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

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/

but when I recognized that it was him after about 20 seconds of screen time, he was just Robert Downey Jr.

If I'm not the only one, I guess I can blushingly admit I spent the whole film trying to figure out who that was playing Strauss (missed Gary Oldman, too--I avoid all reviews/social media beforehand). One character that perplexed me a bit was Strauss's right-hand guy, who a) seemed to spend all his time mocking Strauss, and b) looked too much like Leonardo DiCaprio to not have that be a distraction.

I spent the whole film trying to figure out where I'd seen the guy playing Oppenheimer's lawyer, it was literally his last scene when I realised it was Macon Blair (Blue Ruin, Green Room, both excellent films). He's a bit heavier in Oppenheimer than in anything else I've seen him in, I think that's what threw me.

Alden Ehrenreich. Xpost

That scene where Tony Stark was unexpectedly sonned by Freddy Mercury prior to getting a second chastising by Han Solo

True story: my Mom’s cancer doctor is also a physicist and said he had to stop hanging around with other physicists because they kept trying to sleep with his wife. “They are just not nice people" he said. https://t.co/XzFKSMmYgm

— Daley Haggar (@d_haggar) August 15, 2023

Took the kid to see this last night. Some assholes stole our seats so we sat right up front which was probably for the best because they giggled through most of it. Who knew scientists were such a hit with these Gen Z teens.

Lisa Martino-Taylor wrote a great book a few years back called _Behind the Fog: How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans_ about US (and Canadian) post-war experiments on veterans and civilians about fallout.

She mentions that the people who staffed up these labs deliberately looked for a certain kind of sociopathic over-achiever type, one who was all about grabbing results without any piddly ethics or common morality getting in the way of the Science. I can’t remember if this thinking was also in place during the war, but the types they hired certainly overlapped.

So fucking around on each others spouses was surely small potatoes compared to, say, lying to the press, the military, and other nation’s governments about the radiological nature of the weapons that were dropped and why weird symptoms were showing up in the Downwinders in America and “Disease X” killing Japanese survivors.

The Dollop just did a two-parter on Einstein and this describes him exactly as far as fucking around on spouses and generally treating everyone like shit. Absolute twat.

who would fuck Einstein?

Exactly

Well, actually, his cousin for one.

He had soulful eyes, or so I’ve heard

Just now remembering some anecdotal evidence of the physics majors I knew in college that I won’t go into.

A guy who graduated from the UC Irvine physics department when I was there later wrote a tell-all about how modern science practice makes everyone conservative and got kicked out of the profession for writing it.

The first college-level physics class I ever had was taught by a Nobel Prize winner who was in Feynman's group at Los Alamos. I never learned anything about the swinger's club, but it was clear that any working physicist back then, each "with an ego big enough to stab each other in the front for prestige," knew the Manhattan Project and subsequent post-war military budgeting was going to define American science. All of it. You were either in or out.

Oppenheimer's "well, I guess it worked" is accurate.

I mean, I am sure there were people who just wanted to be able to say they'd fucked Einstein.

all those Big Bang Theory fuckers were horny as shit.

E=MC splooge

Think about it, you have completely upended what everyone thought was true about the nature of the universe, what else is there to do but screw?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGczXkknl80

New film achievement unlocked per this post:

if you start oppenheimer and queensryche's operation:mindcrime at the same time your friends will leave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oku8ex_WsVs

if you start oppenheimer and queensryche's operation:mindcrime at the same time your friends will leave

DON'T LEAVEEEEEEEEEEEEE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
DON'T LEAVE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

*Oppenheimer enters conference room, head of commission looks up*

"And WELCOME..."

You bahstad

Related to Elvis’ post up thread, I recommend Lisa Martino-Taylor‘s Behind the Fog: How the U.S. Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans.

After covering all the really evil shit that was done w/r/t atomic and fallout radiation testing, she points out that a lot of the scientists recruited from the university departments were a particular personality type, one that wasn’t so caught up on empathy or the ramifications of what they were doing so much as technical achievement and in-group competition.

Shitty system and shitty incentives

lol I totally forgot to see this movie.

Reading the book gives the movie - which I liked a lot already! - more dimensions.

(I know, I know - watching a biopic shouldn’t entail doing homework.)

The character Benny Safdie plays is a lot more of a pain in the ass in the larger narrative, let’s say that.

I was reading this article earlier, and if you want to repeat my mistake and see what happens when Wired asks Nolan about AI, feel free, but there was this one section:

My feeling on Oppenheimer was, a lot of people know the name, and they know he was involved with the atomic bomb, and they know that something else happened that was complicated in his relationship to US history.

And like, the third thing is not my impression of what people know? Maybe this is a US education thing, except he's English?

https://www.wired.com/story/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-ai-apocalypse

Honestly, the basic popcult understanding I had of Oppenheimer the person for many years was the bit of dialogue between Sean Connery and the Communist Party minder he kills at the start of The Hunt for Red October, and Connery's character does specifically mention Oppenheimer being accused of being a Communist.

i finally saw Oppenheimer yesterday

(full disclosure, i like most of his movies - not exactly a stan: sometimes in the case of Dunkirk, i had to work at the appreciation bc it was not immediate)

i really liked this overall, i liked Nolan’s attempt at showing how Oppenheimer was never ever really just one thing (in his surrounding life pre/post Manhattan Project) but more like a series of conflicting behaviours

like, Manhattan was maybe the most understandable version of him because it’s him in his theoretical sandbox etc

i get how the last third of the movie might not appeal to a lot of people but I found all that Strauss stuff showed — ok ok yes while also leaning way too heavily on the DO YOU SEE lever — the Strauss stuff is push wide open all the cracks in Oppenheimer in Life. He has no defense for the conservative business machine of politics that Strauss represents, the basic schoolyard bullying that is the actual boring real-life practical application of atomic theory

And it wasn’t at least to me, in a we should feel sorry for Oppenheimer violins story. ok somewhat sympathetic.
but it is also matter of fact play by play of what happens when you live an almost solely theoretical life. The aftermath of the bomb, his relationships, politics: they’re all sort of versions of the same thing in his life; in their way, bigger or smaller, each of those aspects of his life he only approached theoretically, each results in him giving that baffled haunted face when he’s confronted with a reality he either avoided, never confronted or never conceived of.

He was a weird dude.

And Strauss is fascinating at the opposite end, all of his efforrs pre-war for jewish refugees vs all his petty political intractability later .. makes for a good counterpoint to the semi-mythical Oppenheimer.

also Josh Hartnett looked kinda like 90’s Aaron Sorkin lol

anyway def gonna read American Prometheus at some point

Agree w VegemiteGrrl abt Dunkirk, I liked it

This movie felt like a Wikipedia entry being read aloud by Hildy from His Girl Friday

ha, yes