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

I’m a little sad that Michael Caine isn’t in the cast list.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_(film)

He plays the bomb.

We were only supposed to blow the … never mind.

You all do what you must, but I've started anticipating this. AFI Silver is promising a 70mm print and I just might go on preview night.

Christopher Nolan says people who’ve seen ‘OPPENHEIMER’ “leave the movie absolutely devastated. They can't speak.”

(Source: https://t.co/YBS069SoWn) pic.twitter.com/geozYO76qF

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) June 20, 2023

They know just what he's sayin'

Those are just his friends who hated it and couldn't think of a better way to avoid letting him know.

Nolan: "What did you think?"
Friend: (points to throat, shakes head no)

gonna go out on a limb here and suggest this will be visually accomplished but emotionally inert

Ya think?

it’s a bold claim but i’m standing by it

https://i.redd.it/9yxo9qcs4n541.jpg

https://thedisinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/tumblr_inline_ofd5z14OS51qdawwj_640.png

bit cruel of Nolan to incapacitate audience members like that

Stravinsky is so jealous of this cunt

I saw a trailer and it sort of looked like a mansplained version of that twin peaks episode from half a decade ago

Schrader’s on board:

fuck yeah, let’s go pic.twitter.com/QeAILCOtGx

— Brian Haley (@brianchaley) July 18, 2023

“This guy’s work mostly sucks but this one is great!”

Schrader wasn't absolutely devastated and rendered speechless, he's doing it wrong.

What a bullshitter

Most offensive Shrader shitpost yet.

anything he has to say on any other movies henceforth can be safely ignored, same applied when Badshaw gave 5 stars to Dunkirk.

If Oppenheimer cleans up I will expect Paul to issue another angry missive about how the Oscars aren't American enough anymore.

watched an Oppenheimer doc the other week. The suicide of his communist ex gf (who he was probably having an affair with while under FBI surveillance) seems really dodgy. She drowned herself in a bath "lying on a pile of cushions in the bathroom, with her head submerged in the partly-filled bathtub". Sounds like a very awkward method of suicide, if it was.

Be hilarious when film bros are in despair as this flops in comparison to Barbie.

Schrader be shillin'. Ehh...he's probably looking for his next script's Exec Producer.

watched an Oppenheimer doc the other week. The suicide of his communist ex gf (who he was probably having an affair with while under FBI surveillance) seems really dodgy.

I guess to be fair, Harvey Weinstein would have been all over this. https://t.co/HbtwF8XoDp

— Don Hughes (@getfiscal) July 18, 2023

If Oppenheimer cleans up I will expect Paul to issue another angry missive about how the Oscars aren't American enough anymore.

Wasn't this one of the movies that kept getting brought up as provisionally not meeting the AMPAS' new representation/inclusion standards?

https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-standards

I guess it might hinge on the definition of "significant supporting actor."

I will be going to an Oppenheimer preview tonight. But I will be dressed as Barbie.

if i ate one almond per day i’d also engineer an atomic bomb https://t.co/dYqK3umded

— Hadas Weiss (@weiss_hadas) July 20, 2023

What's the big deal, I could easily eat one almond a day.

Don't Tom, it will turn you into an Oppenheimer

I have become thin, consumer of almonds.

Wait he ate only one almond per day or he just randomly threw that on top of his daily meals

Jesus, there has already been enough preposterous director's hyperbole and self-praise around this movie. Shut the fuck up, actors... enough already!

(xp) The latter was my plan.

it wasn't just for his *transformation* into Oppenheimer, he's playing a squirrel in his next project

tbf Cilian Murphy was grossly overweight before he started shooting this film.

thing is when Nolan is creating his dark and devastating aesthetic, you need to look unhealthily anemic and like you haven't had a proper shit in a month if you are his lead actor.

there are other ways to lose mass amounts of weight in a short period of time that are more fun than eating an almond

one - ride in an OceanGate sub

Or sit through the entirety of Oppenheimer without popcorn

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

What about the victims.

I've seen a couple of these and I'm more sympathetic than most. I think it's probably true that telling the story without (some) victims would be incomplete and less interesting. https://t.co/XpzpDymWM0

— jan (@janhopi) July 21, 2023

I just watched this and ugh, maybe I shouldn’t have? First time I have felt such a deep hatred watching a dramatisation, specifically at the dropping of the bomb. Just a primal “what have you done?” screaming from the inside. And then the whitewashing of oopy in the last hour and all the typical stereotypical roles of good guys vs bad guys within the whole game. This was just the encapsulation of that tweet “Americans drop bombs all over children in Vietnam and then make movies about how sad they all are about it”.

"How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?" - Bob Marley

The good news: The dialogue (by Nolan standards) is remarkably clear.

The bad news: The story is about the political backbiting and in-fighting around the U.S. nuclear program (with Oppy as their primary chew toy), and therefore Nolan had to employ nonlinear editing and blatant visualizations of Oppenheimer's thinking to keep this from looking like a random C-SPAN segment.

so it's like Herman's Head

i think i can skip the latest chuck nolan sad man movie

RDJ walks away with it. (Also forget the screen format debate, a sound system is more crucial.)

glad to see aphex twin getting some good-paying work, he's due

Robert Downey Jr. says Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' script was printed on red paper: 'It's kind of like being hypnotized'

get some reading glasses then you daft cunt. The Nolan hyperbole industrial complex reaching new levels of self-clowning parody. I'll watch all kinds of shite but will make a special exception to never watch this hideous garbage.

