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Oppenheimer

by 30 Comments

Year: 2023
Director: Christopher Nolan

Unless I’ve missed it, I don’t think anyone has attempted a review of this so far, so I thought I’d start the ball rolling. I don’t have a massive amount to say about the film, but I’ll give you a brief run through of my thoughts.

The basic background to this is that it’s a biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, the slightly eccentric individual who was in charge of the Manhattan Project. He had a bit of a moral crisis after his work led to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (although I understand in real life his change or heart was maybe a bit more complex and ambiguous than is portrayed here), and then in the 50s he was blacklisted and victimised under the McCarthy communist witch-hunt stuff.

In the hands of a traditional, safe director it might have made a dull but worthy straightforward story. In the hands of Christopher Nolan, as expected, you get something a bit different. Opinions will vary (and it certainly seems to have gathered a few fans and ecstatic critics) but personally I didn’t think it quite worked.

At the heart of it, the reason is simple and easily stated. It’s boring. I know Nolan has his shortcomings, but I’ve always been happy to defend him to an extent. I think Dunkirk is his finest achievement, and in that he managed to convey a relatively straightforward story in a compelling and involving way, with his trademark overlapping timelines and orchestration of tension. He tries the same thing with Oppenheimer and (for me) it just doesn’t work: the story (condensed and simplified as it is) is much too sprawling to contain, and he loses track of the details and forgets to take his audience with him.

We get parallel timelines unfolding both before and after the Manhattan Project. It’s probably the storylines in the 50s I’m most dissatisfied with. There are lots of tense interviews in tense rooms with lots of tension… but Nolan seems to forget to tell you as the audience what we’re supposed to be tense about. He borrows liberally from the cinematic language of things like 12 Angry Men, but you don’t really know who the men are or why they’re angry. And it all seems to trivial in the end: for all intents and purposes it seems to boil down to a professional tiff with another scientist.

By comparison, all the stuff about the Manhattan Project, and the building of a secret, gated community in Los Alamos to build an atom bomb before the Nazis, is truly tense and really well done. It’s a fascinating story, and has all the moral ambiguity and scientific conflict stuff you need in a film. The bit when they actually come to test the bomb, is absolutely spine-tingling and perhaps the finest 10 minutes of cinema you will see this year.

Cillian Murphy is as terrific as you would expect as Oppenheimer himself. I thought at first he was trying to copy Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth (skinny, alien, big hat, beatific eyes…) but then you see what the real Oppenheimer looked like and you realise that’s who Bowie was channeling in the first place.

In the end I was left craving a 90 minute film with just the Los Alamos stuff, with the bomb testing as the climax and maybe a short coda years later covering his fall from grace. And even if it had to be a long film, I was reminded of Laurence of Arabia which managed to be long but still relatively simple and covering only the essential parts of our anti-hero’s life. Here, Nolan seems to want to eat his cake and have it: he has a massive cast of terrific actors (EVERYONE is in this, and I mean EVERYONE) and the freedom to do what he wants, but he just doesn’t know how to claw it back and create a simple, cinematic story.

For all those people who complain about muffled dialogue in Nolan films, you won’t find any respite here. The soundtrack absolutely booms with very few quiet moments, and I would say about 40% of the dialogue was incomprehensible to me. Not a problem with something like Dunkirk which relies more on movement and action, but Oppenheimer is one of his most talkiest films so muffled dialogue is simply unforgivable.

One last criticism: slow it down with the frantic cuts and jumps, Nolan. He’s starting to turn into Michael Bay where everything is cut super fast like a trailer. Take a look at Paul Thomas Anderson or even Kubrick to see how to just let a camera linger for a few minutes. (In the few instances where he DOES let the camera linger in Oppenheimer, it’s truly beautiful – it’s fantastically shot, we just don’t get a chance to stop and appreciate it).

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

I’m not really sure what this is like. I don’t know. The only that springs to mind is something like Tarkovsky or Bergman, where film becomes a kind of endurance test. If you likes P T Anderson’s The Master, you might like the aesthetic of this (vibrant 40s/50s colours and immaculate era styling), but that quality of style clashes with the constant cutting and pumping music.

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Comments

  2. Thanks very much for the review. I’m not particularly interested in the film – I feel like I’ve read enough about the Manhattan Project and don’t need a 3-hour rehash of it, as spectacular as it might be – but I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one here who finds Nolan’s approach to dialogue confusing.

    I know his usual sound team is among the best in the business, with awards all over the shop, so clearly it’s a deliberate artistic choice and not human/technical error that sometimes makes his cast sound like they’re whispering in the middle of a hurricane or down a well.

