One part Great Man Theory with tons of navel gazing and genuflecting to a handful of star figures. One part Sorkin-esque courtroom drama.
Zero parts fun.
Three fucking hours long.
Don’t waste your money on this shit bag, folks.
I liked it but it was such a Nolan movie. Every physicist is introduced like they’re a superhero. JFK gets namedropped at the end like he’s a minor Marvel character being set up for a future movie
They had an hour’s worth of political ahem thriller around whether a guy gets a Senate appointment to the Eisenhower cabinet.
They completely ignored so much of the crazy shit that went down during the actual project.
- The Baker & Williams warehouses, where they accidentally started a nuclear fire with stacked uranium
- The Philadelphia Incident, when three scientists trying to fix a pipe full of uranium hexafluoride accidentally detonated it.
- The Demon Core experiments
- Site W, where the first Plutonium was developed, and the army would disect dead coyotes to measure the impacts produced by all their nuclear waste
- Bikini Atoll & Operation Plumbbob, two major sites of nuclear testing
- Eisenhower’s Atoms For Peace speech and the development of nuclear energy, both for civilian use and military locomotion
All this shit was breezed over so they could make a movie about Oppenheimer not being a Communist.
This is the only actual good critique in the thread. However I’d add that they make clear that he was a communist-sympathizer. He betrays them however, morally speaking.
It also seems a bit reductive. These are legit points to make but they do strike me (and forgive me if this is not the case) as a very American thing were people judge a film based on whether particular ‘cool’ or ‘important’ things happened, whereas movies as an art-form and not just entertainment, and beyond highlighting everything political which we would like them to, can also use formal visual and musical language to convey other themes and ideas. I’d say the film has some clear strenghts in terms of the latter while agreeing with you that it has some clear weaknesses in terms of the former.
JFK will return in JFK 2: Return to Dallas
Tell all the Oppenheimer nerds that Jean Tatlock (probably) didn’t kill herself and then force them to read the Church Committee.
If you watch the movie, there was a one second flash of her head being held underwater. It wasn’t the focus because Oppenheimer blamed himself instead of the feds.
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I came out the movie thinking “Justice for Jean.”
no shit. Nolan is a bad director and he makes bad movies
Death to America
My lib relatives called it anti-communist propaganda because it was anti-union. They also didn’t like that Oppi’s gf was not portrayed as the chemists she was and a general erasure of women in the manhattan project.
Oppi’s gf was not portrayed as the chemists she was and a general erasure of women in the manhattan project
#JustNolanThings
There was no reason to make it three hours. I was close to pissing myself by the second hour and had to suffer through the last part, hoping something interesting would happen, but instead I got an entire hour of dozens of characters I didn’t give a shit about just babbling at each other while my bladder came closer and closer to blasting the entire audience.
Slowly expanding piss puddle to reflect my growing displeasure with the film
Counterpoint - it was good and I liked it
Other Counterpoint - It was meh. Also, it was my own fault for expecting something else, but he really needs to turn down the music and atmospheric sounds. I thought it might be my ears but like really young people were complaining about not being able to make out the dialogue.
Counterpoint - I haven’t seen it. /10
I heard a coworker describe their friend’s evaluation of the movie. The only comment was " that was the loudest movie I’ve ever seen".
I’m starting to realize everyone on this site has baby brain movie opinions
Please enlighten us with your galaxy brain opinions
Adults are not allowed to consume entertainment unless it is sufficiently ponderously grimdark. The arbiter of adulthood has spoken.
Finally saw it. It was good. I disagree with OP and many others ITT which is why I’m replying to you lol. It wasn’t Sorkin-esque in my opinion because Sorkin-esque dialog is very quippy and punchy and smug and sarcastic, and this movie didn’t feel that way at all. Nor did it feel very “great man theory” because there was a lot of focus on the other scientists, engineers, soldiers, and workers involved in the project. It was a biopic, but it was also about McCarthyism. Was it a communist movie, made for communists? of course not. But it was still enjoyable.
Only starting to realise now? This site has had the weirdest most out of touch opinions I’ve ever seen on general media. Like a bunch of millenial boomers. My favourite occurrence of this is when hexbear starts trashing on movies like black panther, saying it’s colonialist/racist or something. Well in South Africa where I live, people absolutely love that movie series, black panther is massive over here. I’m talking about singing and dancing outside the cinema, holding watch parties, etc. I’ve yet to meet a single African here that has expressed a negative opinion of the movie in real life. Pretty much everyone under the age of 35 loves it and regularly makes jokes about “Wakanda”, etc. Yet according to hexbear it’s colonialist apologa trash that no one likes.
There also seem to be a bunch of cranky joyless users that hold eternal grudges bazinga style, like Sheldon Cooper from the big bang theory lmao. I don’t quite understand that.
Dont think people actually hate Black panther expect for racist Chuds Its just that people dont like the typical “Villians goes to far” and The CIA propaganda
I think it’s a maturity thing. There’s an outward need to be contrarian, to be seen. And often just yeah baby brained poor analysis of film
There’s an outward need to be contrarian, to be seen.
Calling people “baby brained” is totally not contrarian whatsoever and there’s no possible motive to be seen as superior for looking down on other people that aren’t consuming “mature” enough treats.
My treats are actually really cool and underground you probably haven’t heard of them because you’re not cool like me
Dae le rare multibillion dollar franchise gems.
