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.
My lib relatives called it anti-communist propaganda because it was anti-union. They also didn't like that Oppi's gf was not portrayed as the chemists she was and a general erasure of women in the manhattan project.
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I really do not understand how anyone came away from the movie thinking it was anti-union.
The communists are portrayed by far the most positively in moral terms. His wife's lapse from communist has deeply affected her negatively. Her arguments for not engaging in radical politics are bad, and the movie makes it clear they are bad when Oppenheimer calls out her bullshit about not supporting the Spanish Republic against fascism.
Her later being humorously combative about it with the feds, which is admirable, doesn't mean we are supposed to interpret this positive character trait as saying her anti-communism is now good. I don't even know if in real life she really did renounce communism (in her heart of woteva). If she didn't then the film shouldn't have portrayed this as actually the case. I need to read the biography the film was based on.
Also:
spoiler
When Jean dies, it seems like the film was hinting that she was murdered, as the suicide note didn't have a signature, and for an instant I thought it looked like another person's hand was pushing her head down into the water.
I dont know I haven’t seen the movie, but doesn’t that seem a lot like putting a positive spin on it? Why would hollywood produce a pro-communist movie? Especially with the strikes?
I mean, Amazon Prime has Boots Riley's series up and that literally has a character twice stop the action for 5 minutes to explain how the falling rate of profit causes a downward cycle of oppression and openly address the audience and call them to revolution.
Capitalism attempts to subsume everything into itself. Sometime of course it ends up like the final boss of Quake 1 because of it
Nolan is one of v v few big budget writer-directors who get pretty much carte blanche to do whatever. Not a lot of pesky oversight.
I mean I was also positively suprised. I thought it was was going to be way more anti-communist. Nolan is still critical of the communists, but my impression is that he sees them more as naive rubes being indirectly manipulated by the Soviets abroad and unjustly persecuted by the government at home.
I think at the end of the day that Nolan's view on the matter is more just a soc dem's. I think he's abstractly sympathetic but more of a pessimist about radical politics in general. None of this takes away from the point that the anti-communists are unequivocally the principal antagonists in this film.
Also, human beings, including artists, are practically contradictory. They might be an asshole in real life and have wack political opinions, while still being able to craft a story that has a positive view of people's desire for economic rights.
I thought I saw a hand pushing her into the water as well