His next movie about the CEO of Armitage Shanks will be printed on toilet paper

this looks good will watch it and report back

I'm going to 70mm showing tomorrow

Another fucking summer blockbuster biopic of a physicist

Probably repeating comparisons others have made but this felt like an incredibly propulsive mix of JFK, The Tree of Life, and the last hour of Inception/Dunkirk. Naturally I loved it.

"...it's the bomb that will bring us together ... "

“Americans drop bombs all over children in Vietnam and then make movies about how sad they all are about it”

i am pretty sure you have this streak in every nation cinema (anti americanism otoh totally exceptional
as with all things american)

national*

for example, the analogue in iranian cinema (to the bombing) would be the islamic republic itself

get some reading glasses then you daft cunt. The Nolan hyperbole industrial complex reaching new levels of self-clowning parody. I'll watch all kinds of shite but will make a special exception to never watch this hideous garbage.

― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Saturday, July 22, 2023 1:39 AM (fourteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

hear, hear!

Probably repeating comparisons others have made but this felt like an incredibly propulsive mix of JFK, The Tree of Life, and the last hour of Inception/Dunkirk. Naturally I loved it.

― ryan, Sunday, 23 July 2023 3:42 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Where did you see the Tree of Life in this? If I saw any of its qualities in Oppenheimer I would have walked away much happier.

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?

For me it was like, what if Malick made JFK? Again, I'd eat that shit up -- it's almost too squarely in my wheelhouse to totally objective.

I read a bit about Nolan wanting to distinguish between “objective” and “subjective” perspectives in this film, which immediately differentiates him from Malick with his Heidegerian, rediction-of-the-objective/subjective-epistemology, philosophical underpinning. I get the similarities based on highlighting the cosmic, but for Nolan the cosmic is always scientific (I mean just look at the subject matter of his last 3 movies bar Dunkirk), while for Malick it is philosophical/religious/spiritual/moral/human/only-scientific-tangentially.

I don’t want to be too hard on Nolan’s style in this movie, I do get the Malick comparison and appreciated it where those moments came up (the bomb testing in particular). I am put off by the politics of the movie and the sometime cringe dialogue (i am become death in the sex scene? That last scene as well? Ugh.) Jokes on me anyways, I paid money to see it

I love The Tree of Life so damn much and find Nolan misguided in his bombastic style. Have nothing against the bloke or his movies as long as he doesn’t take himself too seriously and can admit to his films being popcorn flicks that only signal at ideas worth thinking about without ever actually engaging them with much depth. But Nolan ain’t no Terrence Mallick that’s for sure. Nolan’s film have nothing transcendent in them, too scientific, too in-this-world, none of the beyond. They’re just modern Michael Bay movies written with a science professor as editor. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But Nolan ain’t no Terrence Mallick that’s for sure.

well...that we can agree on.

like nolan, malick, struggles to make the same good movie over and over again, each time narrowly missing the mark

much as i struggle to make a clean typo free post sheesh

My #1 peeve with Oppenheimer was making him the Martyr, the good guy, the main character (I guess “The Atomic Bomb” is a less catchy name). I actually would have loved this film if it finished after the 2nd hour with the bomb testing. But the last hour had to be this morally unambiguous placing of the stakes where Oppenheimer is the good guy being martyred by his country when ummmmm, he directly contributed to killing hundreds of thousands? And this “counter view” is brought up in maybe one sentence and one scene and never considered again? If this movie went apolitical I would have considered it Nolan’s best work, instead I just left jaded that we get a hero story out of a villain. Strauss’ speech towards the end about Oppenheimer being a cry-baby that wanted to be punished to indulge his guilt without having to take it seriously was otm, sadly it was presented as the “villains view of Oppenheimer”.
I’m not American though, so maybe I just don’t get the bloke.

If Malick did this movie it would have been a Tower of Babel analogy

the real tragedy was clearly Oppenheimer losing his security clearance

I'll see this next week, but in the meantime you all have me imagining Malick making his own Oppenheimer movie.

Bomb (voiceover): Why am I here? Am I meant to be alone? It calls to me, my purpose, like a dream receding in the cloudy distance of memory ...

xp i mean is that actually the message of the film?

i can’t really speak to the criticism since i haven’t seen the film, but i think it’s more accurate to say america got to the bomb first vs america invented the bomb. once you understand how the sun works (settled by 1940) you know the theory of how to make it happen and you’re working out technical details.

for me the follow-up question to the fair point of why make oppenheimer a figure of moral conscience (aside from the real life fact that he was an actual communist, vs a lot of european scientists, like edward teller, who were generally eay more right wing) is then why single him out as the big hypocrite?

did you know the 1944 nobel prize was awarded in 1945 to otto hahn and lise meitner for the discovery of nuclear fission? to me, that real life fact is as ghastly (or more!) than nolan making a summer film about him

besides, historically he actually acted as a figure of conscience, and paid some price for it. maybe his actions are not super impressive by 2023 standards, but a lot of his colleagues were publicly arguing for unrestrained use of tactical weapons just to send a message to the USSR! plus the internet hadn’t been invented and he didn’t have the same outlets we do for 24/7 impotent moral posturing, so the fact that he did it at all is an accomplishment

finally that sex scene info is also ghastly and probably enough to put me off seeing this

The Criterion Channel is streaming an Oscar-nominated documentary on Oppenheimer from 1980 - you do NOT need an account or subscription, it's currently free to everyone (albeit for a limited time). It's only 90 minutes and the filmmakers interviewed quite a few people who are now long-dead. They do touch on a lot of moral issues that I hope the film explores. For example, once Germany surrendered, why did they continue on, especially when they knew Germany was nowhere close to developing a nuclear bomb? And amazingly, they carried on the first detonation realizing they couldn't predict what would happen, even preparing for the potential evacuation of New Mexico and speculating the potential destruction of the world if the atmosphere was blown up in the process.

