Oppenheimer (Universal: 2023)

[DocM]

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

++++++++++

No CGI was used for the Trinity  explosion

Based on: American Prometheus by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

Date: July 21, 2023

Director: Christopher Nolan

Screenplay: Christopher Nolan

Cinematography: color for objective, B&W for subjective

CAST

J.  Robert Oppenheimer: Cillian Murphy

Kitty Oppenheimer: Emily Blunt

Gen. Leslie Groves: Matt Damon

Lewis Strauss: Robert Downey Jr.

Edward Teller: Benny Safde

Albert Einstein: Tim Conti

Harry S. Truman: Gary Oldman

Werner Heisenberg: Matthias Schweighöfer

Klaus Fuchs: Christopher Denham

 

[+rdlenk Subscriber²]

Saw it in 70mm IMAX today. Not really what I expected, and I can't say I was a big fan. I may have gone in with expectations too high since I have a fair amount of knowledge on the subject driven by a personal connection. Even past the screenplay though, the format of the movie was pretty strange too. Constant time skipping and lots of quick edits with multiple narratives\subplots happening at the same time. Nolan is all about messing with time and expecting the audience to keep up, which I have thoroughly enjoyed in his previous movies, but this whole movie kind of felt like a 3-hour long trailer for the documentary I probably would have rather watched.

[adam7288]

Hard disagree - it was a challenging yet rewarding watch.

[+rdlenk Subscriber²]

What is cool about opinions is that everyone can have one! Many to most will absolutely love this movie and that is super valid and awesome. There is no doubt of the talent and skill that went into the production and the 1000s of people that worked very hard to make it happen. The acting was superb, the effects (both practical and visual) were excellent and the artistry on display is second to none.

Personally though, it just wasn't for me. As an engineer I was more hoping for a movie that gets you excited about STEM and makes you experience the moral dilemmas of the military-industrial complex with some clever nodes to history and a compelling overall narrative. Something like The Imitation Game or even Nolan greats like Interstellar, The Prestige and Inception. Instead, we got the "Politicians are bad, communists are misunderstood, sexism only kind of existed in the 40s..." and an endless number of time skips forwards and backwards that sometimes weren't even connected with the previous scene. Not to mention an endless parade of characters many of which were only mentioned a few times and on screen for even shorter but were still key parts of the story the audience was supposed to be following.

A good example of how this story could have been told could be found in the TV series "Manhattan" that aired many years ago now. Had a lot of great actors that you stuck with through multiple seasons and understood their struggles. It had lots of nods to actual historical events and even a decent amount of humor and humanity. Several of the characters from that were fictional or sometimes based on real people but the purposely left out some of the biggest names like Groves and Oppenheimer as main characters. A movie with a similar tone as the show following the main players of the Manhattan Project is what I was hoping for from this movie but didn't really get. I will definitely be an outlier here, which is fine, but since it is a subject I am somewhat passionate about it isn't surprising that my expectations for it were too high and it probably couldn't have ever lived up to them.

[FloatingFatMan]

So, a question to those who've seen it.  Are they showing ACTUAL historical events, or Hollywood "historical events", a la Braveheart and the like...

[DocM]

On 24/07/2023 at 02:13, FloatingFatMan said:

So, a question to those who've seen it.  Are they showing ACTUAL historical events, or Hollywood "historical events", a la Braveheart and the like...

 

Nothing will be totally accurate. Nature of film, but they are working from a very good source in American Prometheus which won a Pulitzer Prize.

One of the better efforts was "Fat Man and Little Boy" (1989), named after the Trinity and Hiroshima devices, which were constructed differently (implosion and gun-type, respectively).

For brevity and drama it had a composite character, Michael Merriman (John Cusack), who portrayed several incidents during bomb development including the similar incidents involving Harry Daghlian (1945) and Louis Slotin (1946), who worked on the Demon Core.