One part Great Man Theory with tons of navel gazing and genuflecting to a handful of star figures. One part Sorkin-esque courtroom drama.
Zero parts fun.
Three fucking hours long.
Don't waste your money on this shit bag, folks.
One part Great Man Theory with tons of navel gazing and genuflecting to a handful of star figures. One part Sorkin-esque courtroom drama.
Zero parts fun.
Three fucking hours long.
Don't waste your money on this shit bag, folks.
I liked it but it was such a Nolan movie. Every physicist is introduced like they're a superhero. JFK gets namedropped at the end like he's a minor Marvel character being set up for a future movie
They had an hour's worth of political ahem thriller around whether a guy gets a Senate appointment to the Eisenhower cabinet.
They completely ignored so much of the crazy shit that went down during the actual project.
All this shit was breezed over so they could make a movie about Oppenheimer not being a Communist.
This is the only actual good critique in the thread. However I'd add that they make clear that he was a communist-sympathizer. He betrays them however, morally speaking.
It also seems a bit reductive. These are legit points to make but they do strike me (and forgive me if this is not the case) as a very American thing were people judge a film based on whether particular 'cool' or 'important' things happened, whereas movies as an art-form and not just entertainment, and beyond highlighting everything political which we would like them to, can also use formal visual and musical language to convey other themes and ideas. I'd say the film has some clear strenghts in terms of the latter while agreeing with you that it has some clear weaknesses in terms of the former.
At the end of the day, I think the back third of the movie was a giant waste of time and talent.
Whatever you might say about Oppenheimer, spending a solid hour of filming on Lewis Strauss fuming over a Senate deposition was foolish.
Whether you want to argue that every movie needs Cillian Murphy picking up girls at a party for artistic merit or that spending more than five seconds of screen time on the Chicago Pile is going to make the movie about the advent of nuclear energy drag...
I agree that it slows down considerably in the final third. I enjoyed it, but it was more there to convey how he isn't going to escape some consequences, and that he won't have the glory he wants. By this point we've already seen some personal consequences, as with Jean and his relationship with his wife. The communists on the team at Los Alamos also face consequences, which is contrasted to his tragedy (which is rather more pathetic), of people both a world icon and deprived of the social power to correspond to the technological power he has helped unleash. The state turning on him was a necessary consequence, and I guess Nolan wanted to do his classic interweaving of time frames and narrative by having a key betrayal come from the narrator. He is also just a disposable human being, a weapon, for the American military industrial complex. This implies even more strongly the Red Scare climate of distrust. I enjoyed it but I agree it was the weaker part of the film.
Nolan is still of course fixating on the tragedy of a 'human, all too human' man. Just because I can critique it as Marxist in whatever way that might be, doesn't really take away from any of the positives that such a story can still have. I've never really understand looking at art otherwise. People can still read the Iliad and come away moved and informed by its strengths as art without having to have a noncritical relationship to it or to the society it was created in and to the views of the social class whose ideals it represents. It seems to me reductive and immature when I see people claim that all art that isn't explicitly calling for revolution is evil/reactionary/shouldn't be liked, or whatever (I'm not saying that you think this). Art in the most basic sense is simply a social activity in which human beings produce meanings, ideas and narratives to give meaning to their lives. It can of course have other functions and properties, especially since it exists in a class society, and while one duty of art should be political, the latter in no conceivable way exhausts what art is. Sometime people want flowers and explosions because they are exhausted and alienated by their lives, and that's fine. The fact that people turn to art in their alienation is not at all necessarily an issue to me, no more than seeking psychiatric help.
yes, also the scale and the compartmentalization that the big science guys at the top famously did not have to heed.
"A 1945 Life article estimated that before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved." The magazine wrote that the more than 100,000 others employed with the project "worked like moles in the dark". Warned that disclosing the project's secrets was punishable by 10 years in prison or a fine of US$10,000 (equivalent to $163,000 in 2022), they saw enormous quantities of raw materials enter factories with nothing coming out and monitored "dials and switches while behind thick concrete walls mysterious reactions took place" without knowing the purpose of their jobs."
JFK will return in JFK 2: Return to Dallas
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