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Nolan’s last feature seemed to focus entirely on the mechanics of story. I loved it; others… less so.
Yet here, he is almost entirely focused on the performances of his actors. There’s a real murderer’s row of faces on display here playing real people, real characters, and they all add a tremendous amount of weight to an already heavy story. It’s clear that Nolan gave them all the room to run because each and every person does remarkable work in the time that they’re given. I could go on all day about the major players: Cillian Murphy is kind of perfect for his role, Matt Damon is weaponized in particularly entertaining fashion, and Robert Downey Jr. is unbearably human. However, the performance that I surprisingly walked away with was David Krumholtz. He’s seemingly the only human with a heart in this thing, and I was happy to see him every time he was onscreen.
Apart from the performances, one of the things I was moved most by here was Nolan’s strict adherence to the first person. This is Oppenheimer. It is a singular, subjective cinematic experience. All of Oppenheimer’s visions are nothing but horrifying. So much of the noise of the film can drown out dialogue, physics and politics can mostly drown itself out, but the images speak so clearly throughout and the sound communicates so much power.
This picture really rattled me, as I expected and hoped it would.
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