Oppenheimer is unsurprisingly a monumental achievement in technical filmmaking in almost every facet possible. Sound design, cinematography, score, costumes, makeup, camerawork, etc… There’s too much to unpack and digest, and so much to love. Cillian Murphy delivers the best performance of his career, and possibly of any biopic to exist. He is J. Robert Oppenheimer. He’s absolutely an Oscars nominee lock for Best Actor, and will very likely take the prize.

I gotta say though, I can’t help but walk away feeling quite disappointed. The first 45 minutes was incredibly fast paced, jumping from scene to scene to get everyone up to speed with Oppenheimer’s history leading up to the Manhattan Project. There’s a lot of time jumps, flashbacks, fast forwards, and characters and concepts to get your head around in little to no time. During this ‘intro’ chunk I don’t think there was ever a pause or break in the score - which although incredibly beautiful, made this section of the movie feel like a long, claustrophobic, and overly dramatised montage. It also doesn’t allow enough space for Oppenheimer’s more intimate relationships to feel meaningful - again, falling into the same trap of Inception in not giving me enough to build strong feelings about the protagonist’s relationship with their significant other.

Everything from the first moment Matt Damon walks in to the immediate aftermath of the bomb is phenomenal - I have nothing but praises for this section of the movie that takes up most of the run time. Things really slow down to a manageable pace which let’s everything have enough time to breathe and space to pack a punch, and fully focuses on fleshing out and understanding the complexity of these characters, their political climate, and the moral and lethal challenges and decisions they are faced with / are making.

The final 45 minutes does a complete 180, and becomes a very slow political legal drama of sorts, that after already over 2 hours of run time, really starts to overstay its welcome far too quickly and for far too long. As the famous T.S Eliot quote says “this is how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”. I think this perfectly sums up this film. The length of this final chunk is unnecessarily long and does not do anything to add any weight to the final moments at all. I’m glad Chris Nolan had the freedom and trust to make a 3 hour movie - he’s more than earned the opportunity. But I think if the third act was trimmed, and the first was more fleshed out, this could have been a masterpiece.

There was also a lot of hype around the contrasting use of black/white and colour in this film, but ultimately I didn’t think this had any real impact or effect at the end of the day. The black and white scenes were only really used around the very tightly contained legal drama and Robert Downey Jr.’s character, so the difference between subjectivity / first person and objectivity / third person as Nolan claims was his intention wasn’t anything special. I was hoping this technique would be mixed in throughout all of Oppenheimer’s greater story, with perhaps colour scenes from his perspective being followed by b/w scenes from onlookers that repeat events but portray his mannerisms or behaviours in a much different light. 

Regardless of my gripes (which are maybe due to me being too tired or too dumb), this is a must see epic, and I can’t wait to watch this again some day soon (hopefully in my own home where I can stop, pause, and replay to fully digest this). Barbenheimer has absolutely revitalised the magic in attending the cinema, so I couldn’t be happier.