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

No you’re not giving that impression. The movie is about how Oppenheimer was a complex bloke, that he had a lot of grit and genius, that he was not particularly wise with his personal choices, and that he is haunted by his work and subsequently thrown away due being the weaker force in a U.S. policy battle regarding what to do with atomic power from here (curtail vs expansion).The movie is primarily about Oppenheimer, and only secondarily about the Bomb as it relates to Oppenheimer. The movie is no unequivocally about the bomb being bad

ok yeah, make sense. i’ve already deleted several posts on the topic of the atomic bomb for a similar reason - the posts were about wwii and not oppenheimer, i assume they are ultimately tangential to this thread about christopher nolan’s oppenheimer movie

I think Shaq would do a commercial for genocide if the check was on time

— Trill Withers (@TylerIAm) September 28, 2018

we're so close to this

uhhh sorry wrong thread

Or so you thought

uhhh the communists believe that too

― the late great, Tuesday, 25 July 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Have communists done this?

do you guys have these thoughts about other parts of wwii also? they killed more ppl bombing dresden and tokyo (in one night!) than hiroshima

― the late great, Tuesday, 25 July 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Yes. And Nagasaki too.

Not interested in this film at all but it was always going to get this 'debate' going. Of course it wasn't a good decision to drop the bomb. Oppenheimer should feel bad.

It's led to a world where Russia mutter about dropping nuclear bombs every few weeks. Liberal commentary throughout the Anglosphere are very blase about this stuff.

Zaporizhzhia could turn out to be a disaster.

All good to act about how 'complicated' all of this is.

When Stimson crosses Kyoto off the list and people in the cinema “laughed” at this moment. Maybe it was just the cinema crowd enjoying some gallows humour, but that was too much for me

this is just ignorance (and maybe bad filmmaking). stimson had lived in kyoto with his family and did not want to see it destroyed

He does say that in the film. And it seemed to me that it was being presented as the grimmest possible joke. OK, the people in our screening didn't laugh, but there certainly were "huh"s recognising the bleak humour of the light way he said it.

There are a few things that people have pointed out in this thread, like the above, and like "he didn't say the famous line when the test was complete, he said 'well, I guess that worked'," (and something else I can't remember at the moment) that are correct in the film. But that was one of the things I didn't like about it. I haven't read the book it's based on, but the film seemed to me like those incredibly faithful Harry Potter adaptations, that it had to cram in absolutely everything, sometimes in these fleeting scenes that are over before you've settled into them, introducing people you never see again. I would have liked them to pick a through line and stick to it.

I heard Kistiakowsky, the explosives expert was asking him pay up the bet they'd had straight after big boom test was successful. You'd sound like an absolute wanker coming out with famous quote to people who you work with, especially when some of them where equally responsible for weapon of mass death test actually being a success.

where

it had to cram in absolutely everything, sometimes in these fleeting scenes that are over before you've settled into them, introducing people you never see again. I would have liked them to pick a through line and stick to it.

Yes, it was incredibly "montagey" at several points and as someone who hasn't read the book either it did become hard to keep track of who was who and their significance

Someone on Twitter described it as a three-hour trailer for the best television drama ever, and that seems right to me.

would be a better TV show. third act felt like a totally separate episode

The third act dragged incredibly. Like all three hour movies, this could easily have been a two hour movie.

Like this piece on the demand for politics above stuff like aesthetics, though the writer isn't watching the film.

https://itself.blog/2023/07/22/we-are-all-evangelicals-now-a-nuclear-take/

* and how that goes wrong, I should add.

was it a good movie

impossible to say m8 i didnt agree with something someone said in it

Nah, last third didn't feel justified. It felt like it was answering a big question that hadn't been sufficiently posed in the first part, just "ah look there's some other thing going on we need to tell you about" and by that point I didn't care enough.

xp - a perfectly fine position for a take connoisseur

what is a director but a connoisseur of takes after all nest pas

third act felt absolutely essential to me on a second viewing

you need that counterweight, in other words, both in terms of the narrative and the ethical stakes

have communists obliterated cities? i … think they have? not with an atom bomb tho

they do it with wokeism and progressive economics

They just delete them from photographs

but seriously

Ceaușima (Romanian pronunciation: [tʃe̯a.uˈʃima]) is a vernacular word construction in Romanian sarcastically comparing the policies of former Communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu to the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

The urban systematization conducted by the communist regime has destroyed 29 traditional towns to 85-90% and also has heavily mutilated other 37 cities, including Bucharest.[2]

i was kidding, fucking up the place where u grew up is just the govt’s job, regardless of ideology. unless yr anarchists, then you just ruin your own space

👏👏👏

The third act dragged incredibly. Like all three hour movies, this could easily have been a two hour movie.

