Oppenheimer (2023)

[starlady]

What a stupendous movie. It's mostly talking, but it's compelling, even nerve-wracking at times. I also tend to think that most of the criticisms of the film are answered in the film itself (most, not all).

I saw it in true 70mm IMAX and, wow. I'd like to go back, if I can get a ticket in a more central seat -- I was high enough back but towards the edge so there was still some distortion of the image at times. I really liked seeing the film grain, I hope the prints last the whole run lol. Also AMC doesn't run trailers before these screenings (which makes sense, who would print trailers on IMAX film stock!) so I missed the first 15 minutes, which is another reason I intend to see it again.

• People who are underserved by this movie: Jean Tatlock and Truman, the latter of whom ordered Groves to stop enriching uranium for a third bomb and who, iirc, came to regret the Nagasaki bombing. I thought Emily Blunt's character actually did rather well out of the script; there is no attempt made to make her sympathetic or nicer, which would definitely have been the normal biopic impulse.
• People who got off lightly in the movie: Teller and Lawrence. Lawrence didn't go to the hearing (he did have colitis, it eventually killed him, despite the board treating it as a joke), but he did submit a transcript of remarks critical of Oppenheimer. Also he's responsible for Big Science, the classification complex, and the co-optation of science by the military-industrial complex. A lot of stuff at Berkeley is named after him. As for Teller, the movie ends before he really got going on the H-bomb mania and downplays the degree to which everyone in the community (rightly) shunned him after what he did to Oppenheimer. When your closest colleagues say that the world would have been better off if you'd never been born, well, ouch.
• Was developing the bomb "necessary"? I think the movie shows why people thought it was, although in the event Germany collapsed too soon for it to be used on them. I think the movie also shows why the bomb was, in some sense, inevitable -- as soon as they read the paper about the fission chain reaction, everyone thinks "bomb." It wasn't going to not happen, though the Manhattan Project definitely sped it up.
• I saw "Copenhagen" on Broadway back in the day and iirc the play lightly implies that by the end Heisenberg and company were trying to slow-walk the process, if not that they didn't go the heavy water route to deliberately lead the whole project into the weeds. 
• I continue to find the contention that you can only sympathize with the bombing victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you see them on the screen morally repugnant. Also, I'm gonna be real here, you don't want to see them on the screen, because what happened to the people who weren't instantly incinerated is beyond awful. (You can watch Chernobyl for a glimpse of what the worst of radiation poisoning can do to the human body, with really good makeup effects.) I think Nolan was really damned if he did and damned if he didn't here -- if he had included visuals he'd have been excoriated for instrumentalizing the suffering of non-white bodies to glorify a white* guy. But I think not showing them was unquestionably the morally correct choice. Anyway, if you want to see A-bomb victim suffering (in a morally coherent way), just go watch Barefoot Gen and Black Rain.
• Lots of criticism of Chien-Shiung Wu and the female typists (?) being left out. As somebody said on Twitter, I think we can let the (mostly) white guys have this one. ("They say the next one will be sent by a woman!" "Really makes you feel like you're a part of history!") I particularly can't understand the complaint about the female typists who didn't even know what they were working on -- showing them as hapless patriotic (?) dupes and/or people who just needed a job and participated in a great moral evil because of it is empowering/good for representation how?
• That said, I actually thought that not condensing people down (though John Von Neumann's coining 'kiloton' is given to Oppenheimer, lol) made for a better movie. Life is complicated and biopics inevitably fall down by trying to sand that down to fit into a conventional screenplay narrative. This movie does not do that and it's all the stronger for it.
• It's very funny to me that they had Cal double for UChicago. I think Princeton also doubled for Yale in a few shots?
• Bring back train travel like they have in this movie.
• The people who did live around Los Alamos already absolutely do get shafted, but I think the movie also shows that even Oppenheimer, who professed to love the place, considered them in some ways an afterthought -- his suggestion that Los Alamos be given back to the Indians after the war goes down like a lead balloon for a reason, and he's the only person who even mentions their presence even as he's actively working to displace them. Which is sort of the whole point of the movie in miniature.

Anyway, I liked it a lot. I especially liked that Nolan mixed the audio so you can hear the dialogue this time around, which double proves that he's been deliberately not doing that in all his other movies. I read somewhere that it's partly because he doesn't like to do ADR? Come on man. There's plenty of scope to be precious about movies without actively sabotaging the audience experience, as this movie shows.

Comments

[sovay]

It wasn't going to not happen, though the Manhattan Project definitely sped it up.

I am glad the film articulates that.

I continue to find the contention that you can only sympathize with the bombing victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you see them on the screen morally repugnant.

Oh, good! Another part of the discourse I hadn't seen and wish didn't exist!

Review appreciated.

[starlady]

I think the film puts this up as something to think about: Oppenheimer was wrong that the bomb would usher in a new era of world peace. But 78 years later there has never been another use of nuclear weapons in war, so maybe he was right that we can end the arms race and pull ourselves back from the brink of our own destruction.

[princessofgeeks]

You make me want to see it!