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

this is no thin red line he keeps explaining things

xp a++++++++ sharp wit

xp exactly, Nolan really disrespects his audience nowadays and assumes they're stupid. Also his pretensions come across so poorly - the moment Trinity goes off with the extended silence, for example, at 2 miles away there's a 9 second delay. There was far more than 9 seconds of breathing and editing to the point where I just sat there could even see Nolan himself wanking off screen for a second there. He probably felt smart for trying to over-stylize the moment it goes off. Just felt incredibly unrealistic and took me out of it. Was almost hoping for a cool slow motion perspective of the explosion as depicted here:

https://i.imgur.com/EguVpqI.jpeg

So I live about five blocks away from wherever these scenes were filmed.
https://www.quartzcity.net/2022/04/28/streets-of-sierra-madre-april-2022/

What do y'all think of this post?

(I haven't watched it yet)

Lot of points from that link have already been discussed in this thread. I agree with what it puts forward. I’m wary though that the argument might be too moralistic which is “ugh”. But there is a distinction to be made when getting moralistic about real-world tellings vs fictional accounts. How a real-world story is told has a far larger moral implications than a work of fiction.

Yeah, I posted it because it distills many arguments made here.

saw it, liked it a lot. the montage-style editing and chronological trickery comes with the nolan experience, and in this context took a minute to get used to, but ultimately i think it made it more immersive. it deposited you in oppenheimer's headspace, as he charged ahead in pursuit of discovery only realizing too late what he truly had done.

i’m glad to see the return of downey the actor—his seething vindictiveness kept the movie afloat during the last bit. tho a guy as paranoid and self-involved as strauss should’ve grokked the contempt emanating from ehrenreich’s unnamed aide much earlier.

this was also a “hey, it’s that guy”-a-palooza. i did not recognize krumholtz at all haha, but appreciated his presence, along with matthew modine and weasel-faced dane dehaan

it ultimately presents him as the most human person in its story

thats a matter of opinion, i think basing a longish article arguing for the right to insist a movie is or isnt about what it should be about should perhaps have a better foundational argument that the above statement which, having seen the film, is entirely wrong- oppenheimer is an awkward cypher and the majority of the time we are as an audience only ever represented by other characters equally as frustrated with his neutral passivity to the moral questions (or his own martyrdom) as we are

Here's an interesting riff on the Los Alamos connection from one of my favorite podcasts.

https://www.desertoracle.com/episode-194-where-they-made-the-bomb/

Wow, Desert Oracle is great! Did not know of that.

if this guy ever figures out how to do a sound mix that makes the actors' dialogue coherent he could go on to be a pretty successful director imho

a non zero chance that this is all an actual plot device in his final film imi

my friend that I saw this with remarked "it's so LOUD, I can't hear the dialogue, do you notice that too?" and i just cackled

This was fine. The kangaroo court shit in the last hour got tedious as hell. I almost walked out halfway through the Truman scene.

I do appreciate, I guess, how NOlan expects the audience to know Stimson, General Groves, Potsdam, etc.

At first the handkerchief wave made me think Truman was taking Oppenheimer quite literally

It didn't initially read as the mockery it was meant to

Probably cos of Old Man's face

it did for me!

i think he played it appropriately its the rest of them didnt see it as farce

half expected burt and dom to fall out of an ante room pursued by smokey

another in a series of moments in which he’s denied the martyrdom he’s so clearly seeking

i didn't know that was gary oldman until I checked the credits after the movie

Truman asking “Do you know when the Soviets will have the bomb?” and Oppenheimer misreading it as a direct question was funny too. “Never. Never.”

That scene and the one where they’re deciding to drop the bomb are both very good at showing how in-over-his-head and politically ineffectual (or naive) he was

Apparently this hasn't got a release in Japan. I guess framing a movie about the atom bomb as a personal tragedy for the perpetrator doesn't work in all markets.

sympathy for a charisma-free deadbeat dad who did some explosions

please to meet you, hope you don't curse my name

I will say that RBJ was astounding in a way I hadn't seen him in years.

yeah it was nice to see shades of his pre-Marvel chops again, without the fast-talky sardonic delivery he's settled into.

