Oppenheimer (A- or 3.5/4 stars)
July 21st, 2023. The date that will not soon be forgotten, as The Barbenheimer phenomenon has become one of those extremely rare instances which an initial worry about such different types of films being released on the same weekend has, instead {with dual marketing from both movie camps} created an organic & fascinating sensation which actually benefits the box office haul for both films - we won't soon see this kind of cultural hit again for quite some time. My Barbie review will follow.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, American Prometheus, acclaimed British writer/director Christopher Nolan's 3-hour historical epic, 'Oppenheimer', brings the full-bodied story of the brilliant scientist to the big screen in the boldest of ways. Filmed with IMAX cameras, this movie chronicles Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) - 'father of the atomic bomb' & lead scientist of the Manhattan Project which developed the weapon of mass destruction along with his select team - his relationships with the women in his life, & spreads across several decades from his schooling at Cambridge University to a kangaroo hearing in 1954 conducted in secrecy, which would ultimately strip the man of his rightful government security clearance.
Recruited by director of the Manhattan Project, Army General Leslie Groves Jr. (Matt Damon, stellar), Oppenheimer assembled a monumental group of elite scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop said atomic bomb, a project that was already 2 long yrs. behind the Germans. Physicist Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett - great to see him, here), Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), the 1922 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Hungarian Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), 'father of the hydrogen bomb' & Oppenheimer's brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold), were just a few of the other geniuses selected to partake. And all were present at 'Trinity', the code name for the Los Alamos explosion site, where on 7/16/1945, the bomb was finally tested.
But this movie is about more than the bomb & all the schematics that went into the making of it. As it turns out, our accomplished, yet complex titular subject was also a womanizer. Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh - so good, & so underused), a Stanford-educated psychiatrist, is a member of America's Communist & just one of Oppenheimer's lovers. His wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt) - who was married to another man when she met Oppenheimer - is a gifted biologist who ends up taking a back seat to her husband's work, as most wives did at the time, and suffers because of it. Failing to conform to the norms of the 'attentive mother', Kitty, an otherwise loving wife to Oppenheimer ... drowns her day-to-days in alcohol.
Also in the fray is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), founding commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss & Oppenheimer had a precarious jockeying-for-power relationship made even worse when O humiliates S during one particular Senate hearing. And so, Strauss would exact revenge. Oppenheimer was politically vilified for opposing America's arms race, & was accused of being a communist, which - among other things that Strauss had a hand in - caused him to lose that security clearance & neutralize his nuclear power policy influence. Oppenheimer inhabited crippling inner turmoil about having created the bomb, so his prophetic objections to weapons of mass destruction didn't help him, either.
Cillian Murphy, who has worked with Nolan before, is absolutely superb, here. His dexterous face & wide expressive eyes lend themselves perfectly in bringing both nuance & quiet intensity to the internal struggles of this wildly complicated & fascinating man -- it's simply a masterful portrayal. Robert Downey Jr. & Emily Blunt are also excellent in their limited screen time. Blunt is so good {particularly in a nervy late scene during the hearing in which her brittle toughness - yes, I said brittle toughness - kicks in}, however, I wish there were more to her role; that's one knock on Christopher Nolan, he should put more effort into the writing of his female characters. And Downey Jr.'s Strauss is bitter, petty, smarmy, yet captivating through all of that. Supporting turns by a vast cast include Alden Ehrenreich, Matt Damon, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman (as Harry Truman), Rami Malek, Matthew Modine, Dane DeHaan, Tony Goldwyn, Alex Wolff, James D'Arcy, Florence Pugh, Tom Conti (exceptional as Albert Einstein), & more.
The way editor Jennifer Lame juggles all the timeline narrative threads {Oppenheimer at Cambridge, his relationships, the bomb climax, the kangaroo hearing} is pretty spectacular. This film is 3 hours longgg. So the way the narrative bounces all around to-&-fro the varying time periods RATHER than watching it linearly from the 1926 to 1963 actually helps, because I think we would FEEL the 3 hours even more so. If I were to have one issue with this film outside of the underwritten female roles, it would be that because SO much information is thrown at us in each & every scene, there is a bit of an exhaustion of pacing that made me feel the length. Everything going on was interesting ... it was just A LOT smashed into 3 propulsive hours.
Ruth De Jong is the production designer responsible for the jaw-dropping sets & locales. Hoyte van Hoytema lends his expert camerawork {gorgggeous} once again, as he did with Nolan's Interstellar, Dunkirk & Tenet. There are two scintillating scenes which dynamically blend practical effects with sound to create movie magic. The 1st of these is the nerve-rattling demonstration of the Trinity bomb test in Los Alamos. The 2nd masterful scene shows him upset over his useless celebrity while having waking nightmares about what happened to the people of Nagasaki & Hiroshima. And Oscar-winning composer, Ludwig Goransson, provides a grandly operatic score that - while sometimes intrusive in particular scenes - is an incredible standalone piece.
