Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

[therewillbeblus]

My hot take is that I think Matt Damon should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor, not to the exclusion of RDJ by any means but I think in all of the enormous worthy praise it has gotten that performance stands out ever more to me in this.

Absolutely. I actually think Damon gave the best performance in the film. He played a real person, not a character, with all his compromised selfish-kindness coming across as ordinary but interesting in the context of all these creative, active minds. The position of gently manipulating Oppy, genuinely appreciating him and feeling a connection of sorts, but also genuinely comfortable putting himself in a position that de-emphasizes relationships in favor of a hierarchy that provides him gifts of stability and that he need not challenge.. it was so well-done when it could've been a phoned-in perf and the film wouldn't have lost an Oscar. Being able to remain static in one's comfortable secure home through being so active in aggressively manipulating other communities - it's ironic and antisocially-harmful, but logically protective. Yet everyone else is trying to be aggressively active with what they have in front of them in order to progress in some boundless theoretical utopia, which is wonderful but naive, if still informed. Wha-? This film gets all philosophically and emotionally twisty, reflexively emulating our lead's engagement with himself, the world, history. But then there's Matt Damon, the representation of a human being, who is not evil but who may hold some of the main responsibility for it out of the basic crew here. And he represents the person who doesn't necessarily need to feel or think a whole lot about it. There's something very interesting about that side of the coin too.

[beamish14]

I actually wish that Tom Conti had finally gotten some recognition for his subtle, understated take on Einstein, who is usually played so broadly in films. He’s always been a very overlooked actor IMO

[Monterey Jack]

The constant music on Oppenheimer probably is what I disliked most about it. I liked the movie overall, but this is the ONE thing I absolutely hated, and I also do wish Nolan would just stop doing that...the constant music just become some white noise at some point, until you realise it's still there time and time during the movie and just think Ugh.

I remember a moment in the film where there's an overhead shot of some characters walking across a football field, and the music ACTUALLY STOPPED for what felt like the first time since the opening credits, and I was like, "Thank Christ!"...until the music started up again less than 15 seconds later. This isn't music, it's sound design, and its Oscar win is a grave disservice to what REAL music used to bring to a movie (like Alexandre Desplat's wonderful The Boys In The Boat, which -- naturally -- was assailed as "corny" and button-pushing" by most critics ).

[beamish14]

The constant music on Oppenheimer probably is what I disliked most about it. I liked the movie overall, but this is the ONE thing I absolutely hated, and I also do wish Nolan would just stop doing that...the constant music just become some white noise at some point, until you realise it's still there time and time during the movie and just think Ugh.

I remember a moment in the film where there's an overhead shot of some characters walking across a football field, and the music ACTUALLY STOPPED for what felt like the first time since the opening credits, and I was like, "Thank Christ!"...until the music started up again less than 15 seconds later. This isn't music, it's sound design, and its Oscar win is a grave disservice to what REAL music used to bring to a movie (like Alexandre Desplat's wonderful The Boys In The Boat, which -- naturally -- was assailed as "corny" and button-pushing" by most critics ).

Absolutely. This is the exact same shit that Hans Zimmer and his acolytes are guilty of. Give me Joe Hisaishi, Rachel Portman, or Michael Nyman, not this aural torture

[hearthesilence]

How much of it is the composer and how much of it is Nolan asking for it? I kind of feel like he's requesting it if this pops up with different composers. (To take Zimmer as an example, The Thin Red Line doesn't have too much score, and Malick does exercise control on his scores, to the point where James Horner became quite angry when he did The New World.)

[tenia]

Considering how it became a Nolan gimmick, it's hard not to think it's first coming from Nolan, and the composer executes his artistic vision on this department.

[domino harvey]

I think the entirety of studio era Hollywood beat him to that punch

[tenia]

Not saying that in a jest at all, but could you elaborate ? It might be lost in translation, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

[Noiretirc]

Ugh.

After all of the attention/praise/Oscars, I finally caved and got the Blu. Is this our generation's Titanic moment?

For now I just want to stick to one of many frustrations I had with this film:

The Fuchs affair was galactically underdeveloped. "Oh, you didn't know - he was spying."

It seems that many of the major events became "blink and you'll miss it" items in this film.

