My first time in a movie theatre in 3 1/2 years.
Ok my movie maven amigo, your thoughts on Oppenheimer?
Me, I’m pretty close to this guy, whose takes usually leave me cold but here imo he hits quite a few nails on their heads. Checking out the reviews in Metacritic, I see that he and I are in the small minority: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/oppenheimer-is-ultimately-a-history-channel-movie-with-fancy-editing
Putting it more simply than he does, I kept looking at my watch, more bored than interested, though not totally bored and not totally uninterested. It’s just that one feeling persistently outweighed the other.
Why I like Brody’s review is because he, albeit wordily, says what my wife and I said more simply to each other after: we weren’t “feeling it”. I was presented with Oppie’s great dilemmas, moral qualms, inner conflicts, but I never felt them. To my senses, Cillian Murphy played him greyly, “wraith like”, as Brody aptly says.
Brody makes another point I like, pyrotechnics in place of getting inside Oppie’s torment: we’re never taken inside it, made to experience it, feel it. I wonder if it’s film’s version of the admonition in fiction—show, don’t tell, in film—show, don’t present?
There’s an irony here too that Brody doesn’t mention: instead of colourful pyrotechnics supposedly illuminating/illustrating the power of the atom bomb, why not show actual footage of the devastation and the human carnage that resulted from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What Nolan does is aestheticize and thereby anaesthetize the two bombs’ effects, which is, I think, uncourageous filmmaking by him.
I can take movies that run on too long but in the main are compelling. But when after the first hour of Oppenheimer, I’m looking at my watch frustrated that only an hour has gone by, I know it’s not working for me.
Brody’s score was 50/100. There’s enough in Oppenheimer to raise that to 65/100. For all that she was bored, my wife still gave it an 85. Go know. :-)
