BEFORE: Gary Oldman carries over from "Murder in the FIrst", and I can't wait any longer, I've got a day off so let's finally get to "Oppenheimer", Best Picture winner that's streaming on the popular (?) Peacock platform.
Yeah, I went back and forth on this, and at first I wanted to come here straight from "A Haunting in Venice", but then I thought, maybe delay it again so it will be Big Movie 4,700, but screw it, because you know what, it's Robert Downey Jr.'s birthday, so a special big Oscar-worthy Birthday SHOUT-out to him. It will probably take me at least a day to write my review, or maybe one day just to go through the overly enormous CAST, so maybe I'll have to skip a day after watching this, but really, come on, if not now, then WHEN? That's my new motto.
I have not programmed beyond this point, which is a very unsettling feeling. But OK, first thing I do after I post this review is figure out the path to Mother's Day. I know where I want to go, I know how many steps it needs to take (high and low, trying to give myself a few days off in April and May) really, I just need to find the path. The problem is, from here I can go JUST about anywhere, it links to no less than 31 films on my list. But if I drop out the horror movies and the romances, and also the documentaries, then it's less - just 12 films, but that's still a lot. I'm going to have to maybe work backwards from the Mother's Day films. I could watch "Dumb Money" and then "Barbie", but then I'm up against the "Barbenheimer" thing, or maybe in my case that would be "Opp-bie", and I don't want to do that. It's stupid.
THE PLOT: The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.
AFTER: OK, I'm just not seeing it, did I miss something? This is a three-hour movie that had about 10 minutes of excitement to it, and then the rest was all jumping around in time, following four different threads, one of which was a Senate confirmation for a cabinet position, and the other was a meeting to renew Oppenheimer's security clearance for his job as head of the Atomic Energy Commission. What the HELL? If I wanted to watch government hearings, I'd tune into C-SPAN and watch whatever, but that's just not my thing. Sorry, this was a BIG swing but also a BIG miss. How the heck did this get nominated for Best Picture, let alone win the award? I'm sorry, but I enjoyed "Maestro" more, the OTHER film about an older white man who cheated on his wife, but at least Leonard Bernstein DID something positive, he composed music that everyone liked, what the hell did Oppenheimer do that was productive, not destructive? You feel my point?
I sat through THREE HOURS of this on Peacock and when all was said and done, I just didn't feel like I learned enough about what, exactly, took place at Los Alamos, and that's what I came here for, I got all excited by the fact that I loved Christopher Nolan's last two films, "Interstellar" and "Tenet", in which he got space travel and then time travel RIGHT (I suppose, if that's possible) and blew my mind both times. Now I watch "Oppenheimer", thinking I'm going to learn about the nuts-and-bolts of atomic energy, how the team of the Manhattan Project was put together, who did what, and why, and how it all came to be during World War II, I mean, these were events that changed the WORLD, and instead I get stuck in not one government hearing, but TWO? Bogged down in politics, when what I really wanted to see was SCIENCE. Oh, sure, there was a little bit at the beginning, when Oppie sort of explained how stars work, they're giant furnaces and the forces of gravity and fusion are sort of working against each other, and then someday the fuel is all used up and they contract and maybe form black holes. I get that this is the energy they're trying to re-create with an atom bomb, but how EXACTLY are the two things related, stars and bombs? I know you can't give out really specific details in a film, because then somebody will go and try to make a bomb at home, but come on, give me SOMETHING.
Sure, these scientists were working in uncharted territory, so they maybe didn't know themselves - like at one point Edward Teller's calculations seemed to suggest that the bomb's chain reaction would never stop, and thus engulf and destroy the Earth, but no, they double-checked it with Einstein and found out that Teller just didn't carry the "2" or something. THIS stuff I find fascinating, if the whole movie had been like this, then no complaints from me, not at all. But other than (sort of) understanding how an A-bomb is different from an H-bomb, really, I have to walk away being just as dumbfounded by the whole process as ever. Meanwhile, I felt I really understood the part of "Interstellar" when Matthew McConnaughey's character was somehow younger than his granddaughter, because he'd been traveling through space very fast, and then "Tenet" was basically THE BEST movie ever made about time travel and how that all might "work" in the real world, and I stayed up all night so my brain could work out why that car was being driven right into oncoming traffic - and damn if Nolan didn't get that shit spot on.
So really, this is maybe the "Willow Effect", named after George Lucas's filmography misstep - here was the guy who created the "Star Wars" trilogy and also co-created "Indiana Jones", and then he decides to make "Willow" and most of us were disappointed because it was a fantasy film for children, and nothing like what we'd come to expect from him. I mean, it could be worse, "Oppenheimer" isn't exactly Nolan's "Howard the Duck", but it's possibly his "Willow" - meaning it's a fine film, but only fine, it's not my cup of tea though, and it's definitely NOT what I was expecting to encounter.