Also, I wish someone here in NYC counterprogrammed Nolan's film with Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August. (For some reason you can't even stream it at the moment.)

Direct link to said documentary:

https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-day-after-trinity/videos/the-day-after-trinity

Xp the late great.

Fair points. I can understand the tragedy in Oppenheimer, my issue is more with Nolan’s painting of the situation with him as the martyred hero. I don’t know enough about oppy to know whether he thought of himself this way, but I do know it’s “a bit icky” to have the man who brought us into the nuclear age painted as a hero of sorts

I will give credit to Nolan that he gave the moment of the bombs creation and testing its appropriate weight. I was shuddering at its detonation, and appropriately pissed at the other people in the cinema making even a murmur during the silence of that scene. I really do think the first 2hr of this movie are incredible, they’re just counterbalanced by the last hour being quite literally “the real tragedy was clearly Oppenheimer losing his security clearance”

"the real tragedy was clearly hitler finding out the panzer divisions didnt repel the russians"

the only thing I'm curious about is his commie ex gf very likely got murdered by feds. I doubt Oppy meant the Bhagavad Gita quote in the way it sounds quite self-aggrandising and pretentious - I think he probably knew and would have been informed that he was an expendable part in a project that was happening with or without him. maybe a less capable physicist heading the project would meant a different timescale and - who knows - better or worse outcomes, particularly for civilians of imperial Japan. But I feel like if you already don't have any time for Nolan to start with - this will be worst possible movie to watch. Despite Schrader saying I don't normally like this idiot but oh this blows the doors off.

Time to bring up once again that LRB letter from someone who claims to have asked his brother about the "I am become death" quote and the brother said no, as far as he could remember what Oppenheimer actually said was "well, guess that worked".

But I feel like if you already don't have any time for Nolan to start with - this will be worst possible movie to watch

Amusingly, as someone who doesn't like Nolan, I was happy enough to go and see this because at least it's a real story about real people and I already knew a fair bit about it, so I felt he couldn't fuck it up too badly and at least I would know what was going on. I couldn't honestly say that the film does paint him as a martyred hero. There seemed to me to be an air of "if you're so smart, why couldn't you have seen this coming?" about it. All the other scientists are more pragmatic than he is. He sees so much, but he didn't let himself see this because he was so excited about rushing on to the exciting bits always, but life is not just exciting bits, it is a lot of boring sitting around in committee rooms, being talked at.

I swear to god if I talk myself into retrospectively liking this boring film, I will be furious.

nolan designed that as a time lapse feature

if he ever does a Bazball movie I'll torrent that one

Would definitely watch a Nolan bazball film

Redenbacher pic.twitter.com/x2H0qG1GzU

— Neil Cicierega (@neilcic) July 23, 2023

there goes the one almond a day diet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9yKZjAI5Nk

No Oppenheimer for me today as the 70mm projector was broken

If there was going to be a movie about this I'd rather it was made by an engineering geek than a nob like Nolan. Oppy didn't have the knowhow for the implosion system. The Ukrainian chemistry prof in charge of the explosives dept had to engineer a perfect implosion for the Trinity test to work. Even a tiny air bubble in some of the dynamite could have upset the balance. So this mad person is drilling faults out of individual pieces of dynamite with a dentist drill. Not that I'm an apologist - just find outstanding engineering feats more interesting than some dickhead who just wants to enhance rather than interrogate some questionable mythological bullshit for the sake of a movie.

maybe you might enjoy richard rhodes’ “dark sun” and other books

this topic (nuclear chem) is what my undergrad degree was in so i generally don’t like semi technical stuff (would either read history or science, not so into pop science) but it’s basically what you’re describing

i think there was an american public television series?

“making of the atomic bomb” is the manhattan project one that gets into how current nuclear energy works (including dept of energy)

“dark sun” takes off from there and gets more focused on ppl like edward teller and the real life dr strangelove arms race story. you will also learn a lot more about how this stuff applies to astrophysics (my personal interest, or at least it was 25 years ago)

i can confidently say neither book is going to satisfy anyone who is more interested in the humanitarian questions

actually, i should say it won’t satisfy anyone who is *looking at this book* for answers to humanitarian questions. it’s not a strength of this particular book

Redenbacher

I thought those stills were from "Real Genius" for a second.

