Movie Review: Oppenheimer

Anyone attending any Christopher Nolan movie has to prepare themselves for rapid-fire flashback scenes, a story almost never told in sequence and far too often not as understandable as it should be. Most annoying, way too much non-stop background music – even during important dialogue. The lowest-rated Nolan movie was Tenet, released in September 2020, easily one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Interstellar, released in 2014 was a solid film about space, time travel, and some very well-done highly emotional scenes between a father and a daughter. However, the ending of Interstellar was so crazy and off the wall that it almost ruined the whole movie. Crazy, never seen before insane, will never mean good or great for any movie.

For as long as Nolan has been relevant in the movie industry as a directory it has seemed that he has always been far more interested in being very different, rather than very good.

Nolan’s new movie "Oppenheimer" is about one of the most important people of the 20th century, Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project that created the first Atomic Bomb. For a movie like this, I failed to understand why we needed 3 hours to tell this story, and non-stop loud background music throughout the entire film. Music like this, even during dialogue scenes gets old inside of 40 minutes. After 3 hours – enough already. After seeing this movie, which does have very good points, I would have much rather better directors like Steven Speilberg or Martin Scorsese direct this film, because I find so many of Nolan’s directing tendencies too annoying. For a story this important, just tell the story in sequence, with no unnecessary effects, and constant flashbacks that are all about being unique and not nearly enough about just telling the important story.

The best part about this film is the casting, which was perfect. Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer’s wife, Matt Damon as General Groves who recruits Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project, Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Straus, and Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s disturbed girlfriend. It was nice to see Josh Hartnett, in this major film as he has had a greatly decreased movie career in the last ten years. Florence Pugh had the most out-of-place crazy scenes in this entire film when she was suddenly nude on Oppenheimer’s lap during a flashback fantasy scene in a conference room when he was being interviewed by several politicians. This was another example of Nolan once again, just trying to surprise the audience with an out-of-the-blue scene that we have never seen before, that was all about being shocking and was completely out of place in this story.

The parts of the story that were told in logical sequence were mostly well done as was the acting throughout - with Cillian Murphy probably getting a nomination for a best actor Oscar this year. I was also very surprised that a movie about something this important in history had not been produced long before, now finally being produced and directed by the wrong director.

The final decisions that President Truman had to make to drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I did not believe were explored enough, given how extremely difficult ordering the death of over 220 thousand civilians to finally get Japan to surrender must have been for Truman. There is a scene with Oppenheimer and Truman where Truman calls him a crybaby, because of Oppenheimer’s guilt over the bombing of Japan. According to research on the internet, there is no evidence that this actually did happen. This is another example of Nolan throwing in something controversial and shocking rather than just telling an important historical story.

The remaining part of this film is all about the Politicians in Congress outrageously attacking Oppenheimer after the bombs were dropped, accusing him of being part of the Communist party and attempting trying to deflect the blame for killing so many people, away from the United States and the President onto Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer understandably went into years of depression, after the end of World War 2 – trying to rationalize that creating the atomic bomb ultimately saved more lives than it took, a fact that humanity will never know for certain. Oppenhiemer died in 1967 at only 62 in Princeton New Jersey of throat cancer.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Oppenheimer are too high 96%, with my rating of about 80%, due to the continuing and annoying movie-making practices that are always present in any Christopher Nolan film.