Movies & TV

I liked the movie (which frankly surprised me because, well, Nolan) but there are a few scenes where Oppenheimer meets famous physicists and they're treated with this -I think unintentionally hilarious- bizarre reverence.

For instance there's a scene where Oppenheimer goes to see a talk by Niels Bohr, and Bohr is standing in this packed room, all eyes on him, lecturing. I can't remember exactly now, but the blocking makes it look like he's standing over everyone, as if he were a literal larger-than-life figure, or something else similarly dramatic. It really was like an MCU superhero cameo. And there's similar scenes when Oppenheimer meets Einstein and Heisenberg, with slightly different emotional beats. (Heisenberg is presented as a villain, Einstein is a wizened mentor/death/fate figure (the whole movie is framed as a Greek tragedy, it literally starts with a card that says 'Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.'))

But, to be fair, this portion of the movie is supposed to be Oppenheimer's subjective view of the world, so it was probably meant to reflect Oppenheimer's own reverence for these men, and his ambition to one day be seen as among their number. Still pretty funny though.

Right now I like the movie, but I'm not sure how I'll feel about it when I watch it again in a year or two. I do think pretty much everything Cillian Murphy did was fantastic, but then there was stuff like the above, or as you say the senate hearing at the end. I think Ehrenreich's senate aide character even says something cheesy to RDJ's Strauss like "Oppenheimer had bigger fish to fry" right before Strauss is publicly embarrassed. So I doubt that'll look so good once removed from the spectacle of the movie theater and the first viewing. I dislike the term middlebrow, but unfortunately I think it's a pretty apt descriptor for Nolan as a director. Though he took a swing for the fences with this one, I'll give him that, but it's Murphy who really carries the whole thing. And the movie around him just doesn't live up to his performance (which, imo, is a running theme in Nolan films).