"God doesn't play dice."

Kind of nuts that this is actually the second film I've watched this week that's a dramatized biopic about a figure with a complex reputation and a killer thousand-year stare, where flashbacks are interspersed with court hearings, the technical terms are all over the place, and surprisingly a dude from The Amazing Spider-Man films is in it.

But daaaaamn, what an incredible movie. Oppenheimer really is the kind of film that IMAX theaters were built for. I don't know how much it deserved to win Best Picture, but shit did Cillian Murphy earn that Best Actor win and then some. Possibly the best performance in his entire career!

Oppenheimer looks great. It flows pretty great, even at a 3 hour runtime. The sound mix and score is unbelievably phenomenal. The writing is super sharp. And it's not just that the cast is fantastic. Nolan really did not spare any expense on bit parts, did he? The whole movie was like a Who's Who game of "Holy shit, it's that guy! Woah, it's Rami Malek! Is that... is that Alden Ehrenreich!? Matt Damon! EMILY BLUNT! What's Jason Clarke doing here? Holy crap! That's freaking Dane DeHaan, good for him man! Goddamit Josh, you ran over Oprah AND detonated the world's first atomic bomb!?"

"I hope you learned something today."
"Yeah, we learned that we should be a lot farther away next time."

Oppenheimer is such a fantastic parable on what fear of the unknown enemy and paranoia does to rot a person's soul and cause societal decay. It's not just that the Red Scare and America's irrational fear of communism soaks through much of the storyline and impacts not just Oppie, but all of his friends who are braver than him to retain their devout socialist principles, and how building those connections can tarnish your career and your life when you yourself did nothing wrong.

It's frankly distrubing how much of the movie's dialogue about America's views of communism are things that I've literally seen people on Twitter over the past month. McCarthyism never went away. it just took different forms, and became better at blanketing its vile branches.

Most of the movie's events, and the slip-ups that eventually cause Oppenheimer's downfall, are constantly bolstered by the fear of the Nazis and "our Russian allies" and what scope they have to gain from any technology the Americans can produce. Franticism over secrecy leads to security breaches, leads to infighting, leads to a country that wants to accomplish so much but continues to hold itself back.

And the inevitable boom of the atomic bomb test, despite how loud and roaring you came in expecting it to be, is deathly quiet. The only sound J. Robert hears, and what we hear as well, is that of his own shaky breathing. The only people for whom it was so loud are halfway around the world in a different hemisphere. In America, the legacy of the atomic bomb is a silent horror, but no less palpable.

The theme of paranoia also reflected in so many other places in the movie. Kitty Oppenheimer years later believes that a dead woman is taunting her and keeping her husband away from being committed to her. General Groves is a man consumed by his own desperation to keep the Nazis from winning the war. And of course, Lewis Strauss, who just let a single seed grow from thinking Oppenheimer and Einstein were backtalking him, let it turn into a smear campaign against one of his brightest minds and unexpectedly comes back to bite his own career in the ass.

Sometimes, the biggest enemy is not on the other side of the world, but on the other side of our own skulls.

"When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world…"
"I remember it well. What of it?"
"I believe we did."