Ryne Walley’s review published on Letterboxd:
"The important thing isn't ‘Can you read music?’ It's ‘Can you hear it?’ Can you hear the music, Robert?"
This isn’t merely an emergency.
It’s an unstoppable, cataclysmic chain reaction, one that begins with the innocent fabric of reality itself. Bending beams of light, flowing particles, colliding matter, rippling vibrations. Visions of existence’s hidden threads. They haunt the film’s eponymous figure. Rather than succumbing to their "torment" amid other irrational decisions, however, he sets off to quell them, to reckon with them. And owing unquestionably to art, music, and literature beside embracing an unpredictable beauty as surprising as shattered crystal, he quiets the tremors plaguing his mind, making peace with the ceaseless noise.
But, inevitably, that silence breaks. Conflict sparks. Observation becomes weaponization, science reduced to yet another ever-colonized frontier. At the front of it, leveraged and enabled by unfathomable resources, a man slowly abandons empathy, even if he may believe otherwise in the face of some perceived logic, or just plain ignorance. Naive rationalization and allegiances prevail despite the concerns of many. And born from this negligence is a perversion of the natural world; a boundary-breaking invention for horror utterly irreconcilable with the works once sought to manifest and calm an unseen realm.
Guilt is worthless. Consequences to this degree are eternal. No amount of pity or self-hatred can turn back the hands of time. History has been forever altered, set upon a course toward an increasingly evident final chapter. Reason lies next to the distorted, undervalued voices — namely the women and victims — whose lives fell in the shadows of culpable men who'd rather construct symbolic monuments to their ravenous egos and petty grievances than see a sensible end to a now-closing future. It ultimately doesn’t matter, though, because it's those very men who will honor one another for their shame; a knowingly hollow consolation worth nothing in light of the armageddon they've wrought.
Oppenheimer is, for now, filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus. A mature, staggering, chameleon-like picture of frightening power bolstered by technically awe-inspiring production elements and several award-worthy performances. The caliber of the craft here (especially the editing by Jennifer Lame) cannot be trivialized. I was absolutely floored by the experience.
"You all thought that I had lost the ability to understand what I had started. So, the award really wasn’t for me. It was for all of you. Now it’s your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement."