To be fair, I think the argument for the tragedy in the last hour of the movie is less about him merely losing his security clearance, but that he lost it in the context of criticizing and urging caution. Whatever his mistakes were, and whatever his personal motivations were, there's at least some tragedy in the silencing of a voice of caution given the very dangerous nuclear arms race that happened next.

cheers LG, like the sound of dark sun

looked great in 70mm but i'd advise anyone over 50 to avoid drinking a very large coffee just before this bladder busting movie. the last hour was particularly challenging on that front.

so i watched “man who wasn’t there” again instead of this and i was thinking that if i did a story about mccarthyism i’d also put an idealistic, naive and curiously blank david byrne looking dude at the center, who just plows his way through fate on the strength of his convictions until he can’t anymore (i also finally watched eggers “northman”, lol, which is no more about mccarthyism than “man who wasn’t there” is)

i think oppenheimer himself gets blown out of proportion because if you make a movie about, say, fermi, you’re not really making a movie about america. all of his work at univ of chicago was a continuation of work from italy, with some of the same characters in the same roles!

it would be an immigrant story, like the godfather. it’s a great story - with the rise of fascism he and his small research group divvy up between axis and allies. there are some hair raising escapes, and there’s one weird young semi mystical physicist who maybe drowns at night when a boat sinks near gibraltar, or maybe he escaped to central american jungles, under an alias … but was never seen again!

and with the hat and his looks and time/life magazinems help oppenheimer was photogenic, not just recognizable but memorable (see also gandhi) in a way that resonated with usa wide open west cultural mythology bs … oh which brings me back to how much i really love “man who wasn’t there”, hopefully at least the b&w in this film looks as nice

also maybe nolan sucks but there’s still space for movies about mccarthyism, right? or did jack nicholson put that to rest w/ “a few good men”?

"i think oppenheimer himself gets blown out of proportion"

he was undoubtedly brilliant but only just a slightly a bigger dot than all of us are next to a big military warfare state that is reaching peak level.

one thing I heard was at first he thought he could do this project with a small bunch of physicists and unlimited dosh in a few months. But it proved you needed so many new departments building and so many different experts that the idea of nominating one person as the "architect of the nuclear bomb" seems ridic

as far as he could remember what Oppenheimer actually said was "well, guess that worked".

joss whedon's oppenheimer

the real tragedy was clearly Oppenheimer losing his security clearance

this is (or is related to / synecdoche for) the real tragedy tbf! hiroshima and nagasaki aren't tragedies; they're crimes. a tragedy looks like this:

There seemed to me to be an air of "if you're so smart, why couldn't you have seen this coming?"

(even the horrible bathos is a classic feature: i mean who rly cares how antigone and kreon feel about anything anyway? the city is surrounded by bodies)

i haven't seen this and have always been a nolan hater but i mean... i do like we-never-came-home-from-the-war! the-popular-front-betrayed! stuff (prob too easy a sell on it in fact) and then everyone keeps invoking the editing style of jfk so like... i should probably see it

yes the gradual building of the while town itself is an interesting story that gets a good treatment in those rhodes books and elsewhere … i find it fascinating because my mom grew up with white americans in one of those project towns. my grandfather was “lead geologist / native geotechnical engineer” for a california company doing a massive project in the iranian desert

yeah, a ufo hangar. you heard it hear first ppl

does this movie feature leo szilard prominently? he's the most central person in "making of the atomic bomb". that book is great for how it describes the rapid succession of scientific breakthroughs leading up to the bomb.

he's around in all the scientist crowd scenes, but his views and actions aren't strongly characterized

there’s a book called “the martians” about the great hungarian physicists (szilard is the voice of conscience figure from that group which also includes teller). i could have sworn that was a movie too but i guess not. the cold war is obviously prominent but that’s definitely got a wider scope than atom bomb stuff

i’m posting this because in general i agree that a lot of the people and their stories are a lot more interesting than both oppenheimer and the usa military’s ambitions

lots of biopics get made tbf

admittedly all things considered id rather they focused on the later years after he became dr manhattan but i guess nolan is using that known outcome as background to impregnate the "how did Oppenheimer become dr manhattan" aspect with foreboding like he did with his movie about joaquin phoenix becoming batman

To be fair, I think the argument for the tragedy in the last hour of the movie is less about him merely losing his security clearance, but that he lost it in the context of criticizing and urging caution. Whatever his mistakes were, and whatever his personal motivations were, there's at least some tragedy in the silencing of a voice of caution given the very dangerous nuclear arms race that happened next.

― fajita seas, Monday, 24 July 2023 6:24 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

True.

One other mild sticking point for me. I am not convinced Ben Safdie was the right man for his role and was distracted in most of his scenes. I kept thinking the scientist he was playing was sounding a lot like the character he played in Good Times, which was a funny thought in itself and gave some nice levity.
There were definitely some Safdie-esque “stress scenes” that went far beyond Nolan’s previous levels. Big fan of those

this was not a great film, I’m afraid

To be fair, Oppenheimer does seem like a faultless hero when you compare him to a vile sociopathic ghoul like Teller.

I have agreed to portray the first person ever to talk about someone's mom while doing the dozens. 'YoMommaHeimer' will be in theaters in January.

— George Wallace (@MrGeorgeWallace) July 24, 2023

maybe the saddest part of this movie was when they read from the hearing transcripts and it was less stilted than all the other dialogue

Oh no not this again.

