The sex scene where Florence Pugh's character randomly is like "hehe what's that book 🤪" and then Oppenheimer's like "hehe it says now i am become death destroyer of worlds 😜" was genuinely one of the most bafflingly dumb scenes I have ever witnessed in a movie. The actual video of Oppenheimer's delivery was literally a perfect depiction of the emotions that this movie should have portrayed and yet they still somehow completely missed it.
Literally I was looking for a comment that said exactly this. I have finally watched the movie today and I can’t believe they actually did such a “rendition” of like you said, the real Oppenheimer’s emotional delivery. The line is said again in the movie after that but the first one truly has to be the most pointless and stupid movie scenes I’ve ever seen. It actually made me mad
For me personally, the overwhelmingly high volume of cuts and the near-nonstop flow of dialogue were the two things that stopped me from enjoying this movie as much as I wanted to. The golden rule of storytelling is "show, don't tell," and I kind of feel that about 80 percent of this movie broke that rule. Especially in a drama, dialogue is most effective when it is used as a tool to paint a picture of characters' personalities, not as a way to give information. And in this case, it was used as a tool for CONSTANTLY giving the audience information, and it was very difficult to keep up with. If I missed a line because my chair squeaked or the music was too loud, I felt like I would miss major plot points.
Nolan’s always had a massive problem with show don’t tell, and his dialogue’s always been cheesy and unrealistic (which is usually acceptable for his usual sci fi/psychological epics) we should’ve seen it coming that he wasn’t the right guy for a character driven drama
Im not gonna lie there was alot of information if you look into the subtext theres still alot of story left unsaid. The immense amount of dialogue just makes it harder to see that
When I tell people that I thought the dialogue in Oppenheimer was horrendous, people would always tell me "oh well you just don't like talking films." My response to them is "go watch a Sorkin or Tarantino film and you'll see why ."
@@samuelpark7864 Better Call Saul is one of the most emotionally impactful character pieces I have ever seen. Ninety percent of the show is lawyers and businessmen just saying stuff, or not saying stuff, or walking around, or looking at papers. It works because dialogue functions as subtext, not as exposition.
@@Chromexusdamn, finally someone who understands me. This movie is filled with 3 hours of music over dialogs that have nothing special to build a false tension. Take out the music of the film and what you get is a 3 hour long vacuum. And everybody seems to fall in that trap. Nolan only relies on music to create tension (same in Dunkirk, Tenet, you name it). The plot should create the tension and the music enhance it, not the other way around.
@@Chromexusand yes the non linear story telling serves no other purpose than making Nolan appear like a genius. That's incredibl the number of people who fall for it..
Dude finally someone said it. Only reason people liked his because Nolan is usually a great director and he has fanboys. This is the worst movie he has made, second being dunkirk
Nolan must have a cult following on the internet because every other review glosses over or completely omits all the macro reasons this movie wasn't good, while praising the technical things it did well. It doesn't matter how good the actors, music, and cinematography are if it's not assembled correctly as a whole.
THANK YOU. I was starting to feel crazy after getting home from the theaters and seeing how many people were giving it glowing reviews. You succinctly articulated so many of my thoughts and criticisms about this mess of a film…will be sharing!
That’s exactly how a feel about this movie. It feels like i have watched 3hr trailer. 80% of compositions are terrible. Cuts are so abruptly! It’s bad!
This movie was like watching a clip show of all six seasons of a tv series you knew nothing about. It kept jumping around and before you could figure out who was who or what was happening in a scene, we were pulled away to another scene....not knowing if it took place before or after the previous one. Everything was disconnected and it seemed like none of the main characters were really even introduced. Then we had big names in small brief roles and I'm still not sure who they were playing are what their importance was.
Not even the explosion of trinity is breathe taking. Just take any atomic explosion's footage and you will be 100 times more in awe and fear. Honestly seems like they exploded a firecracker and filmed in slow motion. Another problem is....the lack of physics. Atoms, matter and physics are much much more inspiring and interesting than what the movie showed about it. With that budget, i would totally make an awesome CGI slow motion of ho atoms get to get fission in a huge chain reaction leading to an overwelming explosion. It sucked.
I know nothing about the technicalities of filmmaking, but I do know a bit about storytelling, and that's where this film just flopped for me. What was the story? Was it the making of the bomb? Was it about a madman with an over-active sex drive? Was it about Washington politics? I wanted to cut the whole thing up and stitch it back together to tell one good story. How the hell can you make the story of the making of the Atom bomb boring? This was a snoozefest from start to finish with one explosions somewhere in the middle.
I just saw it streaming on Skyshowtime. Then a 1 hour 30 min documentary called " TO END ALL WAR, Oppenheimer & the atomic bomb " which was peppered with historical recordings of Oppenheimer and some other key people surrounding this piece of history. It was better than the movie which had twice the length and a huge budget. The movie was a 3 hours long waiting for something to happen we knew is coming. In the end it did not even conveyed the message strongly enough to warn us never to use Atomic bombs ever again. Not really showing the horrors of the use of such a horrific weapon at Japan. Not even the weapon test's blast radius. I understand this was about the man. Yet then it shouldn't have been. Instead something more important. It was a series of disconnected scenes of a conflicted genius, artsy frown-with-boobs and generally neurotic people wanting fame getting used then stepped over by power hungry sociopaths. It wasn't anything like Chernobyl. It was just a sad drama that couldn't elicit more than this same feeling.
It wasn’t a movie it was just a collection of scenes. It looks good, but did it look any better than other movies set around this time period? And everybody is so impressed with the wonderful acting, was it wonderful or did they just kinda have a bit of an accent on? The pacing was insane. The dialogue reminded me of what a dumb guy thinks smart guys sound like. Just bad.
Agreed- it was a jumbled, confusing mess with mediocre storytelling. The plot development was weakly constructed and the characters weren't properly written. It didn't have a cohesive theme or an integrated story line. The film was choppy, melodramatic and unnecessarily long. The courtroom drama was repetitive and mundane but became the whole focus of the film. I wanted to love it but it was disappointing.
One of the worst movies i have ever seen and this is coming from a big Nolan fan that usually likes his work. I also love the subject matter but all we got was a very long movie filled with a useless filler dialogue that didn't do anytbing for the movie. They could have essentially taken out all the RDJ bits and you wouldn't miss anything. The characters had no background and there was not a single image of Hiroshima explosion etc. The testing explosion was also incredibly underwhelming. The fake praise the movie gets it what annoys me the most. It's the first movie were I have seen endless ammount of poeple go down the cinema stairs and I never saw tgem back again. Around 10 people walked oit of the movie and now I know why. I felt ailly sitting through this horrible movie. I was looking at my watch every 5 minutes and I have never done that before.
