A One Mann’s Movies review of “Oppenheimer” (2023).
The “Barbenheimer” tag for this week’s releases is slightly bonkers since you could hardly imagine two more different films than “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”! Both have been packing cinema screens this weekend (hooray!).
“Barbie” was surprisingly good. But, having had disappointments from Nolan (“Dunkirk“, I’m specifically looking at you here!) I was keeping my emotional powder dry on this one. But I needn’t have worried. For it is an utterly gripping biopic, and three hours have not sped by so fast for me at the cinema in a long time.
Bob the Movie Man Rating:
Plot Summary:
Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a womanising, left-wing physicist who is a genius at theoretical physics. With World War II in progress, he is tasked by his Army boss Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) with establishing the team at Los Alamos to build and test the world’s first atomic bomb. But with a communist witch-hunt in play, Oppenheimer’s politics are continually being questioned, both before and after the war.
Certification:
UK: 15; US: R. (From the BBFC web site: “Strong language, sex”.)
Talent:
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, Jason Clarke, Tom Conti, Alden Ehrenreich.
Directed by: Christopher Nolan.
Written by: Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin.
Twitter Handle: #OppenheimerFilm.
Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh. Pugh gets close…. but she’s not adding to her “2023 Orgasm Oscar” nominations in this film! (Source: Universal Pictures).
“Oppenheimer” Review:
Positives:
- The structuring of the film is brilliant. The film plays primarily across two different timelines – before/during the war and after the war. We are introduced to these sections up-front by Nolan as “1. Fission” and “2. Fusion”. Peversely (but brilliantly and against expectation), the more modern aspects are filmed in stark black and white compared with the full colour of the earlier scenes. I’ve seen some comment that the last 45 minutes of the film “dragged”. But, for me, this was the exact opposite. These scenes – reflecting the appeal hearing about Oppenheimer’s security clearance (it sounds trivial!) and the senatorial hearing to approve Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) as US Secretary of Commerce – were the most gripping aspects of the film for me and a true cinematic tour de force. It allows some of the actors, especially Rami Malek and Emily Blunt who to that point have been given very little to do, a chance to shine.
- Cillian Murphy, who must be in at least 95% of the shots in the movie, delivers an absolutely blistering performance as Oppenheimer. A post-Hiroshima scene where he is speaking to his acolytes at Los Alamos, but imagining a whole lot more, is a stunning piece of acting (and a stunning piece of film-making). Surely an Oscar nomination for Best Actor is assured here?
- Also utterly mesmerising is Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss. I’d read that Downey Jr. was in the film but I actually audibly gasped when I suddenly realised that the character of Strauss, who I’d seen in both the massively over-played trailer and for at least 10 minutes of the film, was actually played by him! He is almost unrecognisable! But, boy oh boy, what a performance. He’s been nominated for two Oscars before (for “Chaplin” in lead and “Tropic Thunder” in supporting). This is surely a third, and – who knows – perhaps a win.
- The rest of the extensive cast do a knockout job too. Gary Oldman’s cameo is great; Emily Blunt (again, difficult to recognise in the role) delivers as always, particularly in the final scenes; Florence Pugh again delivers, with another risqué performance that her Mum and Dad will squirm at! And there are a whole host of other famous names scattered around delivering neat cameo performances: Tom Conti; Matthew Modine; Scott Grimes; Matthias Schweighöfer (I think he played Heisenberg, but I’m uncertain**); Josh Hartnett; Dane DeHaan….
- Aside from the sound balance (see below), the sound design here is awesome. During many sequences, the cinema woofer speakers were actually making my whole seat vibrate! It was like 1974’s “Earthquake” all over again! (Is it a contractual thing that cinemas are only allowed to play Nolan films if the sound system is turned up to 12?).
- Ludwig Göransson’s score is suitably epic, and played at ear-splittng volume. Another Oscar nomination?
** A joke for the physicists in the audience there.
Negatives:
- The sound balance…. again! Why can’t Nolan get this right? Just as in “Tenet“, at times Ludwig Göransson’s music and the sound effects completely drowned out the dialogue. Nolan himself co-wrote the dialogue…. does he want noone to hear it?? In many ways this movie might have won an Oscar for ‘Sound’ (and who knows, it might still). But now that the ‘sound mixing’ and ‘ sound editing’ Oscars have been combined, I really couldn’t support that since the mix is just so terrible.
- I was dreading seeing how Nolan would reflect the bomb explosion through ‘practical effects’ alone. And, I thought he did a pretty good job. But I still don’t think it completely looked the part and more CGI would have helped.
Summary Thoughts on “Oppenheimer”
A Nolan film tends to be a cinematic event and this one did not disapppoint in the slightest for me. (For once the illustrious Mrs Movie Man alse concurs.) The subject matter of the film is utterly thought-provoking. How did Oppenheimer live with what he had created and the innocent lives that he took? Did he, through making the Japanese bombs possible, shorten the war and ultimately save more lives than he took? Why was Nagasaki necessary after Hiroshima? The film (intelligently) doesn’t really take sides, and lays out the history for you to ponder on. Having visited Hiroshima, and the Japanese museum there, there are definitely still many different sides to the argument.
I also have an interesting personal family connection to Hiroshima. My Dad, who was with the RAF during the war, was stationed at one point a few miles away from Hiroshima a few months after the bomb. He undertook fly-overs of the city to assist with reconstruction efforts. Here are some short extracts from his autobiography “As Time Flies By”:
We were to be stationed at the Japanese army air base of Iwa Kuni, which was about six miles to the west of Hiroshima. The route from the carrier to the shore took us close to that city but at first I had difficulty in picking it out. The first intimation I had was the shape of the quays of the harbour sticking out into the sea. There was a tall concrete structure sticking up like a tombstone and, all around it, utter devastation.
The barracks we occupied were warm and comfortable. There were no Japanese men in evidence. Presumably the soldiers and airmen stationed there had been discharged to their homes by the occupying authorities. But Japanese women carried out domestic duties. It was remarkable how friendly these women were towards us. Some may well have lost their men-folk during the war and devastated Hiroshima lay only a few miles away.
I made only four flights from Iwa Kuni, providing an aerial observation facility for planners engaged in reconstruction projects.
A party of about six of us made one visit to Hiroshima. It was about nine months since the bomb and life was beginning to stir among the ruins. A few people were living in the cleared out cellars of ruined houses. We witnessed one extraordinary and terrible sight of a party of about twenty ten year old girls, in school uniform, with their faces bandaged, each evidently blind and with one hand on the shoulder of the child to her front, being led from one basement to another. It was the uniforms that got to me as well as the blindness. The Japanese are a truly remarkable people, as has been amply demonstrated in the past half-century.
“As Time Flies By”, James Frank Mann.
Grim stuff, but Nolan has produced a devestatingly brilliant overview of the controversial man’s life and work and this is a MUST SEE. I’m sure it will have competition (not least from Scorsese’s upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon”) but I’m sure you can expect to hear the word “Oppenheimer” repeated many many times in the next set of Oscar Nomimations.
By the way, on a far more trivial note, if like me you were racking your brains as to where you think you have seen Magnuson, the Chairman of the ‘Strauss Committee’, before…. he is Gregory Jbara. Still lost? He was Joey Tribbiani’s poor fellow contestent in The Pyramid Game in that classic episode of “Friends”!
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Trailer for “Oppenheimer”:
The trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KD8JwDmMFA .
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