I don’t think it’s a commentary of the maturity of the treats. I think it’s going out of your way to say that there is zero value or anything interesting in a movie like Oppenheimer is just reductive and silly. It just speaks to having a pretty unrefined sense of film analysis. Notice here I’m not arguing for the merits of Oppenheimer. There’s often a sort of weird desire to compete with one another in left spaces to be more radical than others, like “oh that’s your opinion? My opinion is even more extreme than that. I win.” Which leaks into conversations like this in weird ways, and I think that’s a generally a of personal immaturity, not the maturity of the thing itself. And also, “baby brained” is just colloquial shorthand. It’s a silly little phrase, but it’s kind of straw man to be like “oh you used a widespread internet phrase, who’s the immature one now?”
I disagree; calling an entire community “baby brained” just seems arrogant to me and I stand by that.
“Just joking, unless” is an easy out for that, of course.
What would the “unless” part of that be? It was tongue in cheek
No “unless” was said by that person. I added the unless because that was the implication of the “just joking” excuses after the fact.
This really is getting tiresome at this point.
Critical support for Oppenheimer being, apparently, among the least Nolan-y of the Nolan lineup when it comes to Great Man Theory, cryptofascist sermons/speeches, and BWAAAAAAAMs (it’s a movie about nuclear weapons so I must give some allowance there for audio gimmicks).
That said, the toxic fandom around the damn thing (like pretty much anything Nolan) certainly put me off and made it unlikely I will watch it anyway.
Barbie was fun.
Saw it last night. Aggressively mid
Nolan is allergic to subtlety
I liked the movie (which frankly surprised me because, well, Nolan) but there are a few scenes where Oppenheimer meets famous physicists and they’re treated with this -I think unintentionally hilarious- bizarre reverence.
For instance there’s a scene where Oppenheimer goes to see a talk by Niels Bohr, and Bohr is standing in this packed room, all eyes on him, lecturing. I can’t remember exactly now, but the blocking makes it look like he’s standing over everyone, as if he were a literal larger-than-life figure, or something else similarly dramatic. It really was like an MCU superhero cameo. And there’s similar scenes when Oppenheimer meets Einstein and Heisenberg, with slightly different emotional beats. (Heisenberg is presented as a villain, Einstein is a wizened mentor/death/fate figure (the whole movie is framed as a Greek tragedy, it literally starts with a card that says ‘Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.’))
But, to be fair, this portion of the movie is supposed to be Oppenheimer’s subjective view of the world, so it was probably meant to reflect Oppenheimer’s own reverence for these men, and his ambition to one day be seen as among their number. Still pretty funny though.
Right now I like the movie, but I’m not sure how I’ll feel about it when I watch it again in a year or two. I do think pretty much everything Cillian Murphy did was fantastic, but then there was stuff like the above, or as you say the senate hearing at the end. I think Ehrenreich’s senate aide character even says something cheesy to RDJ’s Strauss like “Oppenheimer had bigger fish to fry” right before Strauss is publicly embarrassed. So I doubt that’ll look so good once removed from the spectacle of the movie theater and the first viewing. I dislike the term middlebrow, but unfortunately I think it’s a pretty apt descriptor for Nolan as a director. Though he took a swing for the fences with this one, I’ll give him that, but it’s Murphy who really carries the whole thing. And the movie around him just doesn’t live up to his performance (which, imo, is a running theme in Nolan films).
Oppenheimer was bad because it didn’t explictly indicate support for the 9 dash line like the Barbie movie did.
Movie theaters are too loud man. I forgot my earplugs and now my tinnitus kinda flared up.
Yeah the movie was boring. The whole third hour courtroom drama was weak and stupid.
At least communists looked kind of sympathetic.
Movie theaters are too loud man.
I deliberately come late to skip the FWOOM FWOOM FWOOM noise gimmicks of every. Fucking. Trailer. Of. Every. Fucking. Movie. Of. The. Last. Decade.
Listening to Richard Feynman’s lecture about Los Alamos is way more fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-u1qyRM5w
He was in Oppenheimer as the bongos guy
Yeah, but then you have to listen to a sex pest that didn’t even remotely mind helping build nuclear weapons.
Got some links?
His Wikipedia entry is the best I can really suggest, mostly because it’s been so long since I formed an opinion on mr Feynman to remember where I learned how odious he was. Here’s the choice part of his life that I’m specifically referring to, about one of his memoirs. I’m just quoting wiki here.
Feynman has been criticized for a chapter in the book entitled “You Just Ask Them?”, where he describes how he learned to seduce women at a bar he went to in the summer of 1946. A mentor taught him to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything. He describes seeing women at the bar as “removed” in his thoughts, and tells a story of how he told a woman named Ann that she was “worse than a removed” after Ann persuaded him to buy her sandwiches by telling him he could eat them at her place, but then, after he bought them, saying they actually could not eat together because another man was coming over. Later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place. Feynman states at the end of the chapter that this behaviour was not typical of him: “So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.”
This passage does not mention his particular affinity for attempting to seduce coeds at Caltech. Or secretaries. Or basically any woman that moved.
Thanks. With stuff like that it is often good to ask, since people might have good sources. For me I remembered him being a sexist, which is not quite the same as sex pests, but depending on power situation “flirting” with secretaries is abuse of power.
I was immersed in physics for a while, so I’m familiar with some of the less savory aspects of the people that often get lionized. Feynman in particular draws my ire partly because of how adored he is by
users. I can’t remember the provenance of this, but Feynman was known for always walking to lunch with the secretaries rather than has colleagues. I also recall that there was some more odious parts related to the quote I gave, more specifically about his relationships with undergrads while teaching at Caltech.
Well maybe not at the time but he definitely talked about how he thought more deeply about it after the war
Man who helps invent death machine becomes a little concerned about the morals of death machines well after he’s done making them. I despise Feynman for being an overall piece of shit, I’m not going to make myself care that he thought a little more deeply about it after the fact.
this is kind of honest review i can only get at a place like this
There was 0% Cilian murphy dick :(
Floppenheimer