I had to tap out after 30 minutes. This is despite being a fan of Nolan, having a perma-boner for historical biopics, not being put-off by of long movies, and being fascinated with the field of quantum physics. I couldn't bare another second of this Jackson Pollock approach to narrative structure. And the score - constantly screaming at you to be moved to slow tears, regardless of the actual contef the scene. What a mess.
@@AMurderOfLobs Bro, I read quantum physics stuff EVERYDAY, so you must understand what it was like seeing all of my fav scientists coming together like the Avengers to make a bomb. I also love Star Trek TNG, I don't mind slow burns, can listen to dialogue all day. But this movie was so empty and void of emotion. And even empathy for the audience outside of the cinematography. Felt like it was filmed by a psychopath. And I heard that he wrote the script in 1st person. Wtf would he do that? Even though he did that, it felt like it was written in e-prime.
It's other peoples opinion. They liked it, you didn't. More people enjoyed it than people not enjoying it. I dont know why you care so much about other peoples opinion
Typically I say something similar - “I don’t know why you care about it so much”. But this time I see OP’s point. This movie was SO bad. We care about it so much because we simply can’t believe/trying to understand why so many people say it’s good.
You described it perfectly! I think that Nolan's style works best for the big plot "mindf*ck" movies but not so much for a biopic. I would be repeating your words but I'll just say that the movie felt empty.
Just watched Oppenhiemer an hour ago and I couldn’t agree more. The run time was so bloated it just seemed long for the sake of being a biopic. Loved RDJ performance but the rest of the characters seemed aloof and emotionless. You leave the cinema knowing very little about Oppenhiemer the man, he wasn’t a communist, he wasn’t a pacifist, he wasn’t anything really other than a bit boring. And the shoeing in of his love life was so bland, even the suicide of his ex girlfriend was a yawn moment. I really had no empathy for any of the characters, of which there were so many I couldn’t keep up. The non chronological order of the movie was also massively confusing and the random use of black and white just lost me. All in all I feel like I should have gone to have watch Barbie instead.
The non linear style of the movie was really self indulgent and didn't serve the story at all. Like in pulp fiction, there's an actual function to non linear edits, since someone gets saved at the end of each scene, in every sense of the word, and its as if Vincent Vega is alive at the end of the movie, it's as if he still has a choice. Memento as well, since he has memory problems. But Nolan was really self indulgent and I think he's reached the stage in his career where no one can tell him no, and that's not a good thing.
This is a pretty accurate review. I was really disappointed also. I was really hoping the film would be as good as Dunkirk, which is my favorite Christopher Nolan film. This is no Dunkirk. Maybe he should have gone more abstract with it and not even tried for any sort of linear narrative.
More abstract? It’s based on real life. Is Nolan supposed to just come up with random shit that doesn’t align with the rest of the film at all to make it better?
@@dexterliden It's based on a biography and not an autobiography, even then it's not "real life," it's based on a few people piecing together articles of information without ever meeting the man in person. An autobiography can be false as well, but at least you have subjective perspective. You have the thinking that went into the decisions made. The real life emotional wounds if any. But Nolan could have made his own movie without relying entirely on Prometheus. It would then be his own biography of the man, allowing him to color a bit outside the lines given the tools of the medium.
@@VonJay you are arguing for the line: “Maybe he should have gone more abstract with it and not even tried for any sort of linear narrative.” This criticism doesn’t really make any sense, or at least it has no bearing. That’s why I argued against it. I don’t necessarily disagree, I just found it to be a very illogical reasoning for being “disappointed” in the film.
@@dexterliden to add to my point is that he chose a very detached version of American Prometheus. He chose a central theme that focused on a race against time. When in the book American Prometheus, there were far more personal illustrations of Oppenheimer, dealing with his mysticism and his love for psychology. Dealing with how he was able to be a womanizer (certain personality traits) as well as other things. But Nolan chose to focus on the ideas that supported a ticking clock, which imo is already inherent in the story of the making of the atom bomb, and couldn’t support scenes that expressed other aspects of the man within the biography that was written on him. And respectfully, I really mean this in a respectful way, but nothing I said was abstract. the character of Bohr for instance, indirectly discarded Oppenheimer’s relative ineffectiveness in mathematics and lab by asking him if he can hear the music. The film then consistently cuts to scenes of ripples in the water, explosions in reverse and to the wave function of atoms. I think this should have been the central theme of the film. I was saying that if Nolan chose to represent Oppenheimer “hearing and seeing the music” in this way, that he should have made it an analogy for his “fissile” interpersonal relations. Which directly matches how the atomic bomb works in that it uses “fission” of uranium. That’s not abstract because fission of uranium and fission in relationships are both real things. And those are things that are both talked about in American Prometheus and many other writings on the man and the event. So respectfully, I think you incorrectly deduced that the use of other methods of persuasion would be atomically abstract when that’s not the case at all.
Big fan of Memento here. But the structure was part of the point of that film. In Oppenheimer, confusing or not, the non-linear narrative offered little fresh perspective to the story & frequently detracted from it instead. Short-attention-span theatre?
_Memento_ felt like an exercise in non-linear storytelling. When Chris Nolan made _Memento_ , it felt like he was answering the question: "how non-linear can a story be without completely befuddling the audience?" Nolan has the rare talent required to make an extremely non-linear story coherent, because the non-linearity often supplements the stories he's trying to tell. But in _Oppenheimer_ the non-linear storytelling feels unnecessarily tacky. The time jumps to Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing aren't revealing significant information to the audience which radically shifts the stakes for events chronologically preceding the hearing. It anything, the time jumps ruin the pacing of the movie. If _Oppenheimer_ was a linear story, it would be a fairly bog-standard rise and fall story, and the time jumps not only fail to change that, but I want the rising and falling action to have an uncontrollable inertia, where the stakes keep escalating non-stop in the rising action, and the aftermath keeps spiraling non-stop in the falling action. But instead, the inertia constantly gets interrupted and resumed by the time jumps. I want the events to feel like they don't have the room to breathe, especially since Nolan's frenetic direction doesn't leave the audience with enough time to breathe regardless. I guess I just really wanted Nolan to make something simple yet effective like _Dunkirk_ again.
