I can’t find a thread for Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER so here you go

Be hilarious when film bros are in despair as this flops in comparison to Barbie.

Schrader be shillin'. Ehh...he's probably looking for his next script's Exec Producer.

watched an Oppenheimer doc the other week. The suicide of his communist ex gf (who he was probably having an affair with while under FBI surveillance) seems really dodgy.

I guess to be fair, Harvey Weinstein would have been all over this. https://t.co/HbtwF8XoDp

— Don Hughes (@getfiscal) July 18, 2023

If Oppenheimer cleans up I will expect Paul to issue another angry missive about how the Oscars aren't American enough anymore.

Wasn't this one of the movies that kept getting brought up as provisionally not meeting the AMPAS' new representation/inclusion standards?

https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-standards

I guess it might hinge on the definition of "significant supporting actor."

I will be going to an Oppenheimer preview tonight. But I will be dressed as Barbie.

if i ate one almond per day i’d also engineer an atomic bomb https://t.co/dYqK3umded

— Hadas Weiss (@weiss_hadas) July 20, 2023

What's the big deal, I could easily eat one almond a day.

Don't Tom, it will turn you into an Oppenheimer

I have become thin, consumer of almonds.

Wait he ate only one almond per day or he just randomly threw that on top of his daily meals

Jesus, there has already been enough preposterous director's hyperbole and self-praise around this movie. Shut the fuck up, actors... enough already!

(xp) The latter was my plan.

it wasn't just for his *transformation* into Oppenheimer, he's playing a squirrel in his next project

tbf Cilian Murphy was grossly overweight before he started shooting this film.

thing is when Nolan is creating his dark and devastating aesthetic, you need to look unhealthily anemic and like you haven't had a proper shit in a month if you are his lead actor.

there are other ways to lose mass amounts of weight in a short period of time that are more fun than eating an almond

one - ride in an OceanGate sub

Or sit through the entirety of Oppenheimer without popcorn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQlKjeTbcdg

What about the victims.

I've seen a couple of these and I'm more sympathetic than most. I think it's probably true that telling the story without (some) victims would be incomplete and less interesting. https://t.co/XpzpDymWM0

— jan (@janhopi) July 21, 2023

I just watched this and ugh, maybe I shouldn’t have? First time I have felt such a deep hatred watching a dramatisation, specifically at the dropping of the bomb. Just a primal “what have you done?” screaming from the inside. And then the whitewashing of oopy in the last hour and all the typical stereotypical roles of good guys vs bad guys within the whole game. This was just the encapsulation of that tweet “Americans drop bombs all over children in Vietnam and then make movies about how sad they all are about it”.

"How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?" - Bob Marley

The good news: The dialogue (by Nolan standards) is remarkably clear.

The bad news: The story is about the political backbiting and in-fighting around the U.S. nuclear program (with Oppy as their primary chew toy), and therefore Nolan had to employ nonlinear editing and blatant visualizations of Oppenheimer's thinking to keep this from looking like a random C-SPAN segment.

so it's like Herman's Head

i think i can skip the latest chuck nolan sad man movie

RDJ walks away with it. (Also forget the screen format debate, a sound system is more crucial.)

glad to see aphex twin getting some good-paying work, he's due

Robert Downey Jr. says Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' script was printed on red paper: 'It's kind of like being hypnotized'

get some reading glasses then you daft cunt. The Nolan hyperbole industrial complex reaching new levels of self-clowning parody. I'll watch all kinds of shite but will make a special exception to never watch this hideous garbage.

His next movie about the CEO of Armitage Shanks will be printed on toilet paper

this looks good will watch it and report back

I'm going to 70mm showing tomorrow

Another fucking summer blockbuster biopic of a physicist

Probably repeating comparisons others have made but this felt like an incredibly propulsive mix of JFK, The Tree of Life, and the last hour of Inception/Dunkirk. Naturally I loved it.

"...it's the bomb that will bring us together ... "

“Americans drop bombs all over children in Vietnam and then make movies about how sad they all are about it”

i am pretty sure you have this streak in every nation cinema (anti americanism otoh totally exceptional
as with all things american)

national*

for example, the analogue in iranian cinema (to the bombing) would be the islamic republic itself

get some reading glasses then you daft cunt. The Nolan hyperbole industrial complex reaching new levels of self-clowning parody. I'll watch all kinds of shite but will make a special exception to never watch this hideous garbage.

― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Saturday, July 22, 2023 1:39 AM (fourteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

hear, hear!

Probably repeating comparisons others have made but this felt like an incredibly propulsive mix of JFK, The Tree of Life, and the last hour of Inception/Dunkirk. Naturally I loved it.

― ryan, Sunday, 23 July 2023 3:42 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Where did you see the Tree of Life in this? If I saw any of its qualities in Oppenheimer I would have walked away much happier.

Might just be my prior knowledge that Nolan is a Malick-head but the time-shifting and often disorienting and subjective editing recalled it at times for me! Inter-cutting of the cosmic scale. Maybe more of a credit to Jennifer Lame?

For me it was like, what if Malick made JFK? Again, I'd eat that shit up -- it's almost too squarely in my wheelhouse to totally objective.

I read a bit about Nolan wanting to distinguish between “objective” and “subjective” perspectives in this film, which immediately differentiates him from Malick with his Heidegerian, rediction-of-the-objective/subjective-epistemology, philosophical underpinning. I get the similarities based on highlighting the cosmic, but for Nolan the cosmic is always scientific (I mean just look at the subject matter of his last 3 movies bar Dunkirk), while for Malick it is philosophical/religious/spiritual/moral/human/only-scientific-tangentially.

I don’t want to be too hard on Nolan’s style in this movie, I do get the Malick comparison and appreciated it where those moments came up (the bomb testing in particular). I am put off by the politics of the movie and the sometime cringe dialogue (i am become death in the sex scene? That last scene as well? Ugh.) Jokes on me anyways, I paid money to see it

I love The Tree of Life so damn much and find Nolan misguided in his bombastic style. Have nothing against the bloke or his movies as long as he doesn’t take himself too seriously and can admit to his films being popcorn flicks that only signal at ideas worth thinking about without ever actually engaging them with much depth. But Nolan ain’t no Terrence Mallick that’s for sure. Nolan’s film have nothing transcendent in them, too scientific, too in-this-world, none of the beyond. They’re just modern Michael Bay movies written with a science professor as editor. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But Nolan ain’t no Terrence Mallick that’s for sure.

well...that we can agree on.

like nolan, malick, struggles to make the same good movie over and over again, each time narrowly missing the mark

much as i struggle to make a clean typo free post sheesh

My #1 peeve with Oppenheimer was making him the Martyr, the good guy, the main character (I guess “The Atomic Bomb” is a less catchy name). I actually would have loved this film if it finished after the 2nd hour with the bomb testing. But the last hour had to be this morally unambiguous placing of the stakes where Oppenheimer is the good guy being martyred by his country when ummmmm, he directly contributed to killing hundreds of thousands? And this “counter view” is brought up in maybe one sentence and one scene and never considered again? If this movie went apolitical I would have considered it Nolan’s best work, instead I just left jaded that we get a hero story out of a villain. Strauss’ speech towards the end about Oppenheimer being a cry-baby that wanted to be punished to indulge his guilt without having to take it seriously was otm, sadly it was presented as the “villains view of Oppenheimer”.
I’m not American though, so maybe I just don’t get the bloke.

If Malick did this movie it would have been a Tower of Babel analogy

the real tragedy was clearly Oppenheimer losing his security clearance

I'll see this next week, but in the meantime you all have me imagining Malick making his own Oppenheimer movie.

Bomb (voiceover): Why am I here? Am I meant to be alone? It calls to me, my purpose, like a dream receding in the cloudy distance of memory ...

Do we not have a thread or poll for Greatest Disappointing Filmmakers?