(Hiroshima, is another glaring example. Imagine what could have been done with this.)

And then there's what I call the Hollywood Acting....

Apologies - this is a quick rant. I am hugely disappointed with this film.

[Drucker]

It seems that many of the major events became "blink and you'll miss it" items in this film.

This is my issue with every Nolan film, even the ones I like. There is just so much information packed into 2.5-3 hours that if you miss a line of dialogue you often miss a detail. Honestly it's fun to experience in a theater, which is what I love about his films. But they are just not paced in a way that's easy for me to digest.

[knives]

You make it sound like he’s HHH or Edward Yang. The storytelling, like most Nolan’s, reminded me of Lynch in that the narrative and exposition is there to develop emotional pathways. All the stuff about Hiroshima and the spies seems in service to the emotional development Oppenheimer is going through. I suppose there’s room to criticize that when applied to real horrors, but the constant narration fleeting by definitely strikes me as a feature rather than bug.

[reaky]

Though RDJ came away with a statuette, I thought his last-act pivot into Tod Slaughter bared-teeth villainy was only missing the cape flung over his shoulder and a hissed “medding kids”.

[therewillbeblus]

You make it sound like he’s HHH or Edward Yang. The storytelling, like most Nolan’s, reminded me of Lynch in that the narrative and exposition is there to develop emotional pathways. All the stuff about Hiroshima and the spies seems in service to the emotional development Oppenheimer is going through. I suppose there’s room to criticize that when applied to real horrors, but the constant narration fleeting by definitely strikes me as a feature rather than bug.

I've been banging this drum for a while, though ironically I think this is perhaps the most balanced example where Nolan is just as interested in philosophical concerns as emotional ones. Anyways, he dresses up films in big ideas he's interested in, but they're all about rather simple emotions, ones I imagine he feels that draw him to material given his enthusiasm. And when I say "simple," it's intentional - the actual experience of the characters going through them is complex, but there's a clarity to what his characters are going through that we can immediately identify with on an easy level (guilt, loss, love, sadness, exhaustion, fear) and then from there becomes interconnected with systems and 'higher powers' (space, time, dream layers, wars, memory's short window, a blazing hot sun, a villain that has no Achilles Heel in not subscribing to our logic, history changing the way it judges people without accounting for context, etc.)

[domino harvey]

Not saying that in a jest at all, but could you elaborate ? It might be lost in translation, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

Much of classical Hollywood output has a near-constant soundtrack-- it's probably one of the biggest subconscious barriers for new viewers of older films. So I find this crutch of Nolan's to actually be quite a throwback and I have never had any problem with it. As you and others mention, he also uses the score to guide the film to the beats he wants to hit and to provide a propulsive forward momentum. I understand the criticisms this has received, but I think a lot of you are underselling how effective this is as an engagement tool for casual moviegoers. I watched this film with my partner who has limited patience for most forms of entertainment and she was riveted for the entirety of the three hour production on a subject she has zero preexisting interest in. This is why the film was a popular success, and I feel like the inverse of my comments on Barbie-- I think a lot of you are being too harsh on what this film achieves, as though it were another A Beautiful Mind. I do not think it's even remotely a great film (I have seen too many films that are fundamentally the same as this one in different clothes), but I enjoyed its craft, found it entertaining, and I can understand its larger appeals to the masses. So to the joke upthread about it being another Titanic, well... yeah, it should be so lucky!

[tenia]

Thanks for the detailed explanation, domino.
I wasn't sure because I have to say, and maybe it means I don't have that much of a knowledge of these productions, because I seemingly never really realised that this older output had so much music. It might be about the music's style, or how it's mixed, hence why it feels (to me) more intrusive, more "always in your face" in most of the more recent Nolan movies (post The Prestige, IIRC), and in any case, I'd tend to suppose that what the current use of music in Nolan's movies remains something that isn't (it seems to me) widespread amongst Hollywood. Which is why I would think it's rather an "auteur" choice, and not something more decided-by-comittee (especially since the move to Universal hasn't changed anything on this point).

