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.)

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