of these trials could be boiled down to about fifteen minutes instead of spending so much time hearing the same things over and over again. You don’t need to include every little detail about every person who testified. Especially when you don’t care about any of the characters. To tell you the truth, if the bomb went off in the middle of Los Alamos, I would not care about any of these people. They all seem like cardboard cutouts, NPC scientists doing sciency things. This is why I say Oppenheimer is a very flat movie that won’t elicit any emotion whatsoever from you. To tell you the truth, I cared more about Jean Tatlock and her communist efforts than any of the others.
And I’m not saying that just because she appears nude in a couple of scenes. As I’m sure you’re already aware I keep ranting about how our tribal system of values and its extension capitalism is fucking up everything. Communism was the attempt to correct that and to bring power to the people. It was a clumsy attempt doomed to failure as it failed to consider the deep tribal roots in all of us. Oppenheimer is truly an extraordinary movie for all the wrong reasons. It had such potent themes at its disposal and all it managed to do was to give us something akin to History Channel documentaries.
I feel much better now. The positives are, firstly, the performances. Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon were excellent along with Jason Clarke. And the same goes for the rest of the cast. The middle section of the movie, surrounding the initial test, was also amazing. It was the only part of the movie where I felt like everything was done by the book and that I truly enjoyed. I also loved how they showed Oppenheimer for what he really was, a brilliant scientist but also a flawed man. This ties in with the frantic persecution of anyone who had anything to do with the communists, accurately depicting the atmosphere in the power structures gearing up for a Cold War with Russia.
Ultimately, Oppenheimer is a good movie worth watching despite all its flaws. I’m guessing Nolan got lost, as great directors sometimes do, in a maze of written material and the weight of the adaptation. After all, this is a movie based on the non-fiction novel American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The amount of buzz and raving reviews speaks to the sheer number of people hungry for these sorts of stories. Although this could be that age-old gimmick of saying you love something pseudointellectual to come off as intelligent. I approve even of that, anything that can move us from another vapid Marvel sequel.
Finally, I have a very personal comment I’d like to add. The first time I ever heard of Oppenheimer was many years ago when I stumbled upon his famous quote “And now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds”. He actually quotes the ancient Hindu text, Bhagavad Gita. If you want to know more about it, there’s this cool Wired text you can check out. Since this is his most famous quote it would be a good idea to leave it out altogether from the movie. However, it makes its appearance in the most pretentious way possible.
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Christopher Nolan,Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Jason Clarke, Florence Pugh
Fun Facts: The Trinity explosion was achieved using miniatures and digital composing. It’s a combination of many smaller and very real explosions (gasoline, propane, aluminium and magnesium).
Rating:
IMDb Link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/
