Next month, the new film, Oppenheimer, will be released to theaters and it has me thinking something I don’t think often these days: I’m looking forward to going to the movies.
As a movie fan, that’s a strange thing to say. I used to love going to the theater and would often look forward to seeing new releases. That just isn’t the case lately.
I recently did a check of my local AMC Theater and saw half a dozen or more movies with bland, yet colorful posters with groups of people standing in formation, collectively beckoning you to sit through their often-bloated runtimes to the tune of $12 a ticket.
No thanks. A colorful poster and stacked cast isn’t enough to get me in the theater anymore.
I even have reservations about the new Indiana Jones film. I’ve been a fan of those movies since I was a kid – yes, even the much maligned fourth installment in 2008 where Indy met aliens at Area 51 – but this new movie looks like more CGI than real life characters and a bigness that seems out of touch with the franchise.
A new movie by a filmmaker that cares, one who thinks about his audience and makes the film for them is a reason to go to the theater.
Oppenheimer is stacking up to be one of those movies and its writer and director, Christopher Nolan, has taken steps to make that the case.
One news story about the making of the film touted the crew discovering how to film the detonation of the first atomic bomb “in-camera,” meaning not done with computer trickery after the fact but right there on the set.
Nolan, who is known for the scope of his films from the Dark Knight trilogy – the mid-2000s reimaging of Batman – to the science-fiction epics of Interstellar and, more recently, Tenet, thinks about his audience when he makes movies. And for him, that audience should be sitting in a theater, prepping for a full experience.
That is apparent in how the movie was shot and will be presented. Nolan decided to make the movie on 70mm film and in IMAX. Those formats allow that bigness to shine. A strip of 70mm film is nearly three times the size of the traditional 35mm film, which is what movies have always been shot on going back decades. The picture is literally larger as well as being a clearer, higher quality image.
Nolan has done IMAX before also, which not only allows the film to be projected on a movie screen more than twice the size of those at a standard multiplex, but it also allows for that image quality to far exceed other films. Current movies, whether shot on 35mm film (rare) or 4K-plus digital (more likely), are only screening at a 2-4K maximum. Additionally, 35mm film, while an analog product, translates to an image quality of about 5-6K in digital terms. The 70mm/IMAX combination will mean Nolan’s film will be able to be seen at an image quality nearly three times that resolution. Almost nothing we watch anywhere in daily life comes close to that level of image quality.
Beyond the technical specs, I look forward to a movie that explores a subject and time in history I have interest in: the building of the first atomic bomb. The movie tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project, the secret government plan during WWII to build the bomb. That decision not only changed the tide of the war, it changed the face of warfare for all time. That alone is worth sitting with.
I’m trying not to have to too high of expectations as the movie world has often dropped the ball. But this film seems to have a lot going for it and its director has a track record of delivering.
Please, Chris. Don’t let me down.
-Michael Williamson is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.