Okay, Nolan fans, get your fingers poised to downvote what I'm about to say. That's the only way I can understand the high rating for this film - thousands of devoted Nolan fans inflating the score. Because if you're honest, there's no way this mottled mess of a movie is an 8.9. Not in any sane universe.
I've seen all of Nolan's films. Memento was a brilliant calling card for a young director and The Dark Knight elevated superhero movies to something amazing, gritty and crackling with verisimilitude. But Inception was a long slog of exposition, and Interstellar, while offering some good moments, also imploded under the weight of the writer-director's ego.
Nolan likes to tackle big ideas. Dreams and outer space. Here, he delves into quantum physics, but it's relegated to a line, really, that Oppenheimer offers Kitty before marrying her. He explains quantum physics as mostly space in which particles have an "attraction" to one another... and then they hold hands.
For the first two hours of Oppenheimer, I was lost in a blizzard of short, disparate scenes, constant musical score, actors chewing through endless dialog. You are never allowed to rest, never really sure where or when you are. Nolan offers only two cryptic title cards at the very beginning: 1. Fission and 2. Fusion. (Or maybe it was the other way around.) He separates the time period of public hearing, with Robert Downey Jr. As the main character, by desaturating to black and white. But other than the make-up used to age or de-age Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer, you never really know quite where you are, or where it fits in sequentially or contextually into the story.
There is the public hearing, and there is a closed hearing with a wolf pack of hungry prosecutors, and then there is some semblance of Oppenheimer's backstory - his love life, his gradual involvement in government, leading to a general (Matt Damon) for some reason hiring him to be the head of Los Alamos. All of this is mashed together, scenes never really more than a few seconds long before cutting to somewhere else, something else, often interpolated with macro shots of things fizzing and roiling and exploding. I assume that's supposed to be some sort of visual metaphor for the work Oppenheimer is doing, his theorizing and contemplating, but that's it, for any demonstration of the actually "work" Oppenheimer does, save one scene near the beginning where he inadvertently shatters a beaker in class and we hear he's terrible in a lab.
Yet, without exaggeration, by an hour into the movie, we've been told at least ten times that Oppenheimer is brilliant, or a "genius." We're just never shown why. And this is Nolan's chief sin - he is a teller, not a shower. A writer, not really a director.
Take "A Beautiful Mind" for comparison. In that movie, director Ron Howard regularly visualizes the work of John Nash. He shows him, for instance, watching pigeons gather crumbs, and in his mind's eye he maps their pattern. Or on a window overlaying the view outside of some young men playing sports, he uses a piece of white pastel to draw a diagram of them. Film is a visual medium.
Consider "Schindler's List" (or any Spielberg movie, really), and observe the blocking of the actors, the placement of the camera, all in service of telling the story visually. An actor may dominate the frame, or maybe have his back turned. Characters may move and create an entirely new frame (blocking). Their relationship to each other and to the camera help tell the story.
In Nolan's filmmaking, where the camera goes is really arbitrary. And where he cuts the shot has to do with his writing, not the actors reaction or the blocking of the scene, so that the editing feels off, clunky, the shot moving off of an actor at the start of a reaction, or coming back with an actor already in motion. This is because Nolan is cutting for the script, relying on dialog to tell the entire story. Even plays have blocking.
True, he decides to tell the story of the "Father of the A-Bomb" chiefly through these two hearings, the public one and the closed one, so there's going to be lots of talking. But then he doubles down on the talking - on the telling - even further. In one scene, Casey Affleck sits beside Oppenheimer in some room somewhere (I don't even know who Affleck was playing, really, it was very short) and while he's talking to Oppenheimer, Nolan cuts back and forth to another scene with Matt Damon on a train with Oppenheimer, and Damon is telling us about Affleck and who he is and what he wants.
Character should be revealed through action. Not some other character explaining everything off to the side.
There are a great many cameos in Nolan's film - it is "star studded." But rather than the appearance of a name actor helping to clarify the character portrayed, they distract. At one point, a woman near me in the theater said "Oh, look who that is," when Remi Malek appeared. We're focused on the actor and their previous roles, not the character.
Everything in this movie, especially the first ninety minutes, bounced me off, like a stone skipping over water. The scenes are too short, the music never stops, there are too many characters, we're always changing time and place, I'm not really sure what's happening, famous faces keep popping up. And I don't understand why everything is so frantic.
Once we get to about the halfway mark, and the Trinity project gets that infamous test, the movie sinks in a little. That's because Nolan finally slows things down, lets us exist somewhere in the film for a moment, lets us be immersed.
After that, for the most part, he's back a it, whisking us from one quick scene to the next at a pace that tries so hard to be breathless and exciting and just ends up distracting and frustrating. Still, I felt more in tune for the second half of the film, because I could now sense the dilemma, the emotional conflict in Oppenheimer after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In one of the best scenes in the film, Oppenheimer is giving a speech to toast the success of the American empire, but the room turns white, and rumbles, and woman's skin flays.
And finally, another scene with Emily Blunt, as Kitty Oppenheimer, giving one of those wolf pack prosecutors a piece of her mind in the closed hearing, really steals the show. Blunt was truly an enjoyable part of this movie, though she had little screen time.
There's not much else to say. I feel like I just listened to some hyperactive child try to tell me a story that I thought I already knew, but became unnecessarily convoluted in the telling. I didn't really learn anything new, not about the physics of the A-Bomb, nor did I really get a sense of the McCarthyism of the era; they were just after Oppenheimer for no real reason I could grasp, until very close to the end, apparently it was all because he had some reservations about using the H-Bomb.
Nolan tries a twist, too, holding back on a brief conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein by a pond. Because several of Nolan's films have had a big twist, this one felt kind of paltry as twists go, but drove home the underlying grief and sadness of the whole A-Bomb project, and what it meant for the world.
6.5/10.
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