Noah Cassidy’s review published on Letterboxd:
Troubled by Visions of a Hidden Universe
Today was the last day of my summer quarter for grad school, I will still need to hear back on my grades for finals, but for the time being, I am taking a breath. I then, of course, had to celebrate in the only way I knew how. You know, you would think that seeing a movie five times in the theater would get tiring. I then want to report to you that a sincere feeling I had during the first couple scenes of this viewing was sadness, because I knew that this would likely be the last time I saw this in the theater, and with near certainty the last time I would see it in IMAX. (I maintain that IMAX should do rep screenings from time to time, any time this would come back to the format in the future, I'm there in a half of a heartbeat.) Oppenheimer is a movie I have a thousand thoughts on, and it's also a movie I'll never be able to say enough about. I read recently that Christopher Nolan tries to make movies where you aren't going to be thinking about him during them, assuming that he means the films should be speaking for themselves. I really like Nolan, like most people, but I think most would agree that when they watch his films, him and his handsome British mug are pretty often on the mind, It's then one of the many achievements of Oppenheimer where this is the film of Nolan's where it does actually achieve for me what he wanted. I dare to say I look at this film as some kind of entity that brought itself into the world, accomplished through the work of thousands of incredibly talented individuals, Nolan then just being one piece in a symphony of people. Murphy is totally getting that Oscar, same for Göransson, and I don't know man, hopefully this does just get any and every award that's possible. I think in the past two years I've really been changing as a person, and I've had to acknowledge that it hasn't always been for the better. I don't mean that where I think I'm becoming a worse person, but a lot of shit has happened to me, either at my own hands or through others, and it's sometimes a lot to handle. I still consider myself an optimistic and "hopeful" person, yet where those feelings were once very natural for me to feel, they're now more often than not a conscious and sometimes strained choice. Oppenheimer then speaks to me not as a hopeless venture, but one that looks at the assured reality that humanity has the power to destroy itself, and the nearly assured reality that there will come a day where we unleash that power once and for all. It's not a reason to just give up, nor do I think it's falling into a doom and gloom view of people. Oppenheimer certainly does a very good job of showing that there are many who do and will actively go out of their way to prevent an apocalypse. It's then of course sometimes unfortunate that those with the most power seem like they actively want the world on fire lol. Anyway, I'm typing this up while fairly tired but honestly pretty happy, where it counts. Today has been an abnormally good day for me, and this being the final activity of said day felt very fitting. In all of its complexities and overwhelming spectacle ("Spectacle" primarily of the Nope variety, if you get what I mean by that.), Oppenheimer is through and through what I do, have, and will keep pursuing when it comes to my bottomless infatuation with cinema. It's a limitless world of collision and fusion, dancing around, forming and reforming itself. Beauty and horror in the eyes of the beholder. A rather lovely thing that said beholder gets to be Mr. Murphy.
10/10