    Tom Hardy’s masked-up Bane was famously incomprehensible, and even after Nolan was persuaded to make his dialogue clearer, I still need subtitles to really understand him. There is also a scene in Tenet where the key characters are discussing what turns out to be important points while whizzing about on a boat. With all the noise around them, it’s nigh impossible to make out a word they say.

    When criticised, Nolan usually trots out a defence involving his art, or something along the lines of “that’s what the world really sounds like”. But to me that’s just implying his audience need to try harder.

    Yes, he’s made some very good films (though I find his obsession with time and time-jumping a bit wearying), but making your dialogue audible/understandable should be a minimum requirement. I might not follow everything his characters say (hello, Interstellar), but at least let me *hear* it.

    That said, I expect Oppenheimer will hoover up awards, and I’ll end up watching it eventually – at home, where I can switch on the subtitles.

  3. Not normally a big fan of films of this length, but I really enjoyed this and the 180 minutes flew by.

    Amazing to think that once the script was written and sold the whole thing went from pre-production to screen in a little over 18 months.

    As AC says above, Cillian Murphy was exceptional (as were Matt Damon and Robert Downey). Found the Gruaniad’s carping that the part of JRO should have gone to a Jewish actor instead of CM to be just fucking stupid.

    Not sure if I’m alone in this but there seemed to me to be a definite echo of Milos Foreman’s take on Mozart and Salieri in Nolan’s take on the clash between JRO and his nemesis, Lewis Strauss.

    Fine director though he is, I, too get really pissed off with Nolan’s slapdash approach to sound recording – surely the aural equivalent of subtitles that are impossible to read because they are too small or appear against a white background

    If anyone is really interested in the post-Hiroshima shennanigans that went on, there is an excellent Storyville docudrama called, IIRC, the Trial of Robert Oppenheimer on BBC iPlayer in which David Straitharn plays “the destroyer of worlds”

    • Found the Gruaniad’s carping that the part of JRO should have gone to a Jewish actor instead of CM to be just fucking stupid.

      Not sure The Grauniad did say that. I read Peter Bradshaw’s review and he said “Nolan, rightly or wrongly, uses non-Jewish actors for Oppenheimer and Einstein, two of the most famous Jewish people in history and in fact doesn’t quite get to grips with the antisemitism that Oppenheimer faced as an assimilated secular American Jew.
      It’s an interesting discussion, I think. I first noticed it when Russell T Davies was reported as saying that only gay people should play gay characters. Though I don’t think he actually said that. I think he said something about genuinely gay actors bringing more authenticity to the role. It might well be true. That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been brilliant performances of gay characters by straight actors, nor that only gay actors should be cast in gay roles. It simply means from his perspective as a gay screenwriter he sees a certain authenticity when the person really is gay. And that’s similar, I think, to what Bradshaw felt about Murphy’s casting.
      (I’m not convinced myself – after all, if straight actors had felt disinclined from playing gay roles we’d never have had Dirk Bogarde’s superb performance in Victim.)

    • I totally agree with the comparison with Amadeus: in fact I was just making that comparison to my son yesterday! He loved Oppenheimer, and I was saying it felt like it was TRYING to be Amadeus but not succeeding. The difference being that Amadeus clearly signalled the rivalry right from the start, and the whole film was centred around this. I thought Oppenheimer had nowhere near that level of clarity, and in fact the Robert Downey Jr scenes felt like a totally different film to the Manhattan Project stuff.

      Glad you liked it though. I can’t see myself giving it a rewatch any time soon I have to say.

  4. My measured take on the (very good) film…

    I’m so proud of myself for suppressing the huge temptation to shout “MATT DAMON!” whenever he appeared.
    Do I win a prize?

  5. I’m not particularly a fan of the kind of overblown film that Nolan produces, but I really enjoyed this. I liked the triple time frames, and the three hours flew by for me. Perhaps the one problem was that the film built up so much to the atomic bomb test and then the bombing of Japan that the film did then dip a little as it followed Oppenheimer in the following years. But some great performances, and a powerful soundtrack.

    Inevitably some have criticised it for not properly showing the horrific impact on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which simply demonstrates that some people think films are BBC news reports that are required to show some sort of objective balance as opposed to works of art that reflect a very specific perspective and tell a specific story. In this case the story is Oppenheimer, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nolan’s focus is on the age old question of science, and scientists’ moral responsibility. Do they keep pushing the boundaries of science irrespective of the potential consequences? Can they completely walk away from any moral accountability for those consequences?

    One criticism I have some sympathy for – there’s definitely a heavily male perspective brought to bear with Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt’s characters little more than cyphers (not the actors fault – they’re both excellent). And there was little evident narrative need for Pugh to have to sit through a couple of scenes naked, beyond the male director thinking it would look nice.