Silly me, I see a film called "Oppenheimer", and I think it's going to be all about Oppenheimer, and then it's not, big parts of it are about Admiral Lewis Strauss, and I don't know who that is, and I just don't care who that is, in the end. Even if he was Oppenheimer's nemesis, even if he got his security clearance pulled, and even if that came back to bite him in the tuchus when he was trying to become Secretary of Commerce under Eisenhower, I JUST DON'T CARE. I'd rather shoot myself in the head than watch a senate confirmation hearing, and that's what I got here, again and again, this movie kept cutting back to it. They could have cut out an hour's worth of footage focused on Strauss and it wouldn't have mattered, in fact I think that would have made the film better, more focused on Los Alamos and also an hour shorter. THEN you'd have a movie.
What's worse is that "Oppenheimer" kept cutting between four (?) time periods - A) 1926 to 1938, when Oppenheimer studied in Europe, began teaching in California and got married to Kitty, B) 1942 to 1945, covering the recruitment of Oppenheimer by the government to lead the Manhattan Project and develop the atomic bomb, C) 1954, when there was a hearing before a Personnel Security Board to decide whether to renew Oppenheimer's clearance as an advisor to the AEC, and D) 1959, the Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss, which to me is the "WHO CARES" portion of the movie. (Again, Drop part D, you don't need it, you've got more than enough movie already...)
What's weird is that the scenes in 1959 are in black and white, while the rest of the film is in color. Normally in these movies that take place over a long period of time, you'd expect the OLDER parts to be in black and white, because color film didn't exist in the early 1900's. This is how "Maestro" worked, the early Bernstein years were filmed in B&W, and also in a screen ratio similar to what was used in the 1940's, then the 1950's scenes were in color and a different ratio, and then finally the scenes in the 1970's were in better color and wide-screen, that makes SENSE. Seeing the 1930's in color and the 1959 scenes in black and white, that doesn't work for me. According to Wiki, this was done to represent the scenes WITH Oppenheimer being first-person, and the scenes without him (the Senate hearing) being third-person. Objective vs. subjective, but it was more confusing to me than anything else.
Then there's ALL the editing, back and forth between the years, creating the false impression that all of these things are happening at once, but how could they be, they're happening in separate years? The film this reminded me most of is "Slaughterhouse Five", but in that film the cutting between decades was justified, because Billy Pilgrim's consciousness was traveling between his older and younger bodies, so the movie's narrative followed him between the different eras, and we similarly pieced the timeline of his life together, even though the scenes were not presented in proper chronological order. So I kept thinking that maybe Mr. Oppenheimer was going to end up in an alien zoo on the planet Tralfamadore and be given the power to time travel within his own lifetime, thus justifying the odd structure of the story. It didn't happen, but I think it could have improved things, it would certainly have been less boring.
So had time become fractured, or (much more likely) did they write or film the movie in sequence, then realize how freaking BORING 90% of it was, so they decide to edit between the timelines to keep it interesting, keep the audience on their toes, trying to figure out not just WHAT is happening, but WHEN is everything happening? I hate that, I know they didn't just toss all the film clips into the air and then pick them up randomly, but it kind of feels like it? I know, ideally using this technique we're supposed to gain insight into the different events by seeing how they're juxtaposed against each other, and supposedly if it's done right then all the necessary information in each decade gets revealed, eventually, but only when we all NEED to know it - or again, it's just a cheap editing trick to make the boring parts seem more interesting, because they can just cut to a different decade whenever things start to lag. But for THREE HOURS of this, after a while, doesn't it just get annoying?
I tell you what could have really worked here, if they started the film jumping between the four parts (only two of them are labelled, 1. Fusion and 2. Fission, but I just don't understand it...because there are FOUR timelines, not 2) and had an average shot length of, let's say four minutes. Then gradually, as the first hour of the film spools out, the average shot length could be cut down to, say, two minutes per shot. The audience might not notice it outright, but they'd get this unconscious FEELING that things are speeding up, that we're building to something, it would create an anticipation of sorts, just based on shot length alone. Then by the end of the second hour, we're down to cuts of 20 or 30 seconds, and we're going crazy, feeling that something big is going to happen, and this is sort of what happened here, because those scenes in the 2nd hour of the famous Trinity bomb test, right before it there's a LOT of quick action cuts as everyone, soldiers and scientists, are preparing for the big test, doing the countdown, OH MY GOD what is going to happen? Then, of course - BOOM! or should I say (shh...shh...shh...BOOM!) because the scientists and the camera are so far away from the explosion that it is essentially silent, because light is faster than sound, and you SEE it a few minutes before you HEAR it, the film gets that right. Then, when the sound and the pressure finally reach you, it's very loud, of course. And this film DID also win the Academy Award for Editing, but if it deserved it, it's because of those 10 minutes of excitement, not the stupid quick-cutting between the different decades, which makes no narrative sense. Why can't we just tell this story with the beginning at the beginning, the middle in the middle and the end at the end, or would that just be so boring and normal that we'd all just go insane and poke our own eyes out?
