Rent Oppenheimer (2023)

Drama-free long-haul talk-fest - Oppenheimer review by Alphaville

This tedious Christopher Nolan talkie about the life of the physicist is a real disappointment and a long haul. For three hours the confused plotting zips around all over his life and all over the place, never settling on one scene long enough for any drama to develop. Even worse, the endless meetings are mostly concerned with the audience-boring political implications of his early communist leanings. It doesn’t help that star Cillian Murphy has only one expression and half-whispers his lines in a monotone.

The hours drag by with scene after scene of assorted suits politicking in assorted corridors and boardrooms. After nearly two hours there’s some brief tension when the first atom bomb is tested (to an annoying score of what sounds like scraping violins), but it’s soon back to the politicking. By the end (if you last that long) it’s just words, words, words. Whatever happened to “show don’t tell”? The script was based on a book and would probably have made a better play if not for the huge cast of interchangeable characters. Such a disappointment given Nolan’s track record.

Well acted, interesting story but disjointed and over rated. - Oppenheimer review by JD

I found the film very interesting, giving some food for thought where both the negative and postive aspects of how the US operates were demonstrated. Having taken a interest in geopolitics over the last few years, the film was indeed very interesting in this regard.

The acting is fantastic and the whole production is extremly well done. This is a film that has been polished to within an inch of its life and in this respect alone, its fantastic.

However.

The film is bloated. Bare in mind there is no science in this film. What tiny bit there is, is accompanied with simplistic explanation. There is also very little definition of the destruction these weapons cause. These subjects seem to of been brushed aside to focus on the people and events.

And there is the biggest flaw. Youll notice most people are keen to say they understood the film and thats because it jumps around between different times and storylines in a very fragmented way - Im not fussed to admit it, both me and my GF couldnt keep up with it all. It doesnt make you stupid, or invalidate your not-5 star rating. It just means you cant be bothered playing a memory puzzle while watching some entertainment and eating pizza.

A good film yes, but 5 stars, no. There are far, far better films out there.

Powerful historical epic - Oppenheimer review by PD

This very lengthy but powerful and watchable film about the man who created the atomic bomb slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history in roughly equal measure. Cillian Murphy gives a superb performance as Oppenheimer, making him fascinating and multi-layered: his “Oppie” is an elegant mandarin who’s also a bit snakelike — at once a cold prodigy and an ardent humanist, a Jewish outsider who becomes a consummate insider, and a man who oversees the invention of nuclear weapons without a shred of doubt or compunction, only to confront the world he created from behind a defensive shield of guilt that’s a lot less self-aware.

The film opens with a flash forward to the 1954 hearing of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that ultimately resulted in Oppenheimer accused (among other things) of having hidden Communist ties, being stripped of his security clearance. This was the government’s way of silencing him, since in the postwar world he’d become something of a dove on the issue of nuclear weapons, a view that didn’t mesh with America’s Cold War stance of aggression. The film keeps returning to the hearing, weaving it deep into the fabric of its three-hour running time. As Oppenheimer defends himself in front of a committee of hanging judges, the film uses his anecdotes to flash back in time, and Nolan creates a hypnotic multi-tiered storytelling structure, using it to tease out the hidden continuities that shaped Oppenheimer’s life. We see how the Cold War really started before World War II was over — it was always there, shaping the paranoia of atom-bomb politics. We see that Oppenheimer the ruthless nuclear zealot and Oppenheimer the mystic idealist were one and the same. And we see that the race to complete the Manhattan Project, rooted in the makeshift creation of a small desert city that Oppenheimer presides over in Los Alamos, meant that the momentum of the nuclear age was already taking on a life of its own.

The film has a mesmerising first half, encompassing everything from Oppenheimer’s mysterious Princeton encounter with Albert Einstein to his far from utopian marriage to the alcoholic Kitty (played with some force by Emily Blunt). Just about everything we see is stunning in its accuracy, for this isn’t a film that traffics in composite characters or audience-friendly arcs; Nolan channels the grain of reality, the fervour and detail of what really happened. Meanwhile, the build-up to the creation of the first atomic bomb ticks with cosmic suspense, but the big bang itself, when it finally arrives, is something of an anti-climax as Nolan shows it impressionistically — the sound cutting out, images of what look like radioactive hellfire. Thus the terrifying awesomeness, the nightmare bigness of it all, does not come across, nor does it evoke the descriptions of witnesses who say that the blast was streaked with purple and grey and was many times brighter than the noonday sun. The Japanese experience is, perhaps inevitably, largely side-stepped, and although it's hinted at that bombing the defeated Japanese was less to save American lives and more designed to cow the Russians with a ruthless demonstration of the US’s nuclear mastery, the concentration on the effects of this on Oppenheimer seems rather morally incongruous given the forces unleashed. And once we're past that nuclear climax, the intensity rather subsides - we’re still at the A.E.C. hearing (after two hours), with an Oppenheimer who is now fighting the invention of the more powerful hydrogen bomb, as if it were some utterly different weapon from the one he created, and who is desperate to rein in the existence of nuclear weapons in general, but forgetting the key lesson of the revolution he was at the centre of: that human beings will always be at the mercy of what science makes possible.

