Review of Oppenheimer (2023) by Moviemitch96 — 21 Jul 2023

Holy hell there's so much to unpack here! I'm pretty certain my mind has never been pulled in so many directions at once by a film. Directed with great flare by Christopher Nolan, J. Robert Oppenheimer (played to brilliant perfection by Nolan regular Cillian Murphy) and his life and legacy are chronicled here down to the finest details, from his early years spent learning and teaching quantum physics to the inception of his Manhattan Project during WWII to his eventual fallout with the U.

S. government following his dropping of the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to the immense moral pressure and guilt he faced in the hundreds of thousands of lives he felt responsible in destroying, along with his haunted past and suspected communist ties.

Where do I even begin with this colossal achievement of a film!? For starters, since this is Nolan we're talking about here, this is no traditional by the numbers by biopic by any means! No, this is moreso an intimate and very internal and personal look inside the mind of one of the most brilliant yet tortured minds in our world's history.

This film DOES NOT shy away from showing us exactly what's going on inside Oppenheimer's mind from start to finish, and there's A LOT of inner turmoil and tension, as shown by the constant images of friction, explosions, and mathematics that race through his mind.

Another creative technical choice made on Nolan's part that reminded me quite a bit of one of his earliest efforts 'Memento', is the constant shift between color and black and white sequences (the color scenes being objective and from Oppenheimer's perspective, and the black and white scenes being subjective and based within historical fact.

) I will say however that a common complaint about Nolan's recent films that I for once agreed with this time is that it was far too loud and difficult to understand the dialogue in certain scenes, which is a bit disappointing, because this film races a mile a minute with its dialogue-heavy structure for practically its entire three-hour runtime, making it almost fly right on by for me! As for the performances, if Murphy isn't given his first overdue Oscar nomination for this film come next year, I'm gonna throw hands, because he was ABSOLUTELY PHENOMENAL! He's always been talented and criminally underrated, but my God, if this performance of his doesn't get the Academy's attention, nothing will! As for the massive supporting cast, it's so difficult to single out so many people that I want to single out, but for starters, Robert Downey Jr.

as the opposing Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss stood out so incredibly well here with his commanding screen presence. I'd say he's pretty overdue for another Oscar nomination as well, and this film would be the perfect one to give it to him for! Other notable players here include Emily Blunt as wife Kitty Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock (both of whom were criminally underutilized for this film), Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, hell even Josh Peck! The list goes on and on! Overall, while there are some sound issues in a handful of scenes,the film moves at an almost breakneck pace in spite of its dialogue-heavy delivery, though I wasn't quite as blown away with it as I'd hoped I'd be.

However, I was certainly floored in virtually every other way by this film, from the camerawork to the score to the mile a minute dialogue! While it's still not Nolan's best film in my eyes (I don't think he'll ever top 'Interstellar' or 'The Dark Knight' personally), it isn't at all a stretch to call it for what it truly is: his magnum opus.