Several weeks ago, I did a column about how I hadn’t been to the theater in months and that the release of Oppenheimer might just be the movie to bring me back.
With multiplex ticket prices up over $10 or $12, snacks that double that, and a list of releases that are less than inspiring, it was going to take something big, something important, something historic, something nuclear.
Oppenheimer was the obvious choice.
So, I did see the movie, although not in the 70mm, IMAX presentation I wanted to (I did see it in IMAX, however). And after that build-up of looking forward to its release all summer, I have this response for the film’s director, Christopher Nolan:
Chris, you…didn’t exactly let me down, but the movie wasn’t everything I hoped it would be.
Let me say, the movie is pretty good, probably better than most, but it’s not great, which is what I hoped for.
Maybe that’s my fault, putting unrealistic expectations on a film and filmmaker.
With it being a large scale blockbuster, made by a director I like, about a subject I’m very much interested in, set in a time period I very much enjoy learning about, I thought my response would just be bigger than that. At very least, I thought I would be completely entertained.
I was entertained, but only somewhat.
To recap, the film tells the story of famed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer who led the Manhattan Project – the secret government plan to build the atomic bomb – during World War II.
The movie stars Cillian Murphy, a strong actor to play the legendary scientist. The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-willing biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer from 2005.
While I haven’t read the book, I get the sense it’s fairly comprehensive given the film covers decades of complicated personal and professional events from Oppenheimer’s time at Cambridge to his marital affair to charges of communist sympathies. All great ingredients for a great story.
I will say the film is technically very well made. It looks wonderful and the attention to period detail (short of the 50-star American flag showing up in 1945, before all 50 states had been ratified) is fantastic. The acting is also great and it was wonderful to see Robert Downey Jr. back doing something that doesn’t involve comic books and superheroes.
The scene with the Trinity test, where the team explodes the first bomb in the New Mexico desert, is awe-inspiring and easily the film’s best sequence. It feels as big and important in the film, as it must have to that group of scientists who did it for real.
I suppose my problems mostly arose after this sequence as the final third of the film has Oppenheimer effectively standing trial for his beliefs, rather than staying in his head. In the aftermath of America dropping bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer starts feeling a lack of support for the country’s drive to build bigger bombs and is skeptical of handing over that power to the government.
It deals a bit with that guilt and what would be Oppenheimer’s lifelong wrestling with his role in the bomb’s creation.
Perhaps, for me, that’s what the film is missing; the human tragedy, the human drama, the weight of the decision to take hundreds of thousands of lives, even if it meant ending the war.
Years later, in response to his involvement with the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer famously quoted a passage from the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita, “Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Nolan called the movie’s subject matter the most “dramatic” thing he could think of and certainly make a film about.
I agree, but at the end of its three-hour runtime, it just wasn’t dramatic enough.
-Michael Williamson is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune