REVIEW:
Oppenheimer is artistic as hell, and very well-done. The music anbd editing are both equally thrilling. The scenes are quick paced and involve lots of rapid movement. What that means is, you get two characters in a scene, each one says a line, set to exciting music, and then we cut to the next scene. So this is very much a movie made for our time, or for the A.D.D. You tube Generation. And yet it’s also a 3 hour movie that employs black and white. I’m other words, it does and is everything, all at once (last years best picture winner.)
The reason I call that movie to king is because Oppenheimer is sure to be this years winner. And it’s well deserved. This movie appeals to all audiences. The young and the old. Just jot the stupid. But as far as the young…no scene goes on too long throughout the entire film. This is a long, long movie (3 hours,) and yet director Christopher Nolan makes every scene move fast enough and with enough energy that it never gets tiring.
The big problem is in how complicated and detailed the movie is. There are so many characters and names to follow and remember. This is the kind of movie you need to watch super-carefully, and maybe even dissect in order to fully understand. But once that understanding is there, there’s no denying that this is a pretty cool film.
The movie tells multiple stories at once. That’s what Nolan does, ever since he started as a filmmaker with The Following and Memento. He tells stories out of order and cuts from multiple stories at the same time. But here, Nolan is trying not to lose the audience. That’s why he employs black and white to tell one of the stories (much like he did with Memento,) so that the audience always knows which story they are watching. The black and white story is used to show the point of view of a Senator who is experiencing a confirmation hearing in order to become a member of the incoming president’s cabinet. That senator is Levi Strauss, played by the great Robert Downey Jr.
Of course, Strauss didn’t come into the life of Robert Oppenheimer until after the atomic bomb was built and launched. Which means there’s a huge portion of this movie that has nothing to do with Strauss. But the movie does the smart job of cutting the Straus scenes of his hearing that took place way later, with the scenes of Oppenheimer from way earlier. It all works. So do the rapid fire montages of random images that Nolan employs here in a very Darren Aronofsky meets Terrence Malick sort of way. The movie gets especially great in its final act when the hearing of the senator as well as Oppenheimer’s own hearing before a security board that is debating whether or not to renew his clearance, start to reach their final revelations. There are twists that come out here and are really handled well. That being said, the movie takes way too long to get to them. This movie should not have been three hours. At two hours or even two and a half, it would have been a much tighter, more compelling film. It’s still pretty good, but could have been pretty great.