Movie Details
| Title: | Oppenheimer | |
| Director: | Christopher Nolan | |
| Year: | 2023 | |
| Genre: | Historical | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.03.23 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (8)
- Batman Begins
- The Dark Knight
- The Dark Knight Rises
- Dunkirk
- Inception
- Interstellar
- The Prestige
- Tenet
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.03.23 | Internet | The other half of the year's biggest weekend. There was a Paul Newman movie that I liked growing up called Fat Man and Little Boy. I probably liked it mostly because John Cusack was in it and there was a scene where he died from radiation poisoning (In that same morbid 80s-kid cold war fascination with nuclear radiation as Troma movies and the guy from Robocop falling in the chemical waste). But I remember the rest of the movie being pretty good as well although mostly from Newman's / General Graves' (Matt Damon's character here) perspective. What I was fearful of with this movie was that it would lean more biopic and have some childhood scenes with little J Bobby fascinated with grade school science experiments or whatever. What I got was much more centered around The Manhattan Project, only delving into backstory enough to give context to what would happen in New Mexico. This is good news to me. I quite liked this. Yes, there were still times where, listening with headphones, I couldn't hear Cillian Murphy's low voice or Robert Downy Jr's. low voice over the screaming strings of the score. And I can definitely see why so many summer movie-goers who believed the hype and queued up or even drove hours to see this in 70mm projection IMAX left scratching their heads at the lack of breath-taking explosions and maybe Japanese cities blowing up (especially since the poster is mostly the bomb on fire). I get that the state of the movie business is such that directors with clout like Nolan basically HAVE to champion the cause and try their damndest to get butts back in seats, but staring at Cillian Murphy's cheeks for 3 hours is not exactly the best use of the IMAX format. There's maybe 2 minutes of beautiful visual effects? And the score is great but blasting it in that theater must've been grating by the end. On home viewing though, where the film will live for 99% of its life, it's great. Jarrette tried to get my butt in a seat by saying it was a lot like Oliver Stone's JFK: a movie I love (arguably Stone's best movie, certainly in his top 5?). Unfortunately, I didn't see that from the trailers but now I definitely agree. Not just the color/black-and-white thing but mostly how there's a hell of a deep cast chock full of familiar faces and the movie saves itself with rapid-fire scenes and throwing so much information at you that you're constantly trying to keep up, identify who's on the screen, understand what they're talking about. I'll say not as revolutionary with using different film formats (even if they did "invent" black and white imax stock for this), but still satisfying in the same vein as Stone's film. It is a bit of a shame that this is like, one of some single-digit number of new movies this year that didn't rely on spectacle CGI superheroes or monsters. Back in 1991 I remember JFK's release being notable for its controversial content and longer-than-normal length but otherwise just another weekend. Now, when there's some actual good movie for adults it has to be sung to the heavens. So anyway... yeah. I liked it. Wish the dialogue was mixed a bit higher, but otherwise I thought it was very good. |