Perhaps a daily comic strip.

christopher nolan’s PRINCE VALIANT

doesn’t every country have a word for Ceaușima? reaganomics, thatcherism …

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?

― ryan, Saturday, July 22, 2023 7:58 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

as a fellow malick-phile, I really have come to detest this proxy influence on some of the more prominent contemporary “prestige” commercial filmmakers (primarily nolan and villenueve, I guess) — malick seems to have the sense, and the talent, to allow his pictures to speak for themselves. I really hated the elliptical editing of this movie and the sound editing. murphy was fine though

this was average and a real waste of three hours and all that cast tbh

how I felt too

yep

few things from thread

script is bad, on a line by line level its as functional and graceless as any 90's thoughtless biopic. packed with good actors filling suits and wigs in order to convey some nugget of personality that ultimately gets wasted in the overall churn.

rdj does not walk away with it imo, hes as bad in this as any performance i think ive ever seen him in, the last hour record scratch between him and aldenreich is hamfisted nonsense tbh. aside from murphy and perhaps safdie nobody really gets to act out anything but purely functional dialogue at all

hp upthread i have to say didnt see the movie i did. none of oppenheimers culpability nor his knowledge of it is underplayed whatsoever and imo in order to think it had been i almost feel like youd have to have decided to have that take and ignore most of the relevant dialogue/scenes tbh

malick i get, jfk def but it fills the former vibe with needless say-everything nolansplaining and the latter lacks any zing or style or fun.

someone gave a very good precis of nolan above "i dont mind him when he keeps it to high concept action that has a gimmick" which on all evidence here is very otm. the einstein mush isnt enough of a gimmick, the majority of the rest has no emotional nor performance merit at all and the bomb/fire/space scenes aren't long enough to carry ninety minutes let alone five days or whatever this was

its not as good or important or essential as say apollo 13 is about the gist of it

oh- oldman did at least crack me up so there was that

Hey wtf I saw the same movie (and also made that précis!). My main gripe wasn’t the underplaying of oppenheimers culpability, rather the overplaying of how sad and tragic all this was for him without foregrounding the hundreds of thousands dead

it was not i hope a personal assault :)

well it's very much a biopic not a historical journal i think it wears that out front tbh but one of my things is criticising things for what they are badly rather than what they arent (blame tuomas)

Okay it was foregrounded with Oppenheimer watching (with eyes closed) the results in the cinema, and in his mental breakdowns at the rally+hearing, I just don’t think it was given it’s appropriate weight. I commented above that this movie was called “Oppenheimer”, not “the Atomic Bomb and its victims”, so again, whatever I guess it fulfilled its purpose and maybe its wrong to ask something to be what it was not trying to be. But my take comes from my visceral gut reaction of “this is extremely unpleasant to focus on how bad life is for this bloke who just took a major part in the murder of hundreds of thousands of citizens” which lasted for most of the latter half of the movie. Don’t have much more to say about it than that.

i feel you underplayed gary oldman as the colonel tho

well it's very much a biopic not a historical journal i think it wears that out front tbh but one of my things is criticising things for what they are badly rather than what they arent (blame tuomas)

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac), Friday, 28 July 2023 7:26 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Wrote what I said before reading this. I’m guilty for both not liking what it wasn’t and also what it was (in some parts)

No dramas, “wtf” is part of my regrettably jokey vocabulary :)

I thought Truman and Kitty were the heroes of this story tbh, sorry should have foregrounded that earlier

Whoever played the bloke Oppenheimer has to inadvertently give his information about a “friend of a friend heard about moving having communist connections”, I want to see everything he has ever done. He was terrifying

I said to my wife early on “thank god you’re not like her” in reference to kitty, which I then rescinded during her speech at the hearing. That was very satisfying

P Badshaw, who normally gushes over Nolan movies only gave this 4 stars and called it flawed which seems generous to me because I'd give all his movies zero stars and call them all garbage. An interesting criticism he makes is that Nolan doesn't get to grips with the antisemitism that Oppenheimer experienced and also noting that the two most famous Jewish characters of the 20th century in it are both played by non-Jewish actors.

Whoever played the bloke Oppenheimer has to inadvertently give his information about a “friend of a friend heard about moving having communist connections”, I want to see everything he has ever done. He was terrifying

― hrep (H.P), Friday, 28 July 2023 09:35 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

not affleck? the herr flick lookin dude?

Yep Affleck

Oof he’s got quite the Wikipedia page :\