I liked his petulant seething monologue near the end

hard to separate his performance from the clunker of a script his volte face handed him but i thought he was pretty dreadful tbh, sup spacey house of cards pantomime

Robert Bowney Jr (sorry!)

hard to separate his performance from the clunker of a script his volte face handed him but i thought he was pretty dreadful tbh, sup spaceyhouse of cards pantomime

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac), Sund

nah, he'd laid the grounds for that arc way early (the script's fault), and, I guess you disagree, but he was most effective at showing self-righteousness. The problem is Nolan, who didn't think you could've shown it in one meltdown scene, not....three or four.

ill admit i was losing patience fast with the whole thing once we moved outta trinityville which might be skewing my impression

I thought this was very strong, which probably means I’m a simp.

We are all, sadly, simps for RDJ

(I didn’t actually realise it was him, which means he did a good job with the role). Alfred otm about how overdone his villain turn was. At one of his lengthy monologues I felt like shouting out “OKAY WE GET IT, YOU ARE THE VILLAIN, THANK YOU”

I think overall (aside for Safdie), the cast was great

I was surprised at how packed the cinema was for this on day 9 of release — more packed than Barbie (same city, same size room) was on day 4 of release. Sunday vs Monday though.

It's absolutely chugging along per Variety:

Meanwhile, “Oppenheimer” has earned $174 million at the domestic box office and $400 million at the global box office. It has already outperformed the lifetime grosses of two prior Nolan efforts, “Tenet” ($365 million) and “Batman Begins” ($373 million).

On Bluesky there was discussion of Nolan's understanding of sex and the lack thereof, I checked Wikipedia and was bemused to learn he has four kids, and then realized that Abiogenesis would be a perfect Nolan film title. I can even see the font.

Yeah, at the local art house big screen, both showings in 70mm were sold out today (along with a screening of one of the Lone Wolf & Cub films upstairs)

Yeah, at the local art house big screen, both showings in 70mm were sold out today (along with a screening of one of the Lone Wolf & Cub films upstairs)

xxpost featuring Vincent Cassel as Louie Pasteur

Also whoever made the point that Einstein was Obi-Wan’s Ghost was spot-on

I think overall (aside for Safdie), the cast was great

Safdie seems to have been cast for his eyebrows alone.

I went to a 9:30 a.m. screening, the first such screening I've heard of in my life and...it was 3/4ths full. I was amazed.

Safdie's accent was pretty rough much of the time but imo he's not in the bottom-5 worst performances in this, nowhere near as bad as Oldman's Foghorn Leghorn routine or whatever the hell Rami Malek thought he was doing.

tbh the image from this that has stayed with me the most has been Benny Safdie wearing goggles and grey goop all over his face sitting stoically waiting for the flash

i was initially in the camp of those who thought the movie could have ended after the test. because the test made me feel incredibly sad and i felt a bit angry that the movie was continuing with the petty squabbles of men afterwards. that probably was nolan's intent and i'm just a mark. i think the obvious, child's thought some people such as me have when contemplating the bomb is that after its invention surely the keys to something so monstrous would be handed to philosopher kings, to be used with divine prudence and forethought. the last third of the movie was meant to disabuse such people of that thought (however hamfistedly that was done - the reveal that strauss had set oppenheimer up, einstein's dialogue at the end) and to remind us that even something as terrifying and awe-some as atomic death ultimately rests in the hands of petty people who only care about their petty personal squabbles. perhaps that's a reality that is as ambient as water or air in a country that jsut came off of 4 years of donald j. trump having the keys to the nuclear kingdom. so i was ok with Nolan's DO YOU SEE third hour, but a 2-hour cut where the movie ends after the test would have been fine too.

the filmmaking itself, eh, it was fine, functional, nolan overindulges in that thin 70mm depth-of-field. i wish he would have put aside his antipathy towards computer effects and gotten something better for the shots of the test, which looked like a michael bay explosion. he got something great for interstellar, wish he could have gotten something great here.

dialogue was fine and sufficiently loud in our IMAX projection.