Any means of forcing Japanese surrender would have killed incredible numbers of civilians, the guilty parties are the imperial officials who insisted on continuing a hopeless war.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 23, 2023

next day reflection is that my biggest disappointment in this is that Richard Feynman is reduced to a blink and you'll miss him bongo playing extra in the background.

I didn't realise he was meant to be Feynman. I only knew he must be someone because I recognized Jack Quaid.

i didn't know it was Jack Quaid. i wonder if there was more of him that didn't make the final edit?

the weirdest fact about jack quaid is that nobody ever references his innerspace remake from 1991

the weirdest fact about jack quaid is that nobody ever references his innerspace remake from 1991

the weirdest fact about jack quaid is that nobody ever references his innerspace remake from 1991

what's the weirdest fact about Jack Quaid?

he actually hates Billy Joel

Tell him about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNumdLhDV2M

is the "dropping of the bomb was necessary to save millions of lives" narrative still as prevalent as it once was?

I've always found it to be horseshit, but the Hiroshima thread on ILX was pretty mixed back in the day.

This film suffered from bloody horrible audio mixing. I hate this new thing in film and TV where you can hear every foot shuffle, every jacket lining, even people breathing, to the detriment of dialogue

Blame the Foley Artist Union

is the "dropping of the bomb was necessary to save millions of lives" narrative still as prevalent as it once was?

I've always found it to be horseshit, but the Hiroshima thread on ILX was pretty mixed back in the day.

I think even in the '90s, during the 50th anniversary coverage, America's mainstream was ambivalent at best, but maybe I was just selectively taking in the coverage

Admittedly my position was more emotional cos I'd read Hiroshima in school and was pretty shook by it

i would say the question is as controversial and unanswerable as ever.

the facts are the japanese (branches of military, imperial court, civil society) were themselves at odds with each other over the question of surrender. meanwhile publicly they are calling for collective fight to the death, and at this point even avowed pacifists and anti war activists are getting into kamikaze fighters (semi willingly) to defend the home islands. so like in real life, people's stated motivations and their actions are confused and contradictory. on the other side, you can't fault the allies for starting to ask whether it was really going to be foxhole combat on a thousand little islands for another six months. and yes there is also debate in the us govt about whether dropping the bomb is necessary and whether they should just test it on people either way, while they can.

so this is real murky stuff because even in retrospect it's not clear why they did what they did. in real life henry stimson finally "agrees" to dropping the bomb on the condition that 1) it's not on kyoto or other cultural landmark site (overruling the army) and 2) it's out of humanitarian necessity and to get ahead of an inevitable arms race, and NOT simply just to see how well it works in a real life use case ... and truman respects not just #1 but uh ... also #2? but what does that even mean, since it ends up looking no different?

Debates about the motivations of an event the killed hundreds of thousands of civilians indiscriminately always come off as a little misguided at best? I am Thomistic with my morality, believing that there is a balance between circumstances and intention when judging a moral decision. But this one? I think the gravity of the effect makes discussion of “intentions” shallow.

Just reminded me of another moment in the movie when my ears went red. 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

Also xp otm about audio mixing. How does Nolan get away with it? I was more forgiving on this one because, you know, I was comparing it to Tenet.

today muscular liberalism is saying again, there are benefits to incinerating entire fucking cities!

uhhh the communists believe that too

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

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

that’s two separate instances

of course I have thoughts about the fire bombing of civilians by the British and US in Germany and Japan - it was barbarism and mass murder and there should have been the strategists from bomber command and the US air force put on trail for crimes against humanity.

I was gonna say, do you know who you're posting to? lol (<3 calzino)

The laughing at the Kyoto comment was more on the crowd than the film, it wasn’t presented as a funny comment.
My opinions are not personal attacks on your positions the late great, I can appreciate what you are saying. But co-sign with Calzino. Just because the nazi’s/Japanese/communists were notthe good guys in that point of time, does not mean America gets to be by process of elimination. There are no winners in war, especially not innocent evaporates civilians. Woe to us who like the strategy room, make those lives part of a mathematical strategic equation by turning it into a trolly problem. Lives are worth more than that.

*evaporated

I visited Hiroshima maybe 7 years ago? Going to the peace memorial museum was an extremely emotional experience.

The only other time a history museum effected me in a similar way was when viewing a photo in Berlin’s topography of terror. It was a photo of German civilians being forced to look at a mass grave of concentration camp victims. The Germans are wailing in the photo while surrounded by US or USSR soldier.

The thing I try to keep in mind is how Grave of the Fireflies was based on massive 'regular' bombing of Kobe.

wait am i giving the impression i think the us were the good guys? and in any case, is that the message of the film? i didn’t see it but i thought the movie was unequivocal about the bomb being bad?