Thank you, I see these ridiculous review where people talk about this film as if we are in front of a new Kuckrick or something. I think the fans of Nolan have lost their minds now, like with Interstellar, it seems that a cute well shot film with fairly good actors is enough to make a great film. Sorry to destroy their dreams but cinematography is more complex than that. I think Nolan as with other directors become too pretentious when they treat difficult serious subjects like this one. In fact the only films I like of Nolan is those where the subject is not that serious, like comic book character Batman I don-t understand also why cinema has to be so serious and cold nowdays, as we see in Dr. Strangelove, it was extremely deep and interesting treating important subjects but not in a way where we want to kill ourselves for the duration of the movie.
C. Nolan is the main reason why this movie is a 7 at best, instead of a 10. Nolan's work is hit or miss, in the past years it was only miss. Either he is smoking some strong shit, or he lost his touch.
Cinematics were great, and I would love to watch this movie again with subtitles. But going to watch it at the theaters last week was a horrible experience. I couldn't understand what most of them were saying because I couldn't hear anything.
It happened to me as well, I work in cinema... You need to go to the manager and ask them to put the volume up. Sometimes the films can be too loud and the staff is not checking properly most of the times.
I know I'm a little late to the party but I finally was able to see it. I had such high hopes for this film but it was not enjoyable in the least... I don't feel like I gained anything or learned anything from sitting in that theater for over three hours. I was trying to figure out what others saw in it, this was the video I agreed with the most. I think if this movie was released without names attached to it it would have fallen flat.
I loved this movie but had much more expectations. Firsst i thought it was based on science but it turned out to be more political especially the last part after trinity test. Even the test didn't seem so amusing or maybe cause I was expecting actual Hiroshima bomb. The movie during trailer or teaser gave idea about a man making bomb but the movie was more about how he tries to defend himself from his accusations of being a traitor to country and so on. Overall movie was cinematically subtle and i liked it, music played really important role and acting was good too. But felt that the story went lil away from what audiance thought it would be.
You said pretty much what I thought after leaving the theater. The confusing editing does not allow for the pivotal moments of the film to have the weight they deserve. It's too much dialogue, too many characters and every event is portraited as an epic and decisive moment without giving us the time to reflect on what we're seeing. I think Nolan wants us to contemplate the aftermath of the making of the bomb, but it's editing and plot are too convoluted to let us breath and reflect about the stuff he's showing. A real let down for me, but maybe it's my fault to expect anything else from Nolan.
WOW , really get you bro > my exact feleleing . toto much rushed . not allowing to sink in . Not being able to conenct with teh v=cahrector . only using vsiuals to state teh mind of oppenhimer . not trough dialogue or other tools. Nolan should keep away from biopics
It's hard to say this, but I will have to agree with this review. I have been really interested in physics for many years. So of course I was very excited for this movie. A movie about a well-known physicist that I of course knew of before? And directed by Christopher Nolan? I thought it had to be really good. And there were things that I was happy about. For instance, there were many famous physicists in the movie that I was happy to see. And it did at least mention certain physics concepts. But overall, the movie was just too long and messy. This movie was of course about the man, and not the physics, but even then it just didn't explain very much of what was happening. It crammed so much of his life into one movie, without going into much depth on any of it. The story was moving forward too fast, making the story unappealing and a bit dry. I already knew much about his story before, and could at the very least follow the entire storyline up until the Trinity test (and various things after that too, although I probably should have looked more into the trial and his relationship with Strauss). But I wonder what the movie was like for those who just went to the theaters without having looked into his story at all. It's hard to admit that a movie didn't meet your expectations, especially when it is a movie that you really wanted to like. But that's just how it is.
The most annoying part of this movie is when they switch to black and white to show it's the past. If you just made good dialogue and a semi-sensible timeline, and any plot line, you wouldn't need to assume the viewer is lost in time and space. It felt like the entire movie was a trailer. Or like they filmed each individual scene entirely separately of each other. Literally feels stitched together. You can spend 10 minutes in a communist party with no needed details for the story, everyone yelling. Then the next scene you're an indefinite time in the future, getting hired at a school, talking to Einstein, and starting a program in 3 minutes, with almost no dialogue.
My biggest issue with the film was the sound mixing. Everyone in the group that I went with said they couldn't understand like 40+% of the dialogue, and this is a film where the dialogue was really important -and there was a ton of it in this 3+ hour film.
@@Ericthecameraman Did you watch it in IMAX??? It was MUCH BETTER than Tenet and I could hear and understand at least 90% of the dialogue. The scenes and dialogues were very rapid but I could easily hear it.
@@pvkom26 I saw it in Canada too. No doubt there are scenes were the score and music kind of overpower or are louder than the words being spoken. I see why that might bother some people especially older people with diminished hearing but I am younger and was sitting in the 4th row at the corner front and could hear most of it surprisingly.
Sound was the best thing in this movie. If you couldnt understand 40%+ dialouge maybe dont watch movies when you are 11 y old and havent finished shool yet.
Thank you for posting this. Most people loved this, and historically, it covers an extremely important piece of history. yes. As a Film? It felt off. The psychological/emotional/historical layers were so finite...when major events occurred? They didn't feel engaging.
Agree it's "a mess". Most of the film felt like “Previously on Oppenheimer”. I was waiting for the high-density, restless scene-setting to end and for the actual film to begin, but it never quite did. No space is given for subtlety or character development. It felt like all dialogue had been rejected unless grand, smarmy or explosive; or clunky scaffolding to set up an opposing character for something grand, smarmy or explosive (hoho). The non-stop music bed daubs all emotionality with big dumb cues for how you're supposed to feel in day-glo highlighter like "THIS IS A POIGNANT MOMENT, YEAH? ARE YOU FEELING MOVED?", leaving you feeling totally detached from the performances. I would describe the film as emotionally hamfisted, and large chunks of it feel like a coked-up bore spouting unsolicited facts at you at a party, never letting you get a word in, oblivious to whether you're even interested or following. It's frustrating, because there are strengths in so many other areas: it's visually impressive, there are neat little moments of imagined/hallucinatory storytelling, some great sound design choices - when the music shuts up for five seconds - and some memorable performances (despite everyone speaking in unreal, trailer-friendly soundbytes while walking down a corridor or being shallow DOF focus pulled or lurching towards you on a dolly or whatever). Oh and don't forget Einstein popping out of thin air from behind a car to drop pearls of wisdom like he's the ghost of Yoda or something - people were laughing at the screen, utterly ridiculous. Haven't been this p!ssed off walking out of a cinema for a long time, what a waste.