    • I am in the @Jaygee camp and thought the film was excellent. The court room scenes were captivating and portrayed very well that politicians of that time were duplicitous bastards – plu ca change.
      The scenes between Oppenheimer and Einstein especially the revelatory one at the end were excellent.
      What I didn’t realise is that when they were working on the project there was a possibility that their work could have caused a chain reaction capable of destroying the entire planet yet they forged ahead.
      Shows the pioneering spirit of Scientists in a different light and a little disturbing

      • @SteveT

        When you consider the proliferation of nuclear weapons that occurred in the decades after, the creation of the A bomb really did cause a chain reaction capable of destroying the whole world

  7. Gteat review, and echoes closely my thoughts too.

    I read the book and there’s a lot in there about the post-Manhattan Project hearing and reputational damage he suffered and hardly any that I can recall about the conflict with RDJ’s character. In fact that strand could easily have been left out. If it had been a story just about the race to build the bomb, with perhaps just a coda about the hearings, it would have been a lot less boring (and an hour shorter).

    As a footnote the Remi Malik character was a dramatic device standing in for the actual outrage felt in the scientific community about his treatment, but it’s hard to put that on screen, so I thought it fair enough.

  8. My only criticism of the film was the music – intrusive and ill thought out. I know it’s the Trinity Test; I don’t need that orchestral mess telling me that it’s a BFD.

    I’m not sure I agree about Blunt’s character being a cipher as Kitty. Out of the two of them, seeing how things were going, she was the one going down swinging.

    Of the rest…I think the issue with Los Alamos and the surrounding work is that there is just so much of it, editing it is a nigh on impossible task. Could or should Fermi have got more time – chain reaction! – yes. But what would you take out of it? Or just extend the running time?

    I reminded myself that this, essentially, the film adaptation of American Prometheus, which is a superb book, and is such is simply about Oppenheimer. It isn’t about Nagasaki or Hiroshima, but about one man.

    As a side note, if you’re interested in the Manhattan project, Richard Rhodes “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” – 25th anniversary edition – is the business.

  9. Thanks for the review. I seem to be one of the few people who thought Dunkirk was rubbish, so it’s good to know that I won’t be missing much by avoiding 3 hours of Nolan doing the atom bomb story. Will go see Barbie instead.

      • It was quite moving towards the end, but once again I think Nolan’s signature style worked against him. Supposedly he didn’t want to use FX to recreate the countless thousands of soldiers massed on the beach. So instead we have near-empty beaches and a lot of silence. The same applied to the dozens/hundreds of boats sent to rescue them. Instead we have Mark Rylance doing his usual diffident schtick and a handful of boats in an empty sea.

  10. Excellent review. We can’t say we weren’t warned. I plan to go but I’m wobbling now – muffled dialogue drives Mrs. T spare and the length puts me off. We’ll see. I confess I got a bit tired of CM in Peaky Blinders and never finished it so that’s a worry too.

    There’s an excellent Rest is History pod mini series on Oppenheimer BTW.

    • As someone who often struggles to hear dialogue in films/on TV nowadays (not age-related – I’ve always struggled to follow conversations in noisy pubs), I didn’t find the dialogue in Oppenheimer too muffled. I can only think of one occasion when I consciously thought I didn’t catch what they said.

      I did watch it in an Imax though, which was LOUD, but I have to say I thought the sound design of the film was incredible – one the best things about it, and I really liked the film. Despite being 3 hours long, it held my attention all the way through.

      • I agree with LightsOut. Tinnitus means I can struggle with muffled dialogue, but I found this perfectly clear (if loud) in a standard Odeon, and it is a dialogue heavy film.

      • Strange how opinions differ, isn’t it? To be honest, until now I never really agreed with the muffled dialogue criticisms of Nolan films, but this just seemed to take it to a new level.

        I also saw it in IMAX. Maybe I was just too close to the front or something, so the bass was too prominent? A lot of voices were very soft and bassy.

        • Have to say I agree with those above – there was one scene quite early on where I thought it was poor but generally I found the dialogue very clear. Unlike on the excellent Arrival, which I watched last night on Netflix, and resorted to putting the subtitles on.

  11. Just got back from watching it. Extremely good in all the important areas. Top notch acting and the soundtrack was excellent. I found the various timelines worked for me which isn’t always the case.

  12. Also just got back from watching it. Avoided all reviews beforehand. I agree completely with the original review @Arthur-Cowslip.

    Glad it’s not just me who struggled with hearing the dialogue. Inexcusable. The cinema I saw it in had massive bass response which mean the whole place was shaking at times and the music played over the dialogue, plus the poor recording/mixing of it made it mostly incomprehensible. Will watch again one day with subtitles.

    I also struggled with the non linear narrative and found the inquests less than compelling.

    Great acting in general, Murphy was superb, but I thought Downey Jr stole the film

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