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 :\

it's always jarring for me to see former dudebro sex comedy star Josh Hartnett in roles w/ gravitas or closely approximating gravitas

he doesnt work enough!

jesus hes goodlooking also and ive heard a lot about him in those stocky suits in the past twelve hours or so

I assumed that Josh Harnett had morphed into Taylor Kitsch to get younger roles

Just saw this last night. The final scene was the highlight imo. Also, Emily Blunt was very good (if--of course--underutilized).

young Han Solo being Iron Man's aide was a nice touch

Jean Tatlock. The circumstances are definitely dodgy: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/12/11/the-curious-death-of-oppenheimers-mistress/

"One of Oppenhemier's Mistresses"

everyone bar murphy was underutilized

in a four hour movie

"Keep your head down, Fuchs."

everyone bar murphy was underutilized

it's funny i think the other movie that has this approach (recognizable faces in fleeting parts) is the thin red line...used maybe to different effect there.

anyway you guys are a tough crowd! maybe im a bit of sucker for nolan's particular showboating prowess...but, say, that black and white scene at the dinner table where the soviet test is first discussed...the editing, the performances, the visual flourishes, that is cinema to me.

i also think the third hour is the best, a few nolan-y eye rolling moments aside.

also my favorites of his are probably Dunkirk and Tenet...so that's where I'm coming from.

it's funny i think the other movie that has this approach (recognizable faces in fleeting parts) is the thin red line

i thought that was one ot the best parts of “thin red line”! and imo central to whatever it was i thought the film wanted to say about war vs murder (or if you prefer, what’s happening there vs what’s happening in badlands)

With the 3rd act/last hour, I felt that Nolan was all We Need A Climax (I still maintain with pacing of it all that it's meant to be somewhat climactic) when the previous 2 hours didn't require that. Perhaps the demands of it to be a $100M hollywood tent pole with third act reveals, character development etc etc can tend to rub against the material at times. At the same time, I am coming around to it a bit. Oppenheimer is so shell shocked and checked out after trinity that he’s just going through the motions as everything slips away from him. He shrinks further and further in the interrigation room. The whole episode was just a pyrric victory in the end as Oppenhemier is still left staring into the distance plagued by guilt. His victory seems undermined and its men like Strauss who call the shots ultimately.

I need to see it again lol

yeah it's obvious that nolan wanted to use the security clearance kangaroo court as a kind of trial of conscience...but as you say it also demonstrates the drift from the moral clarity of the war and scientific hubris to political cowardice, backbiting, venality, etc....even kitty's testimony is empty theater....she knows how to play those games. but she's also the one who, twice, tells him he won't be forgiven and probably doesn't deserve it. ("you don't get to commit the sin and have us feel sorry for you")

Saw this without much of an expectation last night. Came out frustrated and annoyed. Perhaps I just don't like Nolan's style anymore, but this movie was exhausting to watch. I don't think a single scene lasted longer than 30 seconds. Everything is cut so quickly, flashbacks immediately after phrases uttered, almost stream of consciousness style layered with an unrelenting barrage of intense string arrangements. If I was to use music production terms to describe this movie, it felt "brick walled" to death and had no dynamic range. At all.

No character development, no nuance, no emotional depth, no intrigue, simply exposition for 3 hours, like a 3 hour long movie preview. The sex scenes were completely awkward and forced. Every actor was directed to express one note: intensity. The structure of the narrative and editing felt completely disorienting, frankly. And I get it - this has been Nolan's stylistic MO going back to The Prestige. But in films like that one, like Inception or Interstellar, the mysteriousness and jittery editing and rapid fire flashbacks and flash-forwards help to buoy the intrigue and ambiguity in the story; it works (though I felt the last 30 minutes of Interstellar were quite exhausting as well). However, this is a biopic!

Didn't see Dunkirk or Tenet, and after watching this one, I have no desire to. Hope Barbie is much better, seeing that Sunday, but damn if this isn't a big let down for a film attempting to revive the "summer blockbuster" tradition of seeing things in the theater post-pandemic. Sure didn't convince me.

Everyone remembers J. Robert Oppenheimer, no one gives a shit about Lewis Strauss.

the first half hour to an hour was indeed almost Snyder-esque brief scenes at a dizzying pace, which did initially annoy me.

I did like the movie overall, but it was mostly a boilerplate biopic with a big budget and the typical Nolan dourness.

they were even frowning while fucking

"Read this Sanskrit to me while we fuck"

"just play kula shaker ffs"

xp octobeard both dunkirk and tenet well worth catching tbh

dunkirk yes, tenet no

sorry

tenet is htrow gnihctaw sdrawkcab

the first half hour to an hour was indeed almost Snyder-esque brief scenes at a dizzying pace

yeah my prince valiant comment was not entirely random, i was imagining something like this for the first hour except every panel is a one second shot with a subliminally slow dolly, and there's no monologue just hans zimmer

https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2021/07/prince-valiant_mark-schultz-thomas-yeates_27-june-2021.jpg

^^ probably my favorite prince valiant

i know nothing about comics or movies so maybe that's just a standard training montage in either context?

nolan might be master of the movie length training montage, maybe tenet is that masterpiece

I'm a sucker for handsome period movies - even some bad ones and ppl comparing this to thin red line and jfk makes me think I might even enjoy it - but then I remember trying to put aside my Nolan grievances and watching Dunkirk with an open mind and then realising I hated this guy's movies much more than I even knew before.

The Thin Red Line was so much better though. It had style and pacing to balance the surrealism

"Read this Sanskrit to me while we fuck"

There are better ways to show she's a sapio!

I think Nolan would like to think there are expressionist/surrealist influences driving some of his movies, but he's bad at what he does so it just comes across as all because the lady loves milk tray mystery man bullshit.

his aesthetic sense is really uninteresting to me, he would make really good Gillette razor ads though

Arkham's razor

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.