Immaculate comment, especially the coked-up-party analogy lol In particular, thank you for calling out the “grand, smarmy” and “unreal, trailer friendly soundbites while walking down a hallway” style of dialogue. I was about to say that Nolan is “prone to it”, but even that is an understatement; it seems to be his baseline for dialogue. Tenet was particularly insufferable in that regard, among others
Thank you for posting this review. You thoroughly explained many criticisms of this movie. As a physicist myself and a Nolan fan I was also disappointed.
Main actor sucked and the audio was way outta wack (sound fx way too loud!) Robert Downy was the only one who was engaging enough to make me feel like I wasn't watching a b level movie.
I read a comment on another thread that I think sums up the movie. “Oppenheimer is a good 1 hour and 30 min movie that is buried within and 3 hour bad movie."
I got a free ticket for this on the regular cinema screen, and honestly I was glad I didn't pay for the IMAX experience. I don't think there was enough visual effects to justify it. That was not the real problem I had with this film though. In my opinion it tried to grasp too many themes or subplots, and therefore it became longer than it should've been and less consistent. I would've personally gone into more detail about the moral dilemma Oppenheimer had to face while building this bomb and it's consequences on a human level. And discard alltogether the incessant and boring scenes where he is being hunted or investigated for banging the wrong woman or shaking hands with communists. Also, the movie introduced too many characters which I feel didn't add anything to the movie, it is hard enough to empathize with Oppenheimer to have to pay attention to a new character being presented every 5 minutes. I would watch Memento, from the same director, 3 times in a row, instead of rewatching this movie again... It felt like a scamm even though I saw it for free. I advise everyone to not go to the cinema to watch this, watch, BArbie instead, or anything else. THis was Christopher Nolan doing whatever he wants and not putting himself in the audience's shoes...I might be wrong, but that's what I felt near the end, I heard his voice saying "F*** you, stay put for 3 hours and get bored" and I saw the whole room in the same situation, desperate to get up from the seat. Good review btw. Sorry for the rant.
Agreed- your critique is insightful and analytical. However, watching Barbie isn't going to help... The current state of filmmaking is pretty abysmal. However, I do applaud Nolan for tackling this topic and assembling a great cast.
This movie felt like I was having a seizure. I’d be watching one scene…then the next scene I’m like what just happened how does this scene relate to the last how and why are they now here.
The quality of the film immediately looked amateurish and didn’t seem to have a cinematic quality but more of a RUclips video or movie made for TV weird quality
Watched this last night and have to say it was very boring, this coming from someone who has an interest in physics. Its getting great reviews, but for me films are meant to be entertaining. They do this either by being fun to watch or interesting and thought provoking. Oppenheimer did neither for me, so critics can rave on untill they are blue in the face about cinematography, lighting, narrative structure, ect. But this kind of pretentiousness wont change the fact that the film was just boring. Several people in the theatre actually had fallen asleep.😂 EDIT: this is a subjective opinion, I do understand that others way enjoy film for reasons other than which i stated.
it's for a very specific audience who have a decent attention span I'm surprised that a physics interested person found it boring, quite an embarrassment you are to the scientific field ngl 🤷♀️ learn how to read a novel and skip marvel next time, maybe you'd start loving good movies or the very least "understand"
I too am very interested in physics, and I too was a little disappointed. I honestly wonder what everyone is so hyped about. The vast majority of people do not have a strong interest in physics or in the life and work of physicists, so what is it that they liked so much about this movie and that I am somehow missing?
@@frede1905 it's not about physics or the bomb, it's a biopic of a person so if you're not a good reader in a novel perspective then it'll appear very bland, but for me this was easily inside my top 3 of all time because the sheer display of excellency in story telling
@@onilisa8823 an interesting perspective. the movie seems devisive, people seem to love it or hate it. perhaps its that people who are into STEM expect it to be about STEM - and are dissappointed, and the people who arent see it as a pure character based movie, and enjoy it bacause of this. Can you elaborate slightly on "a good reader in a novel perspective"? As i do like to read both fiction and non-fiction, just curious on how i can translate this to film?
@@onilisa8823 yeah , even that depiction was horrible. Sloppy, disjointed mess. Like tenet. Atleast tenet is watchable. Nolan simps will label any crap he directs as "masterpiece". Storytelling,lol. Non linear crap
I was so excited to go see this and thought for sure that I would love it. Instead I am very disappointed and don't understand what all the hype is about. I was trying so hard to follow along with the loads and loads of dialogue and constant switching of topics. I guess I didn't know enough about all of the details about what happened before going into the movie. Maybe that would have made it more interesting but I found myself bored mostly.
i knew nothing at all about the topic, going in blind and yet i understood most of what happened and can confidently say it is one of my favorite movies of all time. This sounds like a you problem.
@@livia5158Yeah, it isn't you at all- just a sad assessment of the current state of the film industry. People want to be moved by a film so badly that this particular film has been elevated to an undeserved status. Yes, I applaud Christopher Nolan for covering this compelling subject. Unfortunately, it was done in a less than intriguing manner. Cast and acting was top notch and the intent was obviously there to create a great film. When the characters aren't properly developed, the plot has too many themes and the story jumps around too much, a film falls flat.
you nailed it! had the same problems with this movie :( the only thing which is hunting me is the very last "what did he say to....." scene. but the rest is a mess of crosscuts and too much dialog. film is a media which should tell the story which less text/exposition as possible.
Thought the Trinity Test didn’t look good at all. The buildup was clunky and felt I was looking at a zoomed in fireball. Check out the footage of the actual trinity test . Looks way better, shot in the 40’s and not in imax. Didn’t even seem horrifying in context of the picture. Oppenheimer just seemed nervous it wouldn’t work. And everyone afterwards else seemed pretty happy about it. In the context of the movie, he helped create a weapon of mass destruction that killed 70,000 people in Hiroshima and another 35,000 in Nagasaki. He got off light by only losing a security clearance .
The first half was a mess with people just going from room to room/ scene to scene just talking with weird artsy shots and sound effects. When they started actually making the bomb it got interesting.
I was disappointed with the movie overall. It's two movies in one. A third regarding the bomb and two thirds regarding politics. Both important but I'd have preferred the balance to be switched.