However, true enough : in the end, it's just my 2 cents about it. To me, the near-constant quite intrusive music on Nolan's movies isn't propulsive, but the exact opposite. It dulls me and it turns the compositions into white noise, just like something being turned to 11 99% of the time isn't dynamic : it's wallbricking. But maybe I'm just not someone on whom it works (though it didn't seem to work on my GF either, who thought that what worked and made it interesting was the editing and the overall structure of the movie - though we both agreed it's still Nolan doing a non-linear movie and that the last half hour was way more boring than anything before because Strauss isn't fleshed enough to follow up and what's happening to him just isn't remotely as interesting as what happened so far). I thus wonder if the music was part of what riveted your partner or if, like mine, the wonder craft was elsewhere.

Side note : I was positively pleased with the movie. The music definitely is the one thing I disliked about it, but that's because there isn't many other things I didn't like. As written above, I think the framing with Strauss is a good idea, because it allows on a 3hr long movie for themes to appear and reverberate in an efficient manner, working as some of kind of chronological-but-also-state-of-mind manner, but once the movie's focus shifts to him (mostly), it loses it because, well, Downey Jr isn't even half an hour on screen and to me (and my GF), it definitely felt like it. But past this, and despite not really being fond of post-Inception Nolan, the 3hrs (well, 2h30) went like a breeze. It's extremely well crafted and well interpreted, efficiently intertwined narratively (not fond about the female parts though, which felt very superficial), and as a chemist by scholarship, we tend to overlook during school how all those physicists worked within the same quite narrow time frame so yeah, Heisenberg, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Fermi, Einstein all knew each other... and it perfectly works in the movie (yes, even Branagh as Bohr). So all in all, it's a solid 7.5/10 for me. I don't think it's some grand masterpiece for the ages though, but if plenty of people liked it, it seems perfectly legitimate !

[therewillbeblus]

I watched this film with my partner who has limited patience for most forms of entertainment and she was riveted for the entirety of the three hour production on a subject she has zero preexisting interest in. This is why the film was a popular success, and I feel like the inverse of my comments on Barbie-- I think a lot of you are being too harsh on what this film achieves, as though it were another A Beautiful Mind.

This was my partner's experience as well - she couldn't entertain the idea of sitting down to it unless we planned it as two viewings, but digested it in one sitting and came away wanting more, placing it as favorite of the noms (while also discarding Barbie's worth more and more over time; wonder if I'll do the same). The same happened with Saltburn - neither from a place of being affected by Higher Meaning, just emotionally invested by formal wit for entertainment purposes.

[swo17]

The score for Oppenheimer is more overwhelming than for the typical classic Hollywood film, but the same could be said of Punch-Drunk Love or There Will Be Blood. I wouldn't want every movie to be scored this way, but I like it here

[soundchaser]

It helps that the score is, in isolation, pretty stunning. I was very surprised to hear how the tempo changes in "Can You Hear the Music" were handled.

[aox]

I thought one of the film's strengths was that Nolan spent no time with the two Japanese bombings. I know what they did, and he filmed the demonstration in New Mexico. I didn't need to see what happened on the ground outside of a few stills.

[flyonthewall2983]

I feel like anxiety is the overriding theme, not so directly touched on in dialogue but it’s all over his face when we first see him in that tiny room, opening his eyes from the visions which still haunt and mystify him. I found that somehow helpful in what is already a healthy understanding of the stakes involved. And considering the present state of the world as I see it, the prescience it has to ideas we are still relatively struggling to understand made the viewing experience oddly cathartic.

[Constable]

I watched the film recently and then watched a bunch of reviews on Youtube and a number of people mentioned some instances of bad dialogue. When I watched it, I never remarked on any of the dialogue as bad. What lines are people referring to there?

[domino harvey]

The only thing I recall is how annoyingly the explicit Kennedy namecheck was relayed. "Bad dialogue" sounds like lazy reviewing without any specific examples

[Black Hat]

The dumb youtubers are probably talking about the sex scene.

[flyonthewall2983]

An excellent hat check. I thought the Kennedy line was superb at first but immediately recognized it would be the one put through the wringer. It holds up as understanding exactly how Nolan plays up truth being stranger then fiction versus how much tactical or logistical concerns in the fictional realms he created, or interpreted the work of those before him as in the Batman movies.

[Constable]

The dumb youtubers are probably talking about the sex scene.

The first one where he reads the destroyer of worlds bit from the book?