"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/

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

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

― The Ned Wedding (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, December 9, 2023 1:51 AM (

omg

Nolan is interesting in that, like Aronofsky, he's made one of my favourite movies (Dunkirk, Black Swan), one of my least favourite movies (Batman 3, Requiem For A Dream), and two weird kinda-bad movies that I adore despite myself (The Prestige, The Fountain)

Dunkirk in particular has my favourite Zimmer score, it's such an amazing thing. I had high hopes for Oppenheimer's score and I enjoy it on the OST (which I listened to several times before seeing the film) but didn't enjoy it to picture

I had forgotten to watch Oppenheimer in theaters, but I saw about half of it the other night and ... it's OK. I sort of admire the way most scenes are barely snippets, all kind of stitched together as fleeting bite-sized nuggets. That's got to take some effort (in the script, in the editing bay) to construct. On the other hand, it has been amusing that in lieu of storytelling those mini scene nuggets are often little more than compact platforms for narrative dump dialogue. Again, only halfway, and it's fine, but it feels like there's barely been any acting *between* people, just scenes with one or two or a bunch of people together where someone says or tells someone the one important thing - per fgti, the wikipedia beat - and then the movie quickly moves on.

I suppose these are all elements of what sets it apart from more boilerplate biopics, but maybe the more traditional Hollywood "drama!" moments are coming up in the back half.

the least interesting half

i do think the scene of oppy hallucinating at the podium is really excellent

Yeah the sound design on that sequence is very cool, the weird disembodied scream interruption was great

Oh also, Emily Blunt is just the greatest, isn’t she?!

(This is where I just add that of course I like fgti's new handle there.)

Emily Blunt’s final scene is arguably my favorite in the movie.

The testimony or the cold look at Heller?

@ Ned: :)

The cold look at Heller.

When Strauss finds he’s lost the nomination due to three senators’ votes, with his aide pointedly highlighting JFK as one of the three, was that meant to suggest Strauss’ vindictiveness meant he was involved at Dallas? Or more a “another mistreated American hero” parallel with Oppenheimer? Felt like a strange personal aside, like showing the gloves drowning Jean.

idk i think it’s just more “random historical fact”, generational timelines crossing etc

like jfk can just be a guy in this instance, his name doesnt necessitate conspiracy klaxons at every mention yknow

Nolan leaving the door open for a sequel imo

Ploppenheimer

I thought this was pretty good. Agree the first half is better, think the second half gets a little too movie-y in its beats and bombast, but in the end I appreciated Nolan's ambitions and grandiosity. It helps that Murphy seems like he is being eaten alive from the inside out from the the first moment on, a good example of an actor truly embodying a character (imo) vs. many of the people playing more familiar Hollywood dress-up around him. I liked the score, too, especially a bit before the first big test when it sounds like the crackling of a geiger counter. Unless that was just my speakers.

Murphy's is one of the better Hollywood biopic transformations. His relative anonymity as a star -- not an actor -- helpe dtoo.

When Strauss finds he’s lost the nomination due to three senators’ votes, with his aide pointedly highlighting JFK as one of the three, was that meant to suggest Strauss’ vindictiveness meant he was involved at Dallas?

I took it to suggest that was the progressive stance

its to let us know the good guys are against strauss who is a bad guy booooo

lol yeah exactly.

haha yes in other words

I feel you guys are underestimating the extent to which it’s there just for Nolan to get his corny “one of the holdouts was an upstart young senator from Massachusetts. His name…? HMS titanic” moment

(One of several very big at-not-with laughs in my screening)

The guy’s scripts are always so asinine

Yeah, I saw a comedian talking about "Oppenheimer" being so over his head until he gets the JFK reference at the end, and then he and the other guy in the theater were like that Leo DiCaprio "I recognize that!" meme.

I assume the script is out there, I wonder what it looks like? There are barely any scenes more than a couple of minutes long, is it just a million scenes?

I feel you guys are underestimating the extent to which it’s there just for Nolan to get his corny “one of the holdouts was an upstart young senator from Massachusetts. His name…? HMS titanic” moment

(One of several very big at-not-with laughs in my screening)

― Boris Yitsbin (wins), Wednesday, December 13, 2023 9:53 AM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The guy’s scripts are always so asinine

― Boris Yitsbin (wins),

In that document

BAPOW!

lay the Vietnam War.

I assume the script is out there, I wonder what it looks like? There are barely any scenes more than a couple of minutes long, is it just a million scenes?

― Josh in Chicago,

I got the script as part of the screener package and, well, yeah.

320 Short Films about Robert Oppenheimer

the movie is a three-hour montage, basically

I didn’t know who Heller was until I watched the film!

Wait, which one was Heller?

Teller?

Yes!

Just watched this last night and thought it was FANTASTIC

Possibly the best performance I’ve seen from Matt Damon in years

Also I’m pretty sure RDJ is winning an Oscar

Alas.

Richard D James?

Variety reporting that he's looking at possibly remaking The Prisoner next.

The TV show? Sure, I can see that.

The opening sequence of a depressed Oppenheimer dreaming of colorful waves, clouds of atomic particle clusters, black holes etc. was so clunky and embarrassing.