The part after the Bomb test was too long. Needed to be compressed bigtime. The whole time youre thinking about the Bomb going off and its like "who gives a shit about all this other stuff?"
Agreeeeee!! it's so bad ... I gave up after 20 mins ... it wasn't confusing to me .... Cloud atlas is also nonlinear but it's so good and I have watched it over and over without getting bored. This one is just stupid, boring and too rigid...
The Non-linear storytelling was not confusing in the slightest, and I found memento/intersterlarr/inception confusing. But I think the non-linear narrative was unnecessary and just an excuse to use black and white. A good use of non-linear is social network(very similar to Oppenheimer)
First of all, I'm a huge fan of all of Nolan's movies with the exception of Dunkirk. I thought Dunkirk was an okay movie, but it didn't enthrall me like his other movies. Oppenheimer was in the same boat as Dunkirk for me. I have mixed feelings about it. The movie is long, tedious, and boring to get through, but it does have some really great moments. The first half of the movie was a mess in terms of editing and pacing. The movie jumps all over place, and its hard to connect with the plot and characters. There is also excessive exposition that is needlessly conjolted. The second half of the movie improves significantly in editing, pacing, and character development. I enjoyed the second half of the movie far more than the first half. The lead up to the atomic bomb scene was epic, and the movie really makes you feel the impeding doom and moral dilemma of the situation. But after the atomic bomb scene, it goes back to the tiresome and drawn-out exposition. The final interrogation scene where they question Oppenheimer went on far too long and the conclusion wasn't worth the build up. There were some mildly interesting moments during the interrogation scene, but it didn't justify the long screen time and was far less engaging than the atomic bomb sequence. This movie really suffers from over-exposition, poor pacing / editing (especially in first half of movie) and sub-par character development. With the exception of Oppenheimer himself, we really don't get to learn too much about the supporting characters. The supporting characters are all pretty one dimensional for the most part. I understand the movie is being told through the perspective and eyes of Oppenheimer, but it would have been more interesting if the supporting characters were a little more flushed out giving more emotional weight to the movie. I will say that Cillian Murphy was amazing as Oppenheimer which really elevated the movie. But overall, this movie falls under C tier for Nolan movies. Its worth watching once but not a movie I would want to watch again
I was so hyped. I love Nolan and his approach to timelines. I was disappointed. 4 timelines. To resolve the most dinamic one 1h before the end of the movie, made the last par tanti climactic.
@@pablo-z-dragon it's quite subjective. But even if I take your argument I would argue that a court drama is probably not the best choice to follow origin story, followed by litherally a nuke blast 😀
@@worsethanhitlerpt.2539 or move the nuke to the end and move the court drama earlier. Also why the original story with the university and the apple? To show his ambiguous morality or something? Maybe to illustrate decision and regret or his passion for physics. Either way the first 40 min ad nothing to the story, didn't even develop the character much
what I don't like about this movie is the overwhelming amount of dialogues and info dump it gives to the viewers. It doesn't give enough time for us to breath and digest the conversation. Coupled with extremely fast talking by the characters and layers upon layers of flashbacks and cutscenes, I couldn't get through the movie in one sitting. I wanted to enjoy it and I generally love dialogue -filled shows/drama but the pacing in this movie sucks for me.
Nice review. I was also disappointed by the lack of explanation in theory and visually, as to how they came up with the shape and technical workings of the bomb. All you get are some quick sketches, 2 test of heavy firecrackers and some snap shots of the assembly of the bomb's core. Just like the detonation itself, you can clearly see, Nolan struggles with re-creating the enormous blast, he was lucky they did it at night, so you don't get any visual references from the scene to compare the fire-ball to. But still you feel it some how won't come close to the real thing. And there fore it makes no impact. And if it was to difficult to create such a blast, the shock wave the sand and debris that would be pulled in by the explosion and violently spit out would have made for some awesome slow-motion shots. I think it's sad we now know every little detail from his personal life, but almost nothing of his biggest achievement. (if one can call it that)
@@Belomoh6genuinely braindead ppl, they have a shorter attention span than toddler and expect this to be an action movie 💀 for me this was a masterpiece because I love reading novels and this was like a book came to life
But…we didn’t really get every detail of Oppenheimer’s personal life? There were almost no scenes where he talks about his inner thoughts or reasoning. What motivates him? For example, he repeatedly says he isn’t a communist but we never see or hear him explain **why** he rejects communism. We are told he loves his country, but are never shown or told why….was his father a WWI veteran? Was he horrified to witness the mistreatment of Jews in Germany during his studies? Why did he decide to attempt to MURDER his tutor at Cambridge? Why did he decide not to go through with it? His personal relationships are completely shallow and do nothing to reveal his character. So many stones left unturned…three hours and I still have no idea who Oppenheimer was as a man.
@@lalaLAX219Yes, spot on - BIG problems with connecting the viewer to the character Oppenheimer. I wanted to love this film; that would require a deeper understanding of him and some other main characters. What made them tick? Why were so many in higher education turning to Communism? Where was Oppenheimer's pain, drive, obsession, passion, philosophy etc. Please, in three hours time, give us more to ponder than repetitive courtroom scenes and sketches of LANL.
Exactly!!! A biopic drama really really didn't need a non-linear story which made everything all the more confusing and unappealing. On top of that the non-linear story was also poorly executed. I mean, compare the editing in this movie to The Prestige, a fantasy drama about magicians. Editing in Oppie was very shoddy, and certainly not needed in the first place.
Leaving out showing the bombing of Japan was so disappointing. It undermines the destructive power of the bomb. Dunkirk had some great Spitfire scenes. Would have loved to see the Enola Gay B29 in this film. Everyone always "says show, don't tell", yet they seem to be giving this a pass for some reason.
But I think you are missing the point Nolan is trying to make with a historical BIOGRAPHY. This movie is not about the documentary about the Atomic Bomb. This is about biography about Oppenheimer and his life. Showing the bombing makes no sense bc no character ever saw the bomb drop so it would be completely out of place. Not to mention the logistical concerns without using CGI. But I understand the disappointment bc I have no doubt it would’ve been epic
@@PayneBumpus I think you’re the one missing the point dude. This is being billed as an IMAX experience. Massively misleading marketing. Watching it at home on a flat screen TV is just as adequate.