I feel like I need the opportunity to wrestle whether Nolan or PTA gets my vote for driving me insane with their utter garbage everyone else seems to have a hardon for

The only way Nolan could disappoint me is if I somehow ended up liking one of his boring as fuck garbage movies

Well he hasn’t disappointed us in years either, think the last time we watched anything of his was Inception, maybe a better poll title would be “Big Name Filmmaker Whose Work Always Gets Rave Reviews From Friends Of Yours And Then You Feel Like A Hater Despite Being Completely Correct”

Darren Aronofsky
Nicolas Winding Refn
Denis Villeneuve
Wes Anderson
Gaspar Noé
Luca Guadagnino

all candidates for such a list

I feel like I need the opportunity to wrestle whether Nolan or PTA gets my vote for driving me insane with their utter garbage everyone else seems to have a hardon for

― trm (tombotomod)

Every PTA film is garbage?

Guadagnino is way more fun than any of the filmmakers mentioned.

For context's sake, my list of the filmmakers whose work I look forward to watching, even the disappointments:

Claire Denis
Todd Haynes
Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Park Chan-wook
Olivier Assayas
Greta Gerwig
PTA
Kelly Reichardt
Christian Petzold
Alain Guiraudie

"Most disappointing" to me implies strong love of early material and then a string of disappointments, yet you still show up hoping it can be as good as the early stuff. I dunno if there's anyone working right now that I have that relationship with tbh.

On a lower stakes level though Ben Wheatley would be a name to raise? His acclaimed work is iirc mostly despised by ILX too but even if you're a hater you would expect him to end up somewhere less abject than "netflix Rebecca" (no unkind words about Meg 2 from me ofc).

Kill List is pne of my favourite films if the decade, but I haven't been excited for a Ben Wheatley film im years

sometimes if you fall far enough the impact makes all your good films terrible too

Both of the 2025 Wheatley films sound at least potentially interesting.

a field in england is incredible

most pta movies likewise

tbh i think nolan is out on his own here

Darren Aronofsky
Nicolas Winding Refn
Denis Villeneuve
Wes Anderson
Gaspar Noé
Luca Guadagnino

all candidates for such a list

Agreed!

mcdonagh as offered earlier

The opening sequence of a depressed Oppenheimer dreaming of colorful waves, clouds of atomic particle clusters, black holes etc. was so clunky and embarrassing

I thought this was the best part of the movie

― ryan, Sunday, 2 November 2025 bookmarkflaglink

You might be right.

Anyway I did like about an hour of this. Its a bit like Lucius in the Batman movies where he is building something cool for the Bat to use.

I am still half hour from the end but I can't say I care about Oppie's security clearance.

Also really funny watching this in the era of AI data centre build.

I enjoyed Oppenheimer better the second viewing at home when the hopped-up montage style was more familiar and less oppressive. I still wish Oliver Stone's gift for editing and purploid dialogue had been applied here.

What I despised most about this abomination was the plodding pomposity of the thing, the self-identification of it being a Great Movie. It has no poetry, no lift-off. Every emotional response is signposted for the viewer. Every line of the script thuds onto the screen like a dead fish. Not a morsel of insight could be gleaned, and worst of all it's 3 hours long. It's a dull, stupid person's idea of Important Art. 1/10, would not watch again.

Hot damn, you summarized my feelings so precisely with this, bravo! All my partner and I could do for a couple days after watching this movie was complain about it and the time wasted.

I still wish Oliver Stone's gift for editing and purploid dialogue had been applied here.

― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 3 November 2025 bookmarkflaglink

I think not showing what the bomb did in Japan was bad (maybe its in the last half hour). A high profile film like this should show it.

This was like project management: the film, but not to build some shitty application. It kinda showed how we can get together to build solutions. It felt sorta sad that we never got to do this enough for climate change.

Crappenheimer

Kitty was actually p good as the exasperated wife.

Has anyone posted this? I think it's a) perfect b) hilarious and c) exactly how Michael Mann would have ended the movie.

https://bsky.app/profile/coreyatad.com/post/3m4ylr4hdk22a

Lol

I watched this on a plane, which - despite the miniscule screen - is probably the ideal place to see a movie like this - you are desperate for escapism and have zero distractions. I also went in with very low expectations. I'd only seen two Nolans prior to this - one of the Batmans (don't remember which one) and Dunkirk - both of which I found just kind of ok. But having said that, I enjoyed the movie more than I thought I would. Probably my favorite of the 3 Nolans I've seen.

lol at the Linkin Park ending