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

― The Ned Wedding (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, December 9, 2023 1:51 AM

this was a really good thread iirc

robert bowney jr should have taken off

The opening sequence of a depressed Oppenheimer dreaming of colorful waves, clouds of atomic particle clusters, black holes etc. was so clunky and embarrassing

I thought this was the best part of the movie

the best part of the movie was when he abandoned his daughter and we were supposed to feel sorry for him or something

i dunno were we tbh

the best part of the movie was matt damon delivering a project on time for the public money spent, and josh hartnetts wool suits

What I despised most about this abomination was the plodding pomposity of the thing, the self-identification of it being a Great Movie. It has no poetry, no lift-off. Every emotional response is signposted for the viewer. Every line of the script thuds onto the screen like a dead fish. Not a morsel of insight could be gleaned, and worst of all it's 3 hours long. It's a dull, stupid person's idea of Important Art. 1/10, would not watch again.

But did you like it?

The end credits were a great relief, I enjoyed them

Do we not have a thread or poll for Greatest Disappointing Filmmakers?

I feel like I need the opportunity to wrestle whether Nolan or PTA gets my vote for driving me insane with their utter garbage everyone else seems to have a hardon for

The only way Nolan could disappoint me is if I somehow ended up liking one of his boring as fuck garbage movies

Well he hasn’t disappointed us in years either, think the last time we watched anything of his was Inception, maybe a better poll title would be “Big Name Filmmaker Whose Work Always Gets Rave Reviews From Friends Of Yours And Then You Feel Like A Hater Despite Being Completely Correct”

Darren Aronofsky
Nicolas Winding Refn
Denis Villeneuve
Wes Anderson
Gaspar Noé
Luca Guadagnino

all candidates for such a list

I feel like I need the opportunity to wrestle whether Nolan or PTA gets my vote for driving me insane with their utter garbage everyone else seems to have a hardon for

― trm (tombotomod)

Every PTA film is garbage?

Guadagnino is way more fun than any of the filmmakers mentioned.

For context's sake, my list of the filmmakers whose work I look forward to watching, even the disappointments:

Claire Denis
Todd Haynes
Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Park Chan-wook
Olivier Assayas
Greta Gerwig
PTA
Kelly Reichardt
Christian Petzold
Alain Guiraudie

"Most disappointing" to me implies strong love of early material and then a string of disappointments, yet you still show up hoping it can be as good as the early stuff. I dunno if there's anyone working right now that I have that relationship with tbh.

On a lower stakes level though Ben Wheatley would be a name to raise? His acclaimed work is iirc mostly despised by ILX too but even if you're a hater you would expect him to end up somewhere less abject than "netflix Rebecca" (no unkind words about Meg 2 from me ofc).

Kill List is pne of my favourite films if the decade, but I haven't been excited for a Ben Wheatley film im years

sometimes if you fall far enough the impact makes all your good films terrible too

Both of the 2025 Wheatley films sound at least potentially interesting.

a field in england is incredible

most pta movies likewise

tbh i think nolan is out on his own here

Darren Aronofsky
Nicolas Winding Refn
Denis Villeneuve
Wes Anderson
Gaspar Noé
Luca Guadagnino

all candidates for such a list

Agreed!

mcdonagh as offered earlier

The opening sequence of a depressed Oppenheimer dreaming of colorful waves, clouds of atomic particle clusters, black holes etc. was so clunky and embarrassing

I thought this was the best part of the movie

― ryan, Sunday, 2 November 2025 bookmarkflaglink

You might be right.

Anyway I did like about an hour of this. Its a bit like Lucius in the Batman movies where he is building something cool for the Bat to use.

I am still half hour from the end but I can't say I care about Oppie's security clearance.

Also really funny watching this in the era of AI data centre build.

I enjoyed Oppenheimer better the second viewing at home when the hopped-up montage style was more familiar and less oppressive. I still wish Oliver Stone's gift for editing and purploid dialogue had been applied here.

What I despised most about this abomination was the plodding pomposity of the thing, the self-identification of it being a Great Movie. It has no poetry, no lift-off. Every emotional response is signposted for the viewer. Every line of the script thuds onto the screen like a dead fish. Not a morsel of insight could be gleaned, and worst of all it's 3 hours long. It's a dull, stupid person's idea of Important Art. 1/10, would not watch again.

Hot damn, you summarized my feelings so precisely with this, bravo! All my partner and I could do for a couple days after watching this movie was complain about it and the time wasted.

I still wish Oliver Stone's gift for editing and purploid dialogue had been applied here.

― The Luda of Suburbia (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 3 November 2025 bookmarkflaglink

I think not showing what the bomb did in Japan was bad (maybe its in the last half hour). A high profile film like this should show it.

This was like project management: the film, but not to build some shitty application. It kinda showed how we can get together to build solutions. It felt sorta sad that we never got to do this enough for climate change.

Crappenheimer

Kitty was actually p good as the exasperated wife.

Has anyone posted this? I think it's a) perfect b) hilarious and c) exactly how Michael Mann would have ended the movie.

https://bsky.app/profile/coreyatad.com/post/3m4ylr4hdk22a

Lol

I watched this on a plane, which - despite the miniscule screen - is probably the ideal place to see a movie like this - you are desperate for escapism and have zero distractions. I also went in with very low expectations. I'd only seen two Nolans prior to this - one of the Batmans (don't remember which one) and Dunkirk - both of which I found just kind of ok. But having said that, I enjoyed the movie more than I thought I would. Probably my favorite of the 3 Nolans I've seen.

lol at the Linkin Park ending