Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)

gmisk

Box office crossed 500m, impressive.

Predicted to hit over 550m by end of this weekend.

Cluedo Monopoly

Saw it tonight. Superb. Absolutely gripping. I thought they could have showed some visuals from the Japanese attack but other than that it was very very well made. Fast moving and didn't feel like 3 hours. The whole cast were exceptional.

One minor thing for me - I couldn't help but think of Oldman's Churchill when Truman was talking.

bejeezus

It was a great film, with outstanding acting but it wore me out !! The film considers the impact of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer’s possible communist sympathies, the Second World War and and so on ( and on and on). Did anyone just coMe out exhausted, in an existential crisis mode- much like Barbie in the eponymous film. Maybe I’m just frigging stupid.

weadick

Was really looking forward to this I like most of Nolans films but this was just dull and very disappointing. Fell asleep around half way through.

Greyfox

Just watched it now and a bit disappointed considering the hype. Cant fault anybodys acting and certainly Cillian Murphys best performance of his career but ultimately found Oppenhimer's story less interesting than I thought it would be. I understand they were showing things from Oppenhimer's point of view but I still think showing brief scenes of Hiroshima/Nagasaki would of made for a better film.

The Black Oil

A lot of care in this impressive projectionist's video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Gkd76pP3A

cdgalwegian

Damn Nolan's arrogance. Since Memento he has wanted to make films that need a rewatch to fully appreciate the depth and density of his creations for them to be fully understood and appreciated (so not referring to the Batman films), through varying mixtures of complexity, and postmodern film-making techniques, and where its the nuances that turn out to be the centre of gravity.

The trouble has been that he has increasingly tended to over-emphasize at least one of these elements, so their depth and density makes the elements - especially complexity - unpalatable, and so unlikely to inspire a rewatch to fully understand or appreciate it. Unlike all his other films, I still haven't mustered up the time and energy to rewatch Inception, even though I want to. I was enthralled by Oppenheimer, mesmerized, but felt afterwards that it was just a fantastic spectacle; a really well put together story of incredible significance, which deserved to be brought to the screen by a writer-director with such vision.

It wasn't overly complex, though did suffer a little from the quick-fire character introductions (necessary because of its history), and the postmodern techniques were scaled right back, so the depth and density were perfecly manageable and appreciated. For me, having been drawn into the history of it after watching it, the film demands a rewatch on the subtleties and nuances of its centre of gravity; where despite the existential crisis of possible global nuclear war,

Spoiler Warning

the film spins on the pettiness of Oppenheimer and Strauss. Nolan portrays the film as from Oppenheimer's first-person perspective, but it's really about the alternating narcissistic perspectives of these unlikable people.

That's why the last segment has a JFK-style court-room feel to it, and why it was so necessary for it to be there. Damn Nolan's arrogance; I'm gonna have to rewatch this again, but unlike Inception, which I want to rewatch only because I need to unravel the complexity at an intellectual level, I look forward to rewatching this for all its marvellous storytelling and subtleties, aided by fantastic acting.

Relax brah

Honestly it’s up there with one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

Cillian Murphy’s finest performance, he will get an Oscar for that. He deserves a homecoming or sort of fuss, Ireland should be so proud of what he has achieved. I feel he doesn’t get the credit over here that he truly deserves.

10/10 - Cillian made it.

johnny_ultimate

A well-considered piece here IMO on the film's choice of perspective and Nolan's choice not to show the bombings themselves or the aftermath.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-08-11/oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-hiroshima-nagasaki-christopher-nolan

We can certainly imagine a version of “Oppenheimer” that tossed in a few startling but desultory minutes of Japanese destruction footage. Such a version might have flirted with kitsch, but it might well have satisfied the representational completists in the audience. It also would have reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a piddling afterthought; Nolan treats them instead as a profound absence, an indictment by silence.

bejeezus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120966206#Comment_120966206

I like this analysis. I think it paints the bombings as a void that cannot be fully comprehended by the human mind. It is the ‘great absence’, more vivid than a paltry reenactment.

bejeezus

Anyone want to take on the discussion re the representation of women in Nolan’s epic? See it written about in the Irish Independent today.

~Rebel~

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120968685#Comment_120968685

At this stage he’s fairly famous for his inability/disinterest in writing women as rounded characters. Emily Blunt does an exceptional job with what she’s given here.

bejeezus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120968970#Comment_120968970

Yeah. When we watched it, my friend, who has no interest in feminism whatsoever, said that there was a lot of time spent focused on men arguing.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120968970#Comment_120968970

Blunt deserves an award just for making a rice-paper thin character work, and speaks to her ability as an actor either way. Mrs Oppenheimer was a phenomenally thinly written entity, I kept waiting for something, anything beyond "she's a lush". And even that had no baring on events.

Nolan can't write a female character worth a damn and as trendy as it may be to crib about it amongst social media, it's also true. Coop from interstellar probably as rounded as they've got, the rest mostly props.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969083#Comment_120969083

Is she any more thinly written than many of the other satellite characters in the film though?

growleaves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969083#Comment_120969083

He should hire somebody else to write the female characters then.