I've really enjoyed your take, however I respectfully disagree. I thought the narrative and means by which the story was told was excellently crafted and the pacing was fine. It didn't feel like a long film to me. I do agree with your take on why the IMAX format was used. Seemed a little unnecessary given the vast majority of the film took place in small rooms. I'd only see this at an IMAX cinema for the sound - which was excellent (typical of camera op to overlook that :D). My main criticism was the casting. Don't get me wrong, all the cast were great in their roles (Cillian Murphy was outstanding), however I would've liked a few more jobbing actors to take more of the bit-part roles. It took me out of the film when all of a sudden another A lister was dropped in for a very brief moment. Is it Nolan's best film? No, Momento is going to be hard to beat. Is it up there with The Prestige and Inception? Again, no. But it's a very good film in its own right, and I expect 99% of people will disagree with me on that :D Look forward to more videos!
I like your take! You are right the sound design did benefit, especially during the trinity test, and there is a lot of things to be commended on that scene Casting was interesting, everyone was great, but the onslaught of cameos took me out of the film, I did really like the portrayal of Edison- could have gone in the typical cartoonish mad genius sort of fashion, but kept a reverence for him, still brilliant, but older and wiser Thanks! Always glad to hear your take
I knew little to nothing about Oppenheimer (the dude, not the movie) and watching the movie was okay. It was fun at times but all the time skipping was confusing and I couldn’t tell who was who. *spoilers ahead* I thought when Oppenheimer was already married to kitty (I think that was her name) when the other girl and Oppenheimer talked about the other girl (who I now know was kitty) being pregnant and getting married before she was showing. I thought kittys son there was his third kid or something. It was a mess of a movie
Why does this movie even needed to be seen in IMAX ? Nothing happens for the entire 3 hours. And the constantly playinh music showed no respect to silence. Most overrated film I've seen.
For the film to really work, they should’ve either: A) leave an hour of it on the editing room floor so it packs a proper punch or B) make a six or seven-episode miniseries that could cover more ground - something that the brilliant “Chernobyl” miniseries achieved so well.
The sound is absurd. Second time I’ve seen a Nolan film in theater (interstellar). Second time my ears have been blown out and the sound drowns out the dialogue or is so distracting you can’t pay attention to the screen because it hurts. I’m fine with sound. I’m fine with using sound to drive the story. I’m not fine with being genuinely concerned for my health because the volume hurts my ears and makes me wince. I can’t see the screen when I’m closing my eyes from the pain. Absolutely stupid.
@hamsandwichindahouse I mean listen, health always comes first, maybe some ear plugs would come in handy for next time. I watch specifically in imax because of the increase of sound, I think for specific movies sound is really cool when it is loud and chaotic, and for this one, it just elevated the movie experience for me and made it epic because of the way he integrates sound within the movie.
@@pablo-z-dragonthey weren’t talking too much about the music, rather the dialogue which is drowned out. If watched in imax, you probably didn’t notice, because it’s legitimately a problem that Nolan acknowledges and defends by telling us to watch in imax
I absolutely LOVED the movie. Even though sometimes I didn't fully understand who is who. But I was still entertained, because of the incredible pace of the movie. The scenes just jump on you one after another. I generally love non-linear story-telling in movies and here there was not only that, but also each one presented a different plot line. Seeing it all come to its conclusions by the end was very satisfying. One of my favorite movie genres is a court drama, so no surprise I found the last hour of the movie the best. I thought it was a strange choice not to end the movie with Trinity test, but as far as I am concerned it worked out perfectly - everyone kinda expected Trinity to be the climax and it wasn't. Music was perfect. Acting was perfect. I agree on the issue with the sound though. I was watching with subtitles so I had no problem but without them I wouldn't understand everything (especilly in the beginning until my ears got used to English). Edit: And my favorite actor of all time is Gary Oldman so you can imagine my reaction when he suddenly appeared as Truman, I didn't expect him to be there and in that moment I just knew that for me this is the movie of the year.
Went into the cinema thinking it was an action-packed historical depiction something along the line of "The Imitation Game" ended up watching a fucking boring drama about Oppenheimer's personal life and that stupid post-war committee interrogation. The fuckers that made this movie might as well made a movie about Mother Theresa or Nelson Mandela and not ruined the Oppenheimer story altogether.
And the score, although having elements that were excellent as standalone compositions, was wielded like blunt object as if batter us into submission with overly omotional music that never stops building in crescendo, suggesting we are always near climax - nevermind the actual context -was jsut so plainly inappropriate. I was fatigued within 30 minutes and had to tap out.
Strongly disagree, tone was clear to me and the jumps in time were not without meaning, in fact they served the plot really well. This is not a perfect film, but not for those reasons, I do agree however about the visuals, they could have done a lot more with color coding. Still a solid 8/10 for me
Most of all,there are so many characters I this movie and can’t tell the difference because they are all Europeans look all the same since I barely see any of them in my country…
It's easily the worst film Nolan has ever made. Fitting, it'll be the one to finally get him his Oscar. I'm just glad I didn't spend money on this trash in theaters.
Dear Eric, I think yours is the first objective criticism I've heard from a technical perspective. In terms of rewatchability however, I think that isn't something film makers give conscious consideration. Frank.
I really love any audiovisual type of art: movies, shorts, animations, video games, art installations, audiovisual performance, etc. And I have a saying “try to respect filmmakers cause you never know how hard it was to make that film, and the world is everyday more unnecessary demanding”. And lastly I really love how Nolan bends the laws of existence; I mean, even if everybody hates Tenet, I do love it very much. So I thought one can spect something interesting with Openheimer, at least. But when I watched it I felt literally ALL what you said in your video. Is like you read my mind and articulated the idea better than my thought could do it in a shorter time. I do liked that Nolan tried to make all visual and special effects Only on camera for the sake of keeping 70mm IMAX negative free of digital post process, that can interfere in the organic feel of particules structures (a very long conversation that talks about arguments to take people to the teather instead of watching at home). The other interesting thing is how color time, instead of color grade, can keep some beyond HDR color physic behaviors, and more with natural light. A thing that Emmanuel Lubeski (many Oscar’s winner) will explain better. that’s why him and Terrence Malik have a Dogma that scientifically and artistically prove many points of all of this. But is sand how Oppenheimer didn’t get to my heart, no even in the historical side of particle physics and quantum physics. For that anybody can read Feynman and at the same time reverse engineering all the novel awards, from Higgs to backward in time. It was very hard to me to conclude all of this and many details I don’t want to share, cause I don’t want to be toxic. So thanks to take the leap 🙏🏿
I saw the film in the 70mm IMAX print format now several months ago, so what do I remember. Bad color correction with skin tones shifting badly within scenes and from scene to scene. Bad framing for IMAX (maybe it works better in Panavision). Blah cinematography. Checking my watch out of boredom. A muddy, predictable, and uninspiring sound mix. The only performance which still haunts me is Emily Blunt’s two wordless stares. The rest as you say I will never crave to see again.