'Oppenheimer', flaws & all, is one of Nolan's best films, and certainly his most sophisticated one. It reminds me a good deal in scope & grandiosity of Oliver Stone's JFK. This film churns on as a masterful achievement, an engrossing history lesson, an intriguing character study of a flawed subject, and an exquisite examination of one genius' dogged determination to create what the government entrusted him to do to 'save the world' from the Germans, only to then blame himself for having been a part of something that would obliterate 135,000 Japanese people and create possible future nuclear holocausts. Transfixing story; told with integrity, thematic heft ... and some protraction.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, American Prometheus, acclaimed British writer/director Christopher Nolan's 3-hour historical epic, 'Oppenheimer', brings the full-bodied story of the brilliant scientist to the big screen in the boldest of ways. Filmed with IMAX cameras, this movie chronicles Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) - 'father of the atomic bomb' & lead scientist of the Manhattan Project which developed the weapon of mass destruction along with his select team - his relationships with the women in his life, & spreads across several decades from his schooling at Cambridge University to a kangaroo hearing in 1954 conducted in secrecy, which would ultimately strip the man of his rightful government security clearance.
Recruited by director of the Manhattan Project, Army General Leslie Groves Jr. (Matt Damon, stellar), Oppenheimer assembled a monumental group of elite scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop said atomic bomb, a project that was already 2 long yrs. behind the Germans. Physicist Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett - great to see him, here), Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), the 1922 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Hungarian Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), 'father of the hydrogen bomb' & Oppenheimer's brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold), were just a few of the other geniuses selected to partake. And all were present at 'Trinity', the code name for the Los Alamos explosion site, where on 7/16/1945, the bomb was finally tested.
But this movie is about more than the bomb & all the schematics that went into the making of it. As it turns out, our accomplished, yet complex titular subject was also a womanizer. Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh - so good, & so underused), a Stanford-educated psychiatrist, is a member of America's Communist & just one of Oppenheimer's lovers. His wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt) - who was married to another man when she met Oppenheimer - is a gifted biologist who ends up taking a back seat to her husband's work, as most wives did at the time, and suffers because of it. Failing to conform to the norms of the 'attentive mother', Kitty, an otherwise loving wife to Oppenheimer ... drowns her day-to-days in alcohol.
Also in the fray is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), founding commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss & Oppenheimer had a precarious jockeying-for-power relationship made even worse when O humiliates S during one particular Senate hearing. And so, Strauss would exact revenge. Oppenheimer was politically vilified for opposing America's arms race, & was accused of being a communist, which - among other things that Strauss had a hand in - caused him to lose that security clearance & neutralize his nuclear power policy influence. Oppenheimer inhabited crippling inner turmoil about having created the bomb, so his prophetic objections to weapons of mass destruction didn't help him, either.
Cillian Murphy, who has worked with Nolan before, is absolutely superb, here. His dexterous face & wide expressive eyes lend themselves perfectly in bringing both nuance & quiet intensity to the internal struggles of this wildly complicated & fascinating man -- it's simply a masterful portrayal. Robert Downey Jr. & Emily Blunt are also excellent in their limited screen time. Blunt is so good {particularly in a nervy late scene during the hearing in which her brittle toughness - yes, I said brittle toughness - kicks in}, however, I wish there were more to her role; that's one knock on Christopher Nolan, he should put more effort into the writing of his female characters. And Downey Jr.'s Strauss is bitter, petty, smarmy, yet captivating through all of that. Supporting turns by a vast cast include Alden Ehrenreich, Matt Damon, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman (as Harry Truman), Rami Malek, Matthew Modine, Dane DeHaan, Tony Goldwyn, Alex Wolff, James D'Arcy, Florence Pugh, Tom Conti (exceptional as Albert Einstein), & more.
The way editor Jennifer Lame juggles all the timeline narrative threads {Oppenheimer at Cambridge, his relationships, the bomb climax, the kangaroo hearing} is pretty spectacular. This film is 3 hours longgg. So the way the narrative bounces all around to-&-fro the varying time periods RATHER than watching it linearly from the 1926 to 1963 actually helps, because I think we would FEEL the 3 hours even more so. If I were to have one issue with this film outside of the underwritten female roles, it would be that because SO much information is thrown at us in each & every scene, there is a bit of an exhaustion of pacing that made me feel the length. Everything going on was interesting ... it was just A LOT smashed into 3 propulsive hours.
Ruth De Jong is the production designer responsible for the jaw-dropping sets & locales. Hoyte van Hoytema lends his expert camerawork {gorgggeous} once again, as he did with Nolan's Interstellar, Dunkirk & Tenet. There are two scintillating scenes which dynamically blend practical effects with sound to create movie magic. The 1st of these is the nerve-rattling demonstration of the Trinity bomb test in Los Alamos. The 2nd masterful scene shows him upset over his useless celebrity while having waking nightmares about what happened to the people of Nagasaki & Hiroshima. And Oscar-winning composer, Ludwig Goransson, provides a grandly operatic score that - while sometimes intrusive in particular scenes - is an incredible standalone piece.
'Oppenheimer', flaws & all, is one of Nolan's best films, and certainly his most sophisticated one. It reminds me a good deal in scope & grandiosity of Oliver Stone's JFK. This film churns on as a masterful achievement, an engrossing history lesson, an intriguing character study of a flawed subject, and an exquisite examination of one genius' dogged determination to create what the government entrusted him to do to 'save the world' from the Germans, only to then blame himself for having been a part of something that would obliterate 135,000 Japanese people and create possible future nuclear holocausts. Transfixing story; told with integrity, thematic heft ... and some protraction.