An interesting but conventionally told biographical/historical drama - Oppenheimer review by Philip in Paradiso

J Robert Oppenheimer (1904 –1967) was an American theoretical physicist. He was appointed director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, in New Mexico, during World War II. J R Oppenheimer was put in charge of the secretive and strategic Manhattan Project, whose key aim was to develop an atom bomb that could be used against the Axis powers, more particularly Germany (as the Germans were known to be working on a similar project of their own). As a result, J R Oppenheimer is often referred to as the "father of the atomic bomb". Interestingly, he knew Albert Einstein who, for his part, refused to take part in any programme aiming to develop nuclear weapons.

The film is, in essence, a biographical drama centred on the life of J R Oppenheimer, from his stint at the University of Cambridge to the mid-1950s. The story is focused on Los Alamos and the development of the atomic bomb, which went on to be used against Japan with devastating effect. The more personal and sentimental side of J R Oppenheimer's life is also told, and the film is, overall, historically accurate.

On the plus side, it is a very interesting story because J R Oppenheimer was, undoubtedly, a very interesting, complex and fascinating character - a genius who played a major part in the history of humanity, through his role at El Alamos. The movie is well directed by Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy's acting (as the lead character) is very good. His interaction (and tussle) with the military man overseeing the project, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), is also interesting and will hold your attention.

However, there are a few issues with the film, in my opinion. First of all, it is very long - too long - at over 2 hrs 45 mins. Two hours would most probably have been enough. The story unfolds at a fairly slow pace. It is always interesting, but it is also a little bit laborious, more particularly in the third part of the film, when it turns into one of those typically American courtroom dramas. Was this amount of procedural and legalistic detail necessary? What is more, the style of the movie is somewhat conventional, and I mean by this the way in which the story is told. Despite the frequent and jerky changes of place and time, not helped by resorting to black & white shots as opposed to colour ones - after a while, it gets confusing and the colour-coding does not help the viewer to distinguish between flashbacks and real-time story telling - the story feels linear and, to a degree, predictable.

In conclusion, it is a very good and very interesting historical drama, but it certainly is not the masterpiece that many reviewers have claimed it is. Somehow, there has been a lot of overhype, due to the nature of the Hollywood film industry and the industry's calendar. But you will enjoy it if you like this kind of movie and if you have a spare 3 hours.

Long and a bit dull - Oppenheimer review by JR

The movie is too long and is 99% talking. The sound track tries to inject some excitement into it, but fundamentally it's a bit of a dull film. Well acted etc (of course) which is why the critics love it, but many people will struggle to get through the 3 hours I suspect.

Long Winded - Oppenheimer review by MT

I likely had unrealistic expectations about this film obviously a great performance by Cillian Murphy but retrospective films that jump about a bit are hard work IMO. To many screen shots of colliding atoms got a touch tedious.

Way overlong, talky courtroom drama with some Nuclear bombs... - Oppenheimer review by PV

I was massively disappointed in this - a great cast, largely British like the director - I actually find a lot of Christopher Nolan's films tedious and overlong too. I have never warmed to courtroom dramas and that is what this is (watch CHAPLIN instead to see McCarthyism, or The CRUCIBLE maybe as a metaphor).

Not sure how this compares to the 1980 TV miniseries BUT that is probably better - special effects, CGI, big budget and the rest only go so far.

Watch HIROSHIMA - DROPPING THE BOMB a BBC drama-documentary or other documentaries on it, WORLD AT WAR documentary classic, early 70s.

Interesting fact: the test bomb in New Mexico would not have worked without a tiny microscopic wire manufactured in the UK, in Wales, by the MOND factory (Mond was a family of Austrian Jews).

I was annoyed by some modern language used for scenes in 1920s/30s and the usual modern need to focus on women characters and relationships - but some stories are just more male, war stories and this. The lovelife stuff bored me.

2.5 stars rounded down.