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

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.

"nuclear physicists - they're regular people just like you and me!" is the theme of this movie, i think.

what can men do against such reckless hate*

*shag all around ye

is in fact the message

seconds after i hit 'submit post', i realized that of course dr. strangelove, a movie i haven't seen in 20 years, is obviously a much better vessel for that message of the ordinariness of nuclear destruction. poster's peril, i guess. but maybe also symptomatic of nolan's hubris that he thought he could have anything original to say about the subject 70 years after the fact.

xp

pic.twitter.com/xNM7tZj7IU

— ? (@xenomorph247) October 25, 2022

Structurally this reminds me a bit of The Irishman, in the sense that it kind of leads you to believe that its about all this exciting dynamic stuff that happens in the first two-thirds (deniros life of crime / the manhattan project) which has its own traditional structure and could make sense as a recognizable genre movie on its own. And then after what feels like the natural climax (hoffas death / trinity), the movie keeps going and the actual concern of the plot is revealed to be not the story of "will he achieve his goal" but the story of someone arriving at the realization that their worldview was mistaken and their achievements are actually bad not good. But that story cant begin until we’ve basically seen an entire feature’s worth of prelude. (Irishman I thought was successful at this and Oppenheimer not so much, bc Nolan cant resist showing every part of the story all at the same time.)

For this reason, the RDJ villain arc felt irrelevant to me, as pointless as if the last 30min of the Irishman was about somebody cracking the case of who killed Hoffa. Given the questions that the movie is raising and the themes its dealing with at that point, who gives a fuck whodunit? “It was Strauss all along!” …Ok fine, thanks for settling that i guess?

thats an excellent read imo

id only add that in fairness nolan isnt known for underthinking his plots so it might be argued that any one of the main takes on it has its audience proxy through which the movie might be viewed:

whodunnit: han solo

justice for oppie: mary poppins

id rather we win the arms race: dwight 'Bucky' bleichert, scarecrow himself, iron man to an extent

the individuals aren't the point, the roles in this system will be inexorably occupied: iron man, jason bourne

we must act, however painful it be, to protect the secret of the chicken spices: commissioner gordon

'what horrors hath man wrought? must be off ive a kettle on': judge gerald biggleswade from paddington 2

the movie is essentially about the scarecrows path through each of these perspectives

LOL @ secret spices

Thats interesting. Yeah for all the problems that I have with it I cant argue that Nolan doesn’t seed the film with a good number of complicating perspectives beyond “war criminal whitewash”. Its just frustrating that in order to find & engage with a lot of them it felt like I was doing battle with a malfunctioning Avid console

The last hour was a jacked-up Sorkin joint.

great read, OEO.

I just read that a Peter Andre biopic has been greenlighted - Nolan's next project obv

(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”

― hrep (H.P), Sunday, July 30, 2023 10:28 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

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

― hrep (H.P), Sunday, July 30, 2023 10:29 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

it’s funny, I also didn’t recognize robert bowney junior until seeing the credits. re: safdie, I don’t know, I’m honestly just really pleased to see him any time he shows up in a film I’m seeing (most recently he was in “are you there, god?”), I just sort of have a soft spot for directors who also act, particularly if I like their work

I really love that THE IRISHMAN parallel, nice

seconds after i hit 'submit post', i realized that of course dr. strangelove, a movie i haven't seen in 20 years, is obviously a much better vessel for that message of the ordinariness of nuclear destruction

wow talk about disrespectful to victims of nuclear disaster, a comedy that centers the comedic antics of noted yellowface merchant peter sellers

uk ilxors prob asleep but i think i can def issue a provisional cancellation until they wake up

tbf it’s called dr strangelove not dr hiroshima unlike this movie which is the biography of dr robert hiroshima

I can't sleep by all means cancel him for all the Indian dress-up alone

i mean surely if he’d put his foot down or jumped off a bridge they wouldn’t have just fired and/or replaced him with a competent project manager who would have started the cold war anyway some months later than originally anticipated

i read will and ariel durant, i know the fate of nations hinges on the heroic adventured of hella raw dudes called kings

that too but i didn’t want to center my personal brown trauma

aarrggghh... I couldn't help it, I saw this morning in 70mm IMAX.

I was part-way into a long-winded critique but wtf? There's precious little here that's worth expending the time on multiple paragraphs as either writer or reader. Compare it to JFK if you dare, but there's no 16 minute scene with, say, Paul Giamatti as John "Dr. X" Von Neumann who explains to Oppenheimer how American Physics (and by extension American Academia) will be the unspoken and silent third partner in the military-industrial triad (or "trinity" if you like) from there on out.

Only way the movie could have been improved was if just before the closing credits each character was shown making a comedy exit along with a "where are they now" line like the ending of Animal House.

"Ernest Lawrence - loves hydrogen bombs and goes on to create the Big Science nation-state before ulcers eat him alive"

"Luis Alvarez - loves dinosaur extinction and the JFK assassination"

"Haakon Chevalier - whereabouts unknown"

According to the RLM guys, this movie was trailered by Paul Giamatti’s new film. We saw the 70mm print, onto which no trailers were attached.