(EDIT: the morning after I watched this film, there was an earthquake in the NYC / New Jersey area. Very loud, it woke me up around 10:20 am - and I couldn't help but think that if someone in the very large affected zone happened to wake up early in order to start watching "Oppenheimer" around 8 am, or maybe 8:05, they would have reached the critical moment of the atom bomb test at a time that synched up with the earthquake. So for that person, the part that was supposed to be silent could have been very loud, and might seem interactive. That person's mind would be completely blown, as the most explosive scene in the movie would have appeared to shake their entire house.)
The other problem here, again in my opinion, is that so much time was spent on Strauss' fall from grace that it never really explored Oppenheimer's, we do get a bit of what was going on his head, whatever guilt he carried with him for his role in creating the atom bomb that killed over 200,000 Japanese people, many of whom were civilians. It's almost an afterthought here, but shouldn't that be the focus, on the ONLY time that nuclear weapons were used in an armed conflict, and that civilians were targeted? OK, sure, it's easy enough to blame President Truman, but Oppenheimer and his team's work enabled that to happen. We get ONE dream sequence where Oppie envisions the bomb's effect on people, but it's not nearly enough. And Truman called him a "crybaby", is that enough to absolve him? I don't happen to think so.
Yes, there's the argument that if Oppenheimer hadn't been involved, then it's possible that the Germans could have developed the bomb first, and the world would have been very different - but as the film points out, the Germans maybe never would have succeeded because Hitler didn't want to listen to Jewish scientists, such as Einstein and others. So therefore it's "better" that the U.S. had the bomb, but is it really? 200,000 Japanese souls might disagree. We're now in a position to blame Palestine for killing Jewish civilians, and Israel for killing Palestinian civilians, but WE did that, the United States, we killed Japanese civilians. It was in the interest of ending World War II and saving the lives of American soldiers, but it's still a shitty thing that WE did, thanks to Truman. And Oppenheimer.
The other argument is that nuclear war became its OWN deterrent, and sure, I can kind of see that, once the nuclear bomb existed, and then other countries developed them, only a crazy person would use them at all, because of the mutually assured destruction response of another country. Still, we could have done better in World War II, the U.S. didn't HAVE to blow up two cities, let alone one. We could have demonstrated the power of the bomb by blowing up an uninhabited island near Japan, and the point would still have been made. Or sent the message, 'Hey, you guys like Mount Fuji? Well, maybe stay away from it next Thursday, because we're going to blow half it up, just to show you what we can do, then we expect to hear about your surrender." Well, it could have worked. But it was a different time, it's just shocking to see a U.S. President talk about foreigners like they don't matter, like they're not even human. (What am I saying, of course Trump does this, all the time!)
Again, there's about 10 exciting minutes, and an hour's worth of interesting material here about what went on at Los Alamos, but that's not a good ratio for a three-hour film. I essentially had to watch a full OTHER movie I didn't want to see to watch the stuff that I did want to see, which was to see which white male actor would be cast as which atomic scientist, who did they get to play Richard Feynman, who did they cast as Albert Einstein, who got cast as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi? That's the fun part to me, the Senate hearing section was duller than dirt, even with the actor who played young Han Solo in it and that other guy who was in "Music in the Heart" and also "I'm Dying Up Here". I guess maybe you can play another game where you try to figure out which member of the Los Alamos team was spying for the Russians, but really, I'm kind of grasping at straws there.
Everybody knows the famous quote that Oppenheimer supposedly said after watching the successful test of the atomic bomb - "Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds." And now we all won't be able to remember that without thinking of Florence Pugh, naked, and holding up a book during sex so he can read that in Sanskrit. Umm, thanks for that, I guess?
Maybe I'm misreading this whole movie, look if you watched it and you enjoyed it, if you voted for it as Best Picture, or you wanted it to win, or you felt that it deserved to win, that's fine. But I have a feeling that a lot of Academy members voted for it because it FELT important, even if they didn't fully understand it or the editing wasn't very well executed, it seems like the subject matter may have outshined the method and the medium. But I HAVE to compare it to the director's other work, which I vastly preferred. "Interstellar" was an 8 for me, and "Tenet" was a 9, and I know this is a different film, but comparing Nolan's films, I have to rate this one less than I rated both of those, I just didn't enjoy it as much.
