im admittedly a nolan fan and respect his craft too much to actually hate this but i still don't think it's good. aside from the gorgeous opening 20-minute visualization of this potentially frightening yet humanistic desire to create/innovate, this is so haphazardly put together that it almost becomes nauseating to watch on a scene-to-scene basis with some really poor wisecracking dialogue in-between. nolan relies too much on the kineticism of the montage, and ludwigs admittedly transcendent score (imagine how'd you feel without it), to mask over the fact that he has nothing interesting to say. he's physically unable to connect with real human emotion and won't ever spend time to rest within a singular moment which brings up doubt when oppenheimer claims to care about his significant others (the "i'll always answer" scene being particularly egregious) and how regretful he is about the bomb.

i can see how some might argue that the unbinding, nonlinear, lighting-fast nature of the film is actually supposed to correlate with the blinding, overwhelming, and destructive nature of oppie's creative urges—i kinda like how the film itself is structured similarly to the use of a bomb with the first two hours being electrically propulsive and distorted while the devastating realities of what's happening aren't felt until the last 45 minutes or so (maybe even the last scene)—but the chaotic editing, the weird cameo-treated scientist scenes, and the overall lack of humanity and patience for its characters, besides nolan's intense fascination with oppenheimer that borderlines hagiography, just doesn't work for me. nolan opts again for spectacle sensation because he has no interesting viewpoints on this other than a weak rumination that man has mechanically constructed their own apocalyptic end—which is not that hard to avow once you've read on this subject or heard of a device that can destroy over 200,000 lives almost instantaneously. i feel most overstate the contents of the film simply because it's based upon “the most important thing that’s ever happened in the history of the world!”

there's a sequence that takes place in an auditorium after the bombs have been dropped that i think adam nayman summed up best—"even when he reaches for literal horror movie effects in oppenheimer, the effect is weirdly feeble: neither subtle enough for genuine artistry nor scary enough for cheap sensationalism."—and that's kinda how i feel about the entire film.