I thought the movie was good with the acting being especially exceptional. However, I didn't like or even understand the ending (or the 3rd act). Maybe that was just my perception, but it felt like a different movie or like I walked into some sort of a "law and order" episode. The whole thing about the security clearance hearing didn't make sense. After the success of the project and his fame, he could have gotten a tenured position in any university that he wished so there was really no need for the government clearance. More to the point, given his regret or "I'm a destroyer of worlds" attitude he wouldn't have wanted anything to do with these types of projects and so again no need for clearance. At some point he replies to his attorney that he has some sort of alteriour motive behind going through the hearing but we never find out what this hidden agenda was all about. A more powerful ending could have simply been (if Nolan really wanted to incorporate this clearance angle), "hey lets take away his security clearance" with Oppenheimer replying: "you can have it" (mic drop). This would have made more sense given the tenor of regret throught the whole film. The 3rd act just had too many new details and plot lines that changed the character of the movie. Felt very forced and needless. Maybe I need to watch it again. This being said, terrific cast and production.
quite agree with this review.. Oppenheimer itself didn't know what genre it exactly fits or what basic idea is it depicting. and trying to capture all genres like period drama, history, war or simply a biography.. It doesn't make audience connect to even one perspective..
@@Ayyyoooo16 I understand him. I understand him. Ich verstehe ihn. i understand him Ich verstehe ihn the first half felt like a trailer compilation, editing so fast you thought it was pitting scenes against each other instead of people. Nolan is great for imposing action, not insightful drama. Felt superficial
@@Ayyyoooo16when they name dropped Kennedy like they were teasing a sequel 😂 Not to mention the quippy dialogue, fast paced scenes that don’t take a moment to breathe, it’s all in montage style, Celebrity cameos, sex scene while reading religious text like nolan had a boner from making an r rated film like if written by a 16 yo film student, and adding black and white portions also like a film student (b and w Isn’t inherently bad)
Yeah I hear you, was a battle to stay awake. Really annoyed that I got sucked into the hype and sat through 3hrs of this in a cinema. The topic just seems such a waste for a Nolan movie. 30mins of this film was truly brilliant, leading upto the detonation. Somehow they managed to squeeze another hour of garbage after this scene to ensure that you are truly bored shitless.
I tried 3 times to watch this movie and I couldn't finish it. The paranoia and jumping back and forth was just too much. This was a turd and I'm surprised more movie goers didn't voice complaints when it hit the box office. They were suckered into the theaters for....wait for it.......super duper hi def 3d sharks with lazers ultimate filming.....to see a paranoid crazy guy walking up to a park bench or...really nothing!
I thoroughly enjoyed Oppenheimer but agree that a more linear narrative was needed. This is a biopic and Nolan's obsession with non-linear story telling didn't add anything here, just detracted. Having said said that, the wonderful performances held it together for me and made it a great cinematic experience. Saw it with my 16-yr-old and she preferred it over Barbie. Always respect your opinions though, even when I disagree. World would be a boring place if we all felt the same. Edit: i did notice they avoided clichés. No mushroom clouds and didn't use the 'I am become death..' quote as the final line of the movie (which i was fully expecting). The actual Einstein ending was unexpected and far superior.
Glad you both enjoyed it, and I respect your opinion as well! I do agree I thought the ending with Einstein was the right note to leave the film on, and his portrayal was very well handled
I couldn't get beyond 45 minutes of this film before cutting my losses. Terrible, clumsy, cliché laden script, absurdly chaotic structure. Some stories are just not meant to be films and this is one them. A great deal of the fascination is in the technical details, and of course this film could only pay lip service to them, having to dumb them down to the level of the stupidest person in the movie theatre. So then you get the painful sight of someone muttering some banal physics catchphrase, to the bewonderment of the PhD standing opposite them. Don't bother, just get hold of one of the many great books available on the subject.
Thanks for the video. Your explanation resonates well with the reasons I didn't like this movie. Besides of all the confusion, the first feeling I had when I left the cinema was "why did I paid extra to watch this movie in iMax?".
This film showed Nolan’s limitations as a writer / director. 1:03 I watched a few Oppenheimer documentaries and mini-series before this film so I understood the story and just focused on the way that Nolan was telling it. The Non-linear structure doesn’t cover up the mess, but it might get some fans to re-watch. I wasn’t confused by the story because I’d done my research so the flaws in the non-linear approach to Oppenheimer became apparent. 4:36 IMO Nolan is too caught up in being an “auteur” for his loyal fans. I watched the film on an IMAX screen but only a few scenes required IMAX. It’s almost as if they shot in IMAX as part of the Nolan brand. 5:45 Yes, I felt no connection with Oppenheimer. It’s a shame because Cillian Murphy is one of the finest actors of our generation but this film is not going to be his “Oscar moment”. Unfortunately, I left the IMAX cinema thinking one of the “New Hollywood” era Directors ( *Sidney Lumet, Coppola, Spielberg, Scorcese* etc) would have done a better job creating an emotional connection and telling a compelling story. Heck, *The Prestige* tells a better story in less time. I remember Spielberg was known for Summer Blockbusters until *Color Purple, Empire of the Sun and Schindlers List* proved he could takle drama. In contrast, Oppenheimer is not a crossover film that will get fans of Christopher Nolan’s action movies into drama like Spielberg did. I think Oppenheimer will be forgotten within a generation unless we’re revisiting the scenes with Einstein. *I’m going to re-watch it* without IMAX this week because I’m a film nerd but only Nolan fans or viewers with a specific interest will rave about this film ten years from now.
@@Ericthecameraman Yes Spielberg would have provided an emotional connection. I hope Nolan takes a risk with his next film and dares to abandon some of his “style” in favour of telling a great story.
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The sex scene where Florence Pugh's character randomly is like "hehe what's that book 🤪" and then Oppenheimer's like "hehe it says now i am become death destroyer of worlds 😜" was genuinely one of the most bafflingly dumb scenes I have ever witnessed in a movie. The actual video of Oppenheimer's delivery was literally a perfect depiction of the emotions that this movie should have portrayed and yet they still somehow completely missed it.