But I want to close tonight with a different quote, or actually two. When I started this blog in 2009, I had an idea to add a quote from a song lyric at the end of each review, to make some kind of insightful point, and then I just never got around to doing that. But last week I was alone in the office and I re-discovered a song mix I made a few years ago, all cover songs, which I did, and it starts with Supertramp's "Give a Little Bit" covered by Goo Goo Dolls, then follows that with Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" covered by Everclear, and so on, ending with Steve Winwood's "Back in the High Life Again" covered by Warren Zevon. Somewhere in there is The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" covered by Limp Bizkit, and also Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" covered by Scissor Sisters. Seeing Cillian Murphy's piercing blue eyes made me think of the lyrics of the Who song though:
"No one knows what it's like to be the bad man, to be the sad man, behind blue eyes.
And no one knows what it's like to be hated, to be fated, to telling only lies.
But my dreams, they aren't as empty as my conscience seems to be.
I have hours, only lonely, my love is vengeance that's never free."
So that reminds me of "Oppenheimer" now, and so does this song by Tom Lehrer, who was a Harvard professor and part-time songwriter and performer back in the 1950's and 60's, and he wrote several songs about the bomb and nuclear war, but one was called "Who's Next?":
"First we got the bomb and that was good, 'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's OK, 'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way!
Who's next?
Egypt's gonna get one, too, Just to use on you-know-who.
So Israel's getting tense, Wants one in self-defense.
'The Lord's our shepherd,' says the psalm, But just in case, we better get a bomb!
Who's next?"
There are more verses, but I think that's enough to highlight the hypocrisy of the nuclear politics, every country wanted one for themselves and didn't want their enemy to have one, not even as a deterrent, because really, in this world, it's every man for himself. Right?
Also starring Cillian Murphy (last seen in "A Quiet Place Part II"), Emily Blunt (last seen in "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen"), Matt Damon (last seen in "Air"), Robert Downey Jr. (last seen in "Val"), Florence Pugh (last seen in "Don't Worry Darling"), Josh Hartnett (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Casey Affleck (last seen in "The Last Kiss"), Rami Malek (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Kenneth Branagh (last seen in "A Haunting in Venice"), Benny Safdie (last seen in "Person to Person"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "Child 44"), Dylan Arnold (last seen in "Mudbound"), Tom Conti (last seen in "Paddington 2"), James D'Arcy (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"), Dane DeHaan (last seen in "A Cure for Wellness"), Alden Ehrenreich (last seen in "Cocaine Bear"), Tony Goldwyn (last seen in "All I Wish"), Jefferson Hall (last seen in "Tenet"), David Krumholtz (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Matthew Modine (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Scott Grimes (last seen in "Winter's Tale"), Kurt Koehler, John Gowans (last seen in "Charlie Says"), Macon Blair (last seen in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"), Gregory Jbara (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Harry Groener (also last seen in "A Cure for Wellness"), Tim DeKay (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Matthias Schweighofer (last seen in "Heart of Stone"), Alex Wolff (last seen in "Thoroughbreds"), Josh Zuckerman (last seen in "Sex Drive"), Rory Keane, Michael Angarano (last seen in "Empire State"), Emma Dumont (last seen in "Nobody Walks"), Guy Burnet (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Louise Lombard (last seen in "Hidalgo"), Tom Jenkins, Olli Haaskivi (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), David Rysdahl, Josh Peck (last seen in "The Wedding Ringer"), Jack Quaid (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Gustaf Skarsgard (also last seen in "Air"), James Urbaniak (last seen in "Beauty"), Trond Fausa, Devon Bostick (last seen in "Godsend"), Danny Deferrari (last seen in "Three Christs"), Christopher Denham (last seen in "Fast Color"), Jessica Erin Martin, Ronald Auguste, Máté Haumann (last seen in "Hercules"), Olivia Thirlby (last seen in "The Answer Man"), Jack Cutmore-Scott (also last seen in "Tenet"), Harrison Gilbertson, James Remar (last seen in "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie"), Will Roberts, Pat Skipper (last seen in "Babylon"), Ryan Stubo (ditto), Steve Coulter (last seen in "Shotgun Wedding"), Hap Lawrence (last seen in "Altered States"), Ted King (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Steven Houska, Sadie Stratton, Britt Kyle, Michael Andrew Baker (last seen in "King Richard"), Troy Bronson, Ross Buran, Flora Nolan, Alan Duncan, Christine Heneise, Brendan McManus, David Phyfer.
RATING: 6 out of 10 marbles in a snifter glass (I didn't see the point of this, either...)
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