AngierCorleone’s review published on Letterboxd:
May I be so bold as to say that I believe that Nolan has fallen off? I admit that I haven’t seen Interstellar that everyone seems to love, but I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed his work.
I wasn’t as excited for this as I was for Barbie, but I expected it to be decent at the very least. And somehow I was still left underwhelmed, for the most part I was just kinda bored by the proceedings. The only time I was truly engaged was the 30 minutes of building up to setting off the bomb, the bomb going off, and Oppenheimer’s breakdown afterwards. But the other 2 hours 30 minutes were an incredibly long slog to get through, honestly you could have just cut everything to do with Robert Downey Junior’s character and the story would have function better as well be an hour shorter.
I’m not saying this movie is a complete loss however, there’s a few things that are pretty good. For a start most of the cast does a fantastic job as I expected, I’m glad Cillian Murphy is finally getting the attention he deserves and with luck he gets Best Actor for this. The supporting cast as well delivered what I expected, I enjoyed doing the DiCaprio meme every time I saw Devon Bostwick and Jack Quaid. Visually it’s pretty phenomenal, but the real highlight of this movie was the score. It’s quietly haunting and bombastic leaving a sense of awe the rest of the movie can’t compete with and it deserves a better movie than this.
I’m starting to have a issue Nolan where it feels like he doesn’t evolve. I mean visually he does absolutely, like compare the cinematography to The Prestige and it’s like night and day. However since The Dark Knight, his dialogue has always felt monotonous and empty despite acting it has so much to say. Where once it was engaging it has now become extremely tiresome to listen to and I think people are starting to notice that, cool concepts and nice visual can only get you so far. Also he can’t write female characters to save his life, it’s no better here than it was in 2006.
And so I’ve now reached the end of Barbenheimer, and a clear winner has been established from my perspective and by the world at large. So I offer my congratulations to Barbie, I had a really good time in the build up to the day these came out and I hope something like this happens again.
Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope you had a good time with this historic event. :)
