Oppenheimer (2023)

Rated R for sex, nudity, and genocide. If that combo isn't the most punk rock combination for an R-rating, I don't know what is.  In terms of questionable content, it all kind of fits tonally.  Considering the content, it isn't surprising that the tone of the movie is quite bleak.  There's also a suicide in the film, matching the tone of the other stuff that is in the movie.  We don't see that much viscera or gore, but it is present in brief imagery.  The sex and nudity, as much as it could be argued as gratuitous, is more depressing than anything else, explaining a lot about Oppenheimer's personality.  Still, R it is.

DIRECTOR:  Christopher Nolan

Part of me was ready to hate this.  I didn't want to hate this.  Honestly, if I could have had the freedom to Barbenheimer this movie, I would have.  Mostly, my feelings about this movie come from my genuine weariness when it comes to biopics.  My complaint about the biopic is that they have a formula.  You wouldn't think that real lives would line up in a formula, but they tend to, especially around Oscar season.  Oppenheimer is more of a Christopher Nolan movie than it is actually a member of the subgenre biopic.  For better or worse, Christopher Nolan really Nolan's it up. I say that for the better.  I've been a little tired when it comes to Nolan over the past few movies.  He's an incredible director.  Absolutely incredible.  That being said, part of me has grown weary of the distortion of temporal storytelling coupled with every shot being filmed in upper case.  

Oppenheimer, however, absolutely lends itself to Nolan's means of storytelling.  That eternal crescendo kind of works because the movie, if I had to lay it out on paper in the worst way possible, is a nerd who really thinks abstractly.  How hard is that to film? We've had lots of films about geniuses and, I'll even go as far as to say that these were good movies.  But we've trodden over that ground.  If my hatred of biopics is that they are all based on formula, you need someone like Nolan to redefine what a biopic could be.  The funny thing is, I like a very different part than what I thought this movie could be.  Again, Oppenheimer is causing me to question what I like or dislike in a movie.  This is a three hour + movie.  It did that thing that I often absolutely abhor in long movies: it's really two movies.  Oppenheimer is that.  It is two movies and one of the movies is better than the other one.  But for the first time in my memory, that first movie only makes the second movie better.

The first movie is what you think it is going to be.  It's that nerd growing up and figuring out how to do what no one else could do.  There are false starts and fears that history won't play out the way that it is supposed to.  There's a lot of "What if...?" that ultimately goes nowhere.  But the first half of the movie, with Oppenheimer meeting all of these famous theoretical physicists and that's all cool.  But while that's all historically fascinating, Nolan uses this time to paint the picture of a man almost detached from reality.  Sure, a lot of geniuses tend to be a little bit off.  I understand that. But Robert Oppenheimer is also this tumultous bag of angels and demons constantly at it.  He's this guy who tried to kill his professor / tutor for scolding him, a man that he admits to liking quite a bit. He's also this guy who is thoroughly political.  But he doesn't really view politics through the lens of the impassioned.  So much of these political moments are almost like a scientist observing an ant colony.  There's an understanding that something of value is happening without the passion that would come with something like that.

By the time the first bomb goes off, the one we see on screen, we see this complex guy whose genius allows him to dodge and weave through situations that don't really want him there.  He's the guy in the room who is always right and we see him make enemies with so many people, even people that would consider themselves friends.  It's what makes Strauss so interesting.  Nolan got me.  He 100% got me.  I knew that Robert Downey Jr.'s Lewis Strauss was a big character who was going to be tied to Oppenheimer.  But when that shoe dropped, I was all on board.  It took that first movie, the making of the bomb, to reveal a villain character and that was a villain that I wasn't prepared for.  Robert Oppenheimer is a hard man to root for.  He's a guy who made a bomb that killed so many people.  He redefined what war and peace meant in the 20th Century.  In case you needed more to dislike about him, he's a guy that continually cheats on his wife and doesn't seem all that moved by it.  There's almost nothing redeemable about this man and yet, he becomes the absolute hero of the film.  Yeah, I didn't see that coming.

Part of that is that Oppenheimer did a lot of the wrong things for the right reasons.  But the bigger element is that this is a story about a man finding his humanity in his mistakes. He never full on says that he shouldn't have invented the bomb.  The images in his head echo a very different story.  He sees people being wiped off in horrifying burning sequences and that says enough.  But he has this odd moral fiber that is built from the beginning of the story into something very different.  It's like watching the scientist become the ant.  The second half of the movie is not only the acknowledgement that workers need rights.  He never completely divorces himself from the philsophies that associated him from the communist party, but instead builds a vocal following about disarmament and the closing of an arms race.  That's what makes Strauss such a fascinating villain.  I mean, he's Trump, right? I don't want to be that obvious with my read on the character and why I love the movie so much.

But there's this politician / admiral who, the second that someone might be talking negatively about him, burns the world around one person.  Those last shots of the movie, by the way?  Chef's kiss.  I can't sell that last reveal of the movie without losing my mind about the effect it has on the film.  When they reveal that Oppenheimer and Einstein had no thoughts about Strauss one way or another, that's what I needed to see. It's almost like someone else was viewing the world through my eyes.  Strauss is this guy who sees himself as the good guy of the story and forgets that this isn't about himself.  Oppenheimer, for the evil that he unleashed on the world, is this guy who is within sight of putting the genie back in the bottle and it's a guy like Strauss who is so insecure about how people think about him that he can't even imagine that he's not on the radar of two of the smartest people on the planet?  It's just something to unpack.

I want to have a bit of time to write about Kitty in this movie.  I am not quite sure what I want to say about her.  There are so many wheels in motion with this movie, especially considering that this is the most insanely cast movie that I can imagine.  But Kitty is her own thing.  We don't get a lot of Kitty as a character.  I was about midway through the movie and I don't think that there was a scene that didn't have Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer on screen.  We don't get time to really unpack her as a character.  We get that's she's a little bit selfish because both Robert and Kitty decide to get rid of their child for their own mental health.  (Sorry, I get frustrated by stuff like that.)  But Act III Kitty is something to be reckoned with.  For a chunk of the movie, she is just the doting housewife, ensuring that Robert can do his job.  Okay, that's fine.  But when she's being attacked by Strauss's people, he becomes something very different.  I love that last shot with her.  There's something interesting about how Robert Oppenheimer treats people that conflict with him.  He's this guy who is crucified and set up for failure.  His weird detached personality doesn't allow him to really show emotion. That's why we have Kitty. There's the scene towards the end when we get the coda for Robert.  He's shaking hands with people who denounced him in the hearing and Kitty's the one who is allowing the emotions to show.  It's an interesting choice.

Golly, I was not prepared for this movie to go as hard as it did.  I mean, I knew it was going to be great.  But I thought that this was going to be a bro movie like a lot of Nolan's other movies. Instead, it's this fascinating character study coupled with gorgeous images.  It's more of a political drama than a traditional biopic.  I really wish that I could Barbenheimer  sometime because I loved both movies so much,  Honestly, it might be a three hour movie that I watch again.  I mean, I own it now on 4K.  I'm sure that'll give me an excuse to really watch this closely again.  But I'm going to keep giving Christopher Nolan the benefit of the doubt because this was a work of art.  It's paced beautifully.  It's intense start to finish.  I looks gorgeous. This movie is marvelously crafted for being such a bummer of a movie.