Director: Christopher Nolan | Writer: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Emily Blunt
Oppenheimer is almost too big to fail. It was a pillar of this year’s cinematic landscape, a masterwork before it even came out, a cultural moment, alongside Barbie, that went beyond whether it was a good movie, bad movie, needed, or just an artist’s conceit. At some point, personal taste or opinions doesn’t even seem to matter; Oppenheimer is bigger than a Letterboxd review. With that said, and with the precursor that I gave this movie a solid rating, I still came away almost disappointed by a film I simply thought would be better. A three-hour emotional epic about a world-changing man created by one of the best director’s working *should* have been better; that it had so many obvious flaws was a real shock.
This is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Prometheus of atomic theory, the Father of the atomic bomb, and the man who may have destroyed the world trying to save it. He studied all over the world becoming a theoretical physicist, he brought those ideas back to the states, and began teaching in California, where the culture was ripe with Communism, unionization, and the rise of a working man. His left-wing leanings often got him in trouble, but Oppenheimer was a man of intelligence and unwavering principle, which is exactly why he was hired to head a secret project as the planet began its second World War. Tasked with building a weapon powerful enough to deter war forever, and before the Germans did, Oppenheimer created a team, a town in a desert, and a path to invention & victory, leading the United States and every government on Earth down a path toward a power that they could not possibly be ready for.
With almost too much to say about this film, I’ll first reiterate that Oppenheimer is so massive an idea, project, and success that it almost supersedes opinion and critique. It’s a movie of magnitude, a well-crafted cinematic experience, with a giant cast of talented actors, a global theme of danger, and a message to every one of us. That’s why I will rate this movie highly even while I point out what I didn’t like about it; it’s like the light-devouring, gravity-bloated stars that it references, a black hole of a film that’s simply too large to be understood completely. But I still have issues with it, and I think that’s still fair. Nolan isn’t a god, he’s a man, and humans make mistakes. That I think Oppenheimer is full of mistakes doesn’t mean I don’t respect it; I did, I do, and there are plenty of positives. Namely Murphy, who was phenomenal, the sound, which will bowl you over, and the ending, which wraps the story tightly and delivers it to our gaping mouths. But, again, it wasn’t perfect.
For one, the story focuses far too much on Communist movements before the war and the McCarthy era after the war. If I heard “were you a member of the Party?!” one more time I would have screamed aloud, and cutting that one line from the film would have saved about an hour off the run time. Read Oil! if you’re interested in the themes of the rise of the working class, it does the job much better. Secondly, and because of that focus, we didn’t get enough science, enough scramble to complete, enough Bomb in general. The Imitation Game shows how war and man can be balanced much better, and Nolan should have known how to accomplish that. Then there are the thousand side actors, whose names I don’t have room to write; Pugh was awful, Blunt was unnecessary, Downey Jr felt like his character was reading the book aloud, and every other named side guy just didn’t need to be there. I understand that it’s history, but Nolan tried to make this movie too many things at once, both a recounting of facts and a warning about our world, and he just didn’t find the perfect balance. Oppenheimer simply isn’t excellent, it’s not even top Nolan. It overwhelms, sure, and that’s impressive, the whole movie is, you will walk away impressed. But entertainment is still a fictional film’s first job, even biopics, which are probably the hardest genre pieces to get right; that razor-thin edge between tale and truth is so hard to walk. Although this movie is a massive accomplishment, it isn’t without real problems, and that’s too bad.
My rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