I put it at 7/10 because I felt it was well-constructed overall and enjoyed all the acting. The peculiar sharp but also raspy/crispy filtering on the spoken words (which I mostly noticed in the b&w scenes) caught my interest though I don’t know enough about filmmaking to know what it’s called, whether it was a Nolan thing, etc. Also liked Matt Damon’s character.
There were a couple of threads on hexbear about it last summer when it was newly released. I recall some comments speaking positively about the movie’s portrayal of communism. I strongly disagree about that. To me, nearly all mentions and presentations of communism (and there were many) were no different from Hollywood’s usual disparaging, marginalizing and childish slander. This was done through the words themselves, the committee scenes with Jason Clarke’s asshole character, Josh Hartnett’s aggressively anti-union/communist “just vVooOooTE!!1!” professor character, the musical cues during the scenes with Florence Pugh’s character, etc. It was particularly bad in the house party scene with her and the tall guy presenting themselves as some kind of unwanted solicitor duo to Oppenheimer. I’ve seen that exact type of scene and felt the same little psychological manipulations in anti-union videos at companies I’ve worked for, it was cringe as hell and exactly what some liberal dickhead would imagine a communist or union organizer to be like. (The Netflix series Narcos has this same deeply inherent liberalism in its writing in all scenes portraying or talking about the Colombian communists.)
The American military and political characters were portrayed as ruthless sociopathic warmongering assholes for those who could examine them objectively, yes. That’s correct historically and remains true today. My problem with it is none of that was done in an explicit and overtly scolding manner for benefit of the audience, and so most Westerners who will just go along with the scenes, nodding along and comfortably letting their subconscious biases be confirmed as usual with no challenges presented, because Hollywood is still incapable and/or unwilling to have that sort of writing in any script.
I put it at 7/10 because I felt it was well-constructed overall and enjoyed all the acting. The peculiar sharp but also raspy/crispy filtering on the spoken words (which I mostly noticed in the b&w scenes) caught my interest though I don’t know enough about filmmaking to know what it’s called, whether it was a Nolan thing, etc. Also liked Matt Damon’s character.
There were a couple of threads on hexbear about it last summer when it was newly released. I recall some comments speaking positively about the movie’s portrayal of communism. I strongly disagree about that. To me, nearly all mentions and presentations of communism (and there were many) were no different from Hollywood’s usual disparaging, marginalizing and childish slander. This was done through the words themselves, the committee scenes with Jason Clarke’s asshole character, Josh Hartnett’s aggressively anti-union/communist “just vVooOooTE!!1!” professor character, the musical cues during the scenes with Florence Pugh’s character, etc. It was particularly bad in the house party scene with her and the tall guy presenting themselves as some kind of unwanted solicitor duo to Oppenheimer. I’ve seen that exact type of scene and felt the same little psychological manipulations in anti-union videos at companies I’ve worked for, it was cringe as hell and exactly what some liberal dickhead would imagine a communist or union organizer to be like. (The Netflix series Narcos has this same deeply inherent liberalism in its writing in all scenes portraying or talking about the Colombian communists.)
The American military and political characters were portrayed as ruthless sociopathic warmongering assholes for those who could examine them objectively, yes. That’s correct historically and remains true today. My problem with it is none of that was done in an explicit and overtly scolding manner for benefit of the audience, and so most Westerners who will just go along with the scenes, nodding along and comfortably letting their subconscious biases be confirmed as usual with no challenges presented, because Hollywood is still incapable and/or unwilling to have that sort of writing in any script.