Paul Giamatti as John "Dr. X" Von Neumann who explains to Oppenheimer how American Physics (and by extension American Academia) will be the unspoken and silent third partner in the military-industrial triad (or "trinity" if you like) from there on out.

I would watch the hell out of this film

In that document

PEOOOWWW

lay the Cold War

britishers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2023/oppenheimer-bbc-iplayer

(1980 miniseries newly on iplayer, saturdays on bbc4 from 12th aug)

According to the RLM guys, this movie was trailered by Paul Giamatti’s new film. We saw the 70mm print, onto which no trailers were attached.

― Glower, Disruption & Pies (kingfish), Tuesday, August 1, 2023 10:35 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i saw the 70mm version at lincoln center and it did have trailers, somehow. also the occasional bug and hair projected onto the screen haha

There’s also the American tv miniseries from 1989, with Brian Dennehy as Groves and David Strathairn as Oppenheimer.

Also Tony Shaloub as Enrico Fermi?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzhui_IJz3U

lol I am enjoying this oppiexploitation angle

We've lingered enough. It's poll time: Barbenheimer: The inevitable poll

(1980 miniseries newly on iplayer, saturdays on bbc4 from 12th aug)

Long before Nolan was mixing up B&W and colour 65mm, the BBC were bouncing between 16mm and videotape :)

Nice history/film chat

https://shows.acast.com/warcollege/episodes/what-makes-oppenheimer-great-and-why-it-sucks

The “they give you awards because you’re over” scene at the end hit harder on a second watch.

“Fake Han Solo” (as a podcaster calls him) was kind of a ridiculous device, as a few people noted upthread - what WAS that about? That character seemed like, I don’t know, a cheap audience surrogate or something, like the dude traveled back in time to clown Strauss.

Thought this was well done, and I was attentive the whole way. It reminded me a bit of an old Hollywood biblical film in one way: what Dwight MacDonald described as the "Look--it's Ava Gardner!" phenomenon. I was constantly spotting people and thinking "Look--it's that guy!" and trying to figure where I knew them from.

Haven't read the thread yet--or really anything about the film--but I'm pretty sure I know what the main objection will be, and it's fair: it sort of half-addresses the moral questions but doesn't really, and actual representation of the carnage is altogether avoided. (And there was an opportunity to at least get that on screen mediated, when Oppenheimer was in the screening room.) I guess the only thing I'd say is that you wouldn't go to a big-budget Christopher Nolan film to get that story; there are other films and lots of books. I think it would be chimerical to expect otherwise.

The “they give you awards because you’re over” scene at the end hit harder on a second watch.

I liked that too. (Was that a brief glimpse of LBJ giving Oppenheimer his?)

I think that WAS LBJ!

In real life it was.

Having read American Prometheus last month -- a terrific biography despite Kai Bird vulgarities like "French novelists such as Marcel Proust" or some such nonsense -- I was struck by how well Cillian Murphy projected intelligence, verve, literacy, the passivity that made him a sexual object, and the magnetism.

Murphy’s a very good actor who unaccountably thinks Nolan is a very good director.

Saw this over the weekend. Thought it was a crap movie, beautifully shot, and with a talented cast. I keep hearing people talk about how good Robert Downey Jr. was, but when I recognized that it was him after about 20 seconds of screen time, he was just Robert Downey Jr. from there on out to me.

Although it was already extremely long, I think a remedy for me would have been to go way longer - like, TV season longer. There was way too much expository dialogue. Brief exchanges that stood in for more interesting conversations that deserved to be fleshed out. Telling, not showing. There was so much jumping between characters that Robert Oppenheimer was interacting with, that in most cases, not enough time was spent with each to show how their relationships develop. Likewise, I had also gone into the movie hoping that we would spend more time with the science than we actually got. The visualizations of particle physics just felt like screen savers. The lack of attention paid to the people of Japan and New Mexico has been discussed elsewhere, but I agree that these were unconscionable omissions.

One line that's been on a loop in my head since watching it is Kitty Oppenheimer's "I don't like your phrase". Emily Blunt delivered it very well, and I get the feeling it's supposed to be a banger of a quote, but it feels empty and irrelevant to me.

keep hearing people talk about how good Robert Downey Jr. was, but when I recognized that it was him after about 20 seconds of screen time, he was just Robert Downey Jr. from there on out to me.

Which....is a good thing?

I mean that he didn't blend into the character enough for me.

I found the Strauss section a distraction: an example of Nolan's refusal to trust the audience's intelligence. RDJ actually gave a performance, though.

Timing!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/08/oppenheimer-manhattan-project-radiation-atomic-bomb-declassified.html

This isn't anything new - downwinders have been talking about this for years. It's just that in a state that's so dependent on nuclear weapons and uranium mining, no one wanted to listen to them

https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/in-the-shadow-of-oppenheimer/