Oppenheimer (2023)
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Oppenheimer Movie Review
Oppenheimer is a 2023 biographical film directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Cillian Murphy. It is one of the most overrated movies of the year.
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“Theory will take you only so far“
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A huge box office hit and even a phenomenon during the summer of this year, Oppenheimer was also lauded by critics and regularly cited as Nolan’s magnum opus. But for me personally this is one of his weakest movies, which says a lot as he has made quite a couple of lackluster films recently.
Going in I’d expected an epic period piece about the atomic bomb and its aftermath, but what I got was just another tired biopic, this time about the titular man and everything that he went through before and after the bombing of Japan. Watching this film, I was constantly reminded of Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘The Wind Rises’ as the two movies share a similar faith – they are both about an interesting subject surrounded by a fascinating moral dilemma, but both tried their damndest to evade exploring said dilemma.
Imagine filming a story about a man who made the bomb that decimated tens of thousands of lives and not deal with any moral or emotional baggage from that event. That is what Nolan basically did here as he set out to clutter the film with so many insignificant people, events and conflicts that made the movie insufferably boring to sit through.
The acting performances are uniformly strong, but watching the movie I got the feeling that Nolan just put all of these great actors to make viewers believe that their characters matter, but the vast majority do not. In fact, so many of these actors were entirely wasted on roles that were too minor and simply unnecessary for the bigger narrative. The majority of Oppenheimer consists of him meeting or arguing with many different people, which led me to believe that Nolan was just buying time with those scenes. His desperate quest to make a three-hour epic of a story that was barely two hours long was evident from the very beginning.
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How Florence Pugh, Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh among others were incorporated here was laughable as most of these actors got the smallest roles imaginable. Matt Damon was insufferably annoying and typecast. Casey Affleck fared somewhat better, but his role was also too small. And this brings me to Emily Blunt, who was so praised for her performance in this movie, but I cannot help but wonder if all of it is carefully orchestrated by the media. Yes, she plays a strong woman and her scene at the court is quite powerful, but she got so little to do here that she could have easily been cut from the movie and you wouldn’t have lost anything. Blunt delivered as she always does, but this weak role was simply not worthy of her talents.
But then you have someone like Robert Downey Jr. He plays a government official who was basically a rival to Oppenheimer. Through this character, Nolan wanted to channel ‘Amadeus’, but failed miserably. Downey was very good in the role undoubtedly, but the character was simply never all that interesting to me. In fact, I was actively trying to stay awake whenever this character was on screen.
The movie desperately trying to make him relevant to the overall story when he clearly wasn’t counts among those numerous terrible decisions that Nolan made while making this picture. Watching Oppenheimer as a whole was a frustrating experience of pinpointing everything that went wrong and all the small scenes and details that Nolan chose to accentuate for no valid reason whatsoever.
As for Cillian Murphy, he is without a question the best part of this movie. His performance is outstanding and he was immaculately cast in the role as he fitted it both physically and in terms of his mannerisms. He was excellent, but the role was just not good. Yes, Nolan here basically made a biopic instead of a period piece, which I would strongly prefer, but a biographical story should be a character study, which this movie tries to be, but mostly fails at.
I did not care about anything that happened in this man’s personal life as the female characters were not that well written and Nolan continues to be terrible at writing women and romance/sex scenes. Also, the movie ultimately left me with an empty feeling as I watched a three-hour story about J. Robert Oppenheimer and did not learn much about him. The psychological probing on his personality and his inner conflicts was done in a very haphazard manner, leading to another overly calculated, icy and inhuman movie from one of the coldest of filmmakers.
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Oppenheimer is lauded for its unique editing techniques. The movie is edited and structured in such a way that we jump from one time period to another until eventually it all leads to the bombing and its aftermath. While I did respect this approach from an artistic and originality standpoint, I still didn’t like it personally as it made the film jumbled and needlessly complicated.
The movie is very well shot with the black-and-white courtroom drama scenes contrasting the color ones well, but those courtroom scenes were still overly extended and frankly quite boring. The score is excellent and the sound mixing is better than usual for Nolan, but there is still the issue of the dialogue necessitating subtitles as too many actors do not speak properly, but whisper in a manner that is supposed to be cool, but it can only be so to the youngest of Nolanites. The dialogue is also ridiculously straightforward and lacking in subtlety, again confirming that Nolan is best suited for blockbuster filmmaking.
There is one scene near the end that I loved and hugely respected and that is the depiction of how American society and government work. They would use you, then they would destroy you, and eventually they would honor you when the time is right for them, but only on their own terms. Their lack of gratitude and respect for even their most accomplished citizens is well showcased here and I was surprised that Nolan would tackle it with such honesty. But unfortunately, this theme came way too late in the game with the rest of the movie not dealing with it whatsoever while also failing to grasp of the atomic bombing’s horrors.
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Watching Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer I was constantly reminded of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. Both films are set in WWII and deal with an interesting subject surrounded by a fascinating moral dilemma, but both tried their hardest to evade exploring said dilemma. But Nolan is not Miyazaki, so Oppenheimer was a much bigger waste of time. He continues to write dialogue that is so straightforward and unsubtle so as to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The editing and structure of the film are definitely unique, but jumping constantly from one time period to another led to a needlessly complicated narrative. There is that one phenomenal scene toward the end that depicted the lack of gratitude and respect that plagues American government and society, but other than that excellent theme, the movie is devoid of any thematic or emotional exploration of the atomic bombing and its aftermath. Nolan continues to be one of the coldest filmmakers today, so he failed to imbue the necessary emotions into what was supposed to be a biographical character study. Yes, the acting performances are uniformly strong with Cillian Murphy being the standout, but his character ended up being hollow while the rest fared much worse, most actors being delegated to either cameos or ridiculously small roles not worthy of their talents. Watching Oppenheimer, I was constantly baffled by Nolan’s insistence to make so many terrible storytelling choices consecutively, which goes to show that he is capable of ruining even the material that could be rich soil in the hands of any more competent filmmaker.
My Rating – 2.5
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