Floppenheimer. Watching this in IMAX left nowhere to hide from the cringe. Look, let’s face facts here — the average American reading level is that of a 13-year-old. General American audiences are utterly incapable of any kind of lasting or meaningful reflection on most things, let alone history, let alone the history of America itself. It’s not hard to imagine people crowding the IMAXes drooling by the time RDJ goes full Metal Gear power broker mode. This is a 3-hour-long biopic overflowing with government bureaucracy and advanced high school physics sparknotes — all of the obnoxious sudden explosions feel more like attempts to keep the casual viewer awake rather than any kind of masterful technical flourish. It’s basically Midnight in Paris for guys who had Gordon Freeman posters on their college dorm room walls 15 years ago, and a general refresher/propagandistic neutralization of history for people’s aging parents whose only response to the film will be a faint “huh, I remember that from high school” before immediately wiping their memory of the film in order to store more episodes of HGTV.

I was intrigued at first by the socialist sympathizer arc toward the beginning of the film, as it and several other scenes seem to speak to our president situation today. Young people rushing to unionize, the president is mostly senile and resigned to bloodshed, etc. However, I also think it’s kind of a travesty to make a thoroughly apolitical film about the slaughter of thousands and the creation of a technology that keeps us locked in hyperreal hell, and will forever probably. In Simulation and Simulacra, Baudrillard writes at length about nuclear innovation and its ultimate purpose: not to actually be used to raze populations, but to instead serve as a definitive freeze of the status quo, where power is eterally concentrated in the hands of the few that wield nuclear weaponry. As he puts it, “The balance of terror is the terror of balance.”

This movie decides to let all of the big questions hang in the air until they freefall, but something I kept coming back to while my mind wandered through its long stretches of boring nothingness was this: is there any point to learning sciences capable of destruction right now, in our current world? Any kind of drive for development and creativity can now be effectively raped out of your head by the companies that control the world, and everyone has a price — whether it’s cash or fame — they’re willing to pay to sell their ingenuity to the highest bidder. I mean, fuck, how do you respond to someone who tells you they’re studying physics when the natural conclusion of their studies puts them directly in the pockets of the forever war “defense” industry? Its questions like this that make me recall what China did to its nuclear scientists, and why their nuclear programs fell behind as a result. Would it really be impossible to put the genie back in the bottle if everyone who knew of a terrible science vanished, or if the general populace eventually becomes too stupid to study its mechanics? Idk. 

Unfortunately, these (and others) are very difficult questions on the state of humanity and the world, and it turns out that a guy who’s made three different Batman movies falls short of giving them any meaningful heft or offering any kind of interesting proposal or reading of these quandaries. This shit was better when it was an old Indian woman talking about it for 5 minutes instead of 3 hours of vintage C-SPAN footage. Christopher Nolan, you will never be Terrence Malick.