Macbeth:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

I've always maintained, with respect to many masters, that some of the best anti-war films are those that show the least amount of actual war.

This film on IMAX was definitely an appropriate presentation form. Not a hagiography of Oppenheimer--or Einstein for that matter. I've never seen Einstein presented as a ... well just a guy. A very smart guy, but a guy subject to the same forces of nature we are all subject to: young upstarts thinking they're smarter and better than we are--and being dead wrong about the 'better' part. Age is the great equalizer, where you realize one day that you now know as much as those who came before us, which was far more than we knew before that point comes, and far less for those in the times to come. Hopefully. I really hope so.

I love the fact that this film exists. It's like a gulp of water at the oasis after a desperate touch and go trek thru the desert. Nolan does not spoon feed anyone here: if you don't know about the context of the start or end of WW2, then some of the gravitas and urgency of the film may be lost, but that is on you, the uninformed viewer. That is not a criticism at all: I've watched plenty of films where afterwards I've done a deep dive and gone and soaked up all kinds of information. Then the pleasure of rewatching is exquisite.

Casting-wise, this is a treasure trove. Pugh finally--finally--acting. Cillian Murphy carries the movie for sure, and Matt Damon injects some needed gravitas, verve and humour into the proceedings, but all around you can feel Nolan's presence guiding this. Yes of course the wife is the smartest of them all according to the script but this indulgence is a small price to pay. Anyone who thinks Nolan would end this film on the successful test of the first atom bomb, or a dramatic shot of the Enola Gay floating above Honshu, is being naive. The movie is called "Oppenheimer", not "Bomb" and even though it's a biopic, that is still not quite the point: Nolan's theme, to put it simply, is "uncertainty". The fact that Heisenberg is a key figure lurking in the back of Oppenheimer's mind attests to this. It's not just a bomb guy film. This reductive view must be consoling for some, especially those who would laughably equate the Barbie movie on an equal footing as far as the movie's "importance" goes.

No, they do not dig into Oppenheimer's personal life super deeply since that would be irrelevant to the ethical spine of the story. Sugar coat it as you will, but this film is about a scientist and the uncertainty (potential chaos, if you will) that his science has unleashed upon humanity: much like Prometheus and even Pandora for that matter. These myths speak to the power of our curiosity even in the face of a potential horrible unknown--hell, it's the unknowns we're curious about. So the personal and political factors edge from focal point to mere factors in the other considerations of the 'fall-out' of that successful test. But the political fall-out is part of that; no one could have thought Oppenheimer would be disgraced in such a way. It's not empty intrigue from Nolan: it's all part and parcel of enormous discoveries. That is where the film ventures into real adult stuff. Ethics, politics, appearances and expectations versus harsh realities, painful realizations that our arrogance towards our primitive past has now reached a point of crisis: Prometheus was punished by the gods for a reason. They were wiser, and knew that humanity could not curtail its pathological curiosity. Our greatest strength and weakness. For fuck's sake, in the Christian Bible God doesn't even trust us with a single fucking apple, much less fire.

Suffice it to say, the film expects the audience to have a certain basic knowledge of history, but not necessarily of Oppenheimer himself (WW2 is not a key 'player' here except as motivation, plain and simple). Nolan's effects are effective, and a much more subtle version than those of Interstellar, but what surprised me is the efficacy of the soundtrack and the sound itself. If this movie is allowed to qualify for the Oscars (which have painted themselves into an increasingly irrelevant corner artistically), it should win a lot. As far as I can tell, however, it won't qualify for the new parameters for any significant award. That says more about the Oscars than this film, however. This picture film is very relevant to today, but to be frank ever since I was a kid and did nuclear war drills in elementary school, I have found the potential extinction of humanity by nuclear war to be a very important issue.