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.

On the one hand it’s good it doesn’t try and paint the use of the bomb as morally good or without shades of gray. It could have been much worse and could have just kind of fellated the guy and how great the US was and ignored all the moral dilemmas or shoved them aside and hooting chuds are likely angered by the presence of said reflection and the fact the most deranged anti-communists are portrayed as shifty, ratty little characters which in truth they probably were in real life as well. (Truman certainly was a monster)

On the other, I think Mr. Nolan can make good movies but not truly great movies (only a handful can to be fair and they’re basically all dead at this point). He has a certain talent to much of his film-making that the people shoveling out Marvel garbage and say Zach Snyder don’t possess.

I think it’s about as good of a movie on the subject as one could expect from the US. The framing device through which the story is told (two investigatory panels) is also interesting and at least a somewhat artful way of keeping the audience interest and the tension high.

7.5/10 for me which is pretty high. Worth a watch.

I kept watching it and thought the pacing was too fast and it would have been better as a mini series.

Garbage. Nolan can’t make any other kind of movie than a CGI “epic”, no wonder he gave this movie his usual treatment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhqbILnmJ-Q