9. Oppenheimer, dir. Christopher Nolan
I think the details of my theater-going experience is essential to my reviews of these movies. I like the idea that a movie can be a platonic ideal, of the same quality and purity regardless of how you saw it. But I know that's not true. Movies exist in our world, they have mass, they take energy to produce and maintain. The art itself is not the end of the object, the object also includes its material history, its effect upon the world, for better or worse, and also the medium by which it gets to my eyes and ears. I'm going to enjoy a movie more in a cinema versus at home, especially if the theatrical experience is unique and special in some way. And isn't "unique and special" what we're after here in the first place?
I saw Oppenheimer twice in the largest screen possible, the IMAX at AMC Lincoln Center. The screen was so large that the atomic test might have been at full 1:1 scale. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in close-ups could have cradled Godzilla in his arms. There were little cigar marks on the film bigger than cars. I hurt my neck looking up for three hours, because I was sitting in the front row - the only seats available. This was an event, a pilgrimage of film consumption.
Then I did it all over again! All three hours. Still in the front row. You cannot have a better presentation of a movie. I wish could watch every movie on that screen with people that excited. They came to that place for magic, just as Nicole Kidman says, and Oppenheimer delivered.
Oppenheimer is not the epic thrill-ride you'd expect with these massive cameras, massive screen, and drawing blockbuster crowds. Mission: Impossible 7 tried so hard to entertain with never-ending train crashes and tossing its star off an actual cliff. And yet - Oppenheimer drew the buzz. It was a more exciting and entertaining movie, despite being mostly white guys in suits in meetings suffering petty bureaucratic revenges. Sure, this is a biopic about the guy who led the team that built the atomic bomb. You're gonna big a kaboom, an earth-shattering kaboom in Oppenheimer, and it is thrilling. But after that is another hour of guys, suits, and meetings. This is Christopher Nolan at his most dull and Oscarbait-y, no Batman, no spaceships, no time travel, and yet he's filmmaking, man. This is great stuff. It's impossible to look away.
Oppenheimer is doing most of the things I hate in being prestige biopics. We go from college-aged Oppenheimer in dusty classrooms full of nerds crunching numbers to the Second World War in about an hour. We're racing past decades of this guy's life, keeping the details of the math simple for the audience, dropping a few references to Enrico Fermi and wave-particle duality for the people in the audience who actually have read a physics book before. Yet it's never too complicated, you can cheer for hearing the name "Robert Feynman" but this movie is not too concerned with showing its work in the calculations. There are thhe complications of socialism and the war, Oppenheimer's womanizing, it is all glossed over. Two really good actresses in Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh are given crap roles as the movie unhappily goes through the motions of remembering women exist.
Yet, Oppenheimer never stops. The right filmmaking can make anything thrilling. Oppenheimer has one of the best edits of a movie I've ever seen, solving the problems of exposition and simplification by turning the Manhattan Project into a tense heist, racing to full off the caper before time runs out. And even getting experimental and surreal once Oppenheimer realizes the terror he's unleashed.
Still I would not recommend people make movies like this, unless you are as good as Chris Nolan. And even Nolan should not do this again. Please make a movie about cyborg dinosaurs or something next.
There's also an entire B-plot involving Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) in black and white with his Senate confirmation hearing for a Cabinet post in 1959. It ends up a mirror image of Oppenheimer's own struggles in the back-stabbing world of Washington politics. But Oppenheimer struggles to find this post-game vindication as any of kind of pleasant resolution. Oppenheimer points out that in WWII, there was another through the atomic nightmare maybe in the mind of idealists, but were the idealists wrong? America did not need to conquer the world with a zero sum atomic game with the fate of humanity at stake. There was a real chance to make a better world, instead warmongers and technocrats grabbed everything they could. They won, the rest of us are just acceptable losses if and when the missiles launch. For way too long, nobody understood what a mistake letting out the atomic genie has been.
At least the kaboom looks really cool.
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