David Mamet wrote an essay about how few men writers were good at writing women characters well and approvingly cited John O'Hara, John Le Carré and Tolstoy as ones who could (which I agree with) and cited Tennessee Williams as a failure in this regard.

Tony EH

Are women any better at writing male characters?

~Rebel~

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969135#Comment_120969135

Plenty of men are good at writing women, plenty of women are good at writing men. Nolan specifically is bad at writing women.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969116#Comment_120969116

No, but it is a recurring thing with Noland's scripts that her absence of character was more noteworthy than others; this was a good chance to correct that much commented cliché of the director's writing, as I daresay Blunt's character had an interesting perspective - we just never got it. Surely of all the nearest people in Oppenheimer's orbit, the wife could have added some important rejoinder to the broader narrative.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969119#Comment_120969119

This is why it's important to have collaboration and other perspectives in writing and elsewhere; cos while I don't think Nolan is being malevolent or intentional it's obviously a blind spot that he can't see how incapable he is at writing female characters (and of course, he hasn't written all his own movies so there's that caveat too)

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969206#Comment_120969206

Agreed on the first part. But I see it often that male writers are hauled over the coals for being "bad" writers of women.

On the second part, I don't think he's that good a writer of male characters either.

~Rebel~

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969116#Comment_120969116

she wasn’t a satellite character though. She has significantly more screen time than most. Probably in the top 4 for screen time.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969219#Comment_120969219

I think Nolan tends to write his movies around a singular character. This will, inevitably, mean that other characters will tend to come and go in that character's life, as it were. As for Blunt's character in 'Oppenheimer', the film isn't about her...and to delve deeper into her perspective would end up being detracting. Just like it would if it delved deeper into Leo Szilard's perspective or Edward Teller's or Lawrence Grove's. There was a lot of people in Oppenheimer's orbit that would have been interesting to see fleshed out. But then you'd have a 10 hour movie.

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969223#Comment_120969223

She's a satellite character to the main character. It's a biopic and that's generally what happens.

Jack Daw

Brilliant film. 3 hours long but it doesn't feel like it.My only minor quibble is that I think the wrapping up of the story at the end with the various tribunals could have had 15 minutes or so shaved off it but it was an engrossing film throughout.Brilliant performances by Cillian Murphy and you'd fancy he would have a good shot at winning the Oscar for his performance in this.Great performances from Matt Damon and Robert Downey Junior also, Emily Blunt was very good aswell.

Really gave you a feel that Oppenheimer was an interesting well rounded person with varied interests and not a complete nerd (like I expect physicists to be).There were some moments of humour in the film aswell which I didn't expect.

~Rebel~

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969246#Comment_120969246

Ok… well if we’re calling everyone beyond Oppenheimer himself a satellite character then it seems a bit of a pointless classification.

she’s an important character, with a lot of screen time, and is the one emotional outlet to play off the lead, so as such should be far more fleshed out and developed than she is. Emily Blunt was absolutely pulling up trees with her performance to find some depth there.

sydthebeat

On the female characters... This is the era of 20s-50s. Female characters were written pretty much as they were treated back then.

And still, Blunts taking apart of Jason Clarke is absolutely one of the stand outs of the movie and a testament of the power of the "woman behind the man".

How much of it was Blunt and how much of it was Nolan is up for debate...

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969271#Comment_120969271

Perhaps. But, again, if he's going to flesh out characters other than the main character in his, already long running biopic, we end up with an even more bloated running time.

As I said a few pages back, this subject is probably more suited to a mini series than a movie. Because, inevitably, you're going to get cuts here and there, and that will include character. For instance, I think the likes of Leo Szilard is an infinitely more interesting and important character in the story of Robert Oppenheimer than his Mrs. and he's reduced to a come and go figure in the movie of relatively little consequence.

D-Lo Brown

Really loved this. Flew by.

~Rebel~

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969300#Comment_120969300

She has lots of screen time - she doesn’t need more time to be fleshed out, she just needed to be written better in the time she’s already on screen.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969242#Comment_120969242

It's not about her no, but given the film did explore the Myth of Oppenheimer as much as the man, the absence of a more ... I dunno, robust perspective of the man's domestic life felt limp. I kept thinking it was about to, mind you; there were little moments of Kitty that suggested we might get this pivot - but it never came. Her big speech in the hearing was good, but it kinda came from nowhere.

Maybe more succinctly: had she been written out of the movie, I don't think anything would have been missing - where as his scientific colleagues rivalries would have been intrinsic to the Manhatten aspect. It nearly would have been better had Kitty just been left out.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120969293#Comment_120969293

I think what modern retrospection over historical periods has shown, it's that while women might have been ignored or second class citizens they still have stories - and often.made their own contributions to their various fields. There's no point setting these things - not necessarily Oppenheimer but general historical fiction - during a given period if it can't throw some light on perspectives beyond the obvious or predominant authority. Otherwise you don't get genuinely fascinating stories like those from "Hidden Figures" and the female "computers" who worked at NASA. To take an example from science history.