RhodesMovie’s review published on Letterboxd:
I'm glad I didn't see this at the cinema, given that the script is dense with language and few visual, cinematic moments. Add in the length and no intermission and I feel it's too much for me to absorb in one sitting. I need a break with a movie that's pushing 3-hours. But of course, cinema is about making money so we get 30-mins of adverts before a movie now instead of a bladder break.
Is Oppenheimer a great film? Personally, I say no. Cillian Murphy is superb in the title role and plays the weight of responsibility with an evolution of raw ambition, arrogance and pained contrition. I noticed a lot of awards talk for Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr but I thought Matt Damon was worthy of equal praise. There is a stellar cast of many notable names and quality character actors. I thought James Remar was great in a small but pivotal role.
Dare I say, I found the film too hyperactive. The score almost never stops, even as characters are talking. We jump around in time and between characters with all the editing grace of a reality TV show. For example a romantic moment between Robert Oppenheimer and Kitty (Emily Blunt) fails to resonate, because it's jumped in-and-out of like something overseen by Michael Bay. It's weird to watch a film that's nearly 3-hous with scenes and sequences that feel rushed or shoehorned.
It's not clean storytelling either. I'm often so intensely focused on keeping up with the relentless scenes of men talking in rooms, that the cuts back and forth to black and white scenes in the future mean I'm never fully allowing the story to be told, and I'm like a young kid in class afraid to fall behind.
But, this is still fascinating subject matter and the reverberating wave of that detonation is still felt in our world today. In nuclear terms, we all live on the precipice of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent to any more big bangs, but Murphy's Law suggests that at some point in the future, maybe the distant future, if it can happen then it will happen. The movie's final reflection is to suggest this. Bleak.
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