Literally I was looking for a comment that said exactly this. I have finally watched the movie today and I can’t believe they actually did such a “rendition” of like you said, the real Oppenheimer’s emotional delivery. The line is said again in the movie after that but the first one truly has to be the most pointless and stupid movie scenes I’ve ever seen. It actually made me mad
You couldn't pay me to watch this movie again.
nobody is paying you anyway, stick to making bonsai plants and leave scientific biopic films to ppl who adore it
@onilisa8823 there was no science in this.
@@onilisa8823keep coping with the fact that your taste in cinema is trash.
Pretentious, just like the movie.@@onilisa8823
@@onilisa8823trynna sound smart 😂😂
Too many kiss ups to Nolan. Glad someone's being honest and truthful
For me personally, the overwhelmingly high volume of cuts and the near-nonstop flow of dialogue were the two things that stopped me from enjoying this movie as much as I wanted to.
The golden rule of storytelling is "show, don't tell," and I kind of feel that about 80 percent of this movie broke that rule. Especially in a drama, dialogue is most effective when it is used as a tool to paint a picture of characters' personalities, not as a way to give information. And in this case, it was used as a tool for CONSTANTLY giving the audience information, and it was very difficult to keep up with. If I missed a line because my chair squeaked or the music was too loud, I felt like I would miss major plot points.
It was a flop - flop, fizz I fizz in my book. And you'll need an Alta Seltzer if you watched the whole cacophony of this madness.
Nolan’s always had a massive problem with show don’t tell, and his dialogue’s always been cheesy and unrealistic (which is usually acceptable for his usual sci fi/psychological epics) we should’ve seen it coming that he wasn’t the right guy for a character driven drama
Im not gonna lie there was alot of information if you look into the subtext theres still alot of story left unsaid. The immense amount of dialogue just makes it harder to see that
When I tell people that I thought the dialogue in Oppenheimer was horrendous, people would always tell me "oh well you just don't like talking films." My response to them is "go watch a Sorkin or Tarantino film and you'll see why ."
@@samuelpark7864 Better Call Saul is one of the most emotionally impactful character pieces I have ever seen. Ninety percent of the show is lawyers and businessmen just saying stuff, or not saying stuff, or walking around, or looking at papers. It works because dialogue functions as subtext, not as exposition.
The dialogue is like watching a 3 hour musical but no one is singing.
Except the soundtrack NEVER stopped- drove me nuts along with the nonlinear storytelling that served no purpose.
@@Chromexusdamn, finally someone who understands me. This movie is filled with 3 hours of music over dialogs that have nothing special to build a false tension. Take out the music of the film and what you get is a 3 hour long vacuum. And everybody seems to fall in that trap. Nolan only relies on music to create tension (same in Dunkirk, Tenet, you name it). The plot should create the tension and the music enhance it, not the other way around.
@@Chromexusand yes the non linear story telling serves no other purpose than making Nolan appear like a genius. That's incredibl the number of people who fall for it..
The question is, can you hear the music
Dude finally someone said it. Only reason people liked his because Nolan is usually a great director and he has fanboys. This is the worst movie he has made, second being dunkirk
Nolan must have a cult following on the internet because every other review glosses over or completely omits all the macro reasons this movie wasn't good, while praising the technical things it did well. It doesn't matter how good the actors, music, and cinematography are if it's not assembled correctly as a whole.
The Chris Nolan reality distortion field in full effect, it was a mess.
THANK YOU. I was starting to feel crazy after getting home from the theaters and seeing how many people were giving it glowing reviews. You succinctly articulated so many of my thoughts and criticisms about this mess of a film…will be sharing!
Thank you very much!
Well if a majority of people who’ve viewed the film like it, are you sure that your opinion, that this movie was a “mess”, is correct?
@@dexterlidenit’s an opinion. It’s subjective by definition.
@@bobcobb3654LOL! Perfect response. “Are you sure YOUR OPINION is correct…?” - what a doofus.
I also was very disappointed and thought it sucked.
That’s exactly how a feel about this movie. It feels like i have watched 3hr trailer. 80% of compositions are terrible. Cuts are so abruptly! It’s bad!
YES exactly how I felt. A 3 hour trailer. I just sat there thinking, is this going to be the same for the whole film?, and, yes it was 😮
This movie was like watching a clip show of all six seasons of a tv series you knew nothing about. It kept jumping around and before you could figure out who was who or what was happening in a scene, we were pulled away to another scene....not knowing if it took place before or after the previous one. Everything was disconnected and it seemed like none of the main characters were really even introduced. Then we had big names in small brief roles and I'm still not sure who they were playing are what their importance was.
Not even the explosion of trinity is breathe taking. Just take any atomic explosion's footage and you will be 100 times more in awe and fear. Honestly seems like they exploded a firecracker and filmed in slow motion.
Another problem is....the lack of physics. Atoms, matter and physics are much much more inspiring and interesting than what the movie showed about it. With that budget, i would totally make an awesome CGI slow motion of ho atoms get to get fission in a huge chain reaction leading to an overwelming explosion.
It sucked.
I know nothing about the technicalities of filmmaking, but I do know a bit about storytelling, and that's where this film just flopped for me. What was the story? Was it the making of the bomb? Was it about a madman with an over-active sex drive? Was it about Washington politics? I wanted to cut the whole thing up and stitch it back together to tell one good story. How the hell can you make the story of the making of the Atom bomb boring? This was a snoozefest from start to finish with one explosions somewhere in the middle.
I just saw it streaming on Skyshowtime. Then a 1 hour 30 min documentary called " TO END ALL WAR, Oppenheimer & the atomic bomb " which was peppered with historical recordings of Oppenheimer and some other key people surrounding this piece of history. It was better than the movie which had twice the length and a huge budget.
The movie was a 3 hours long waiting for something to happen we knew is coming. In the end it did not even conveyed the message strongly enough to warn us never to use Atomic bombs ever again. Not really showing the horrors of the use of such a horrific weapon at Japan. Not even the weapon test's blast radius. I understand this was about the man. Yet then it shouldn't have been. Instead something more important.
It was a series of disconnected scenes of a conflicted genius, artsy frown-with-boobs and generally neurotic people wanting fame getting used then stepped over by power hungry sociopaths.
It wasn't anything like Chernobyl. It was just a sad drama that couldn't elicit more than this same feeling.
It wasn’t a movie it was just a collection of scenes. It looks good, but did it look any better than other movies set around this time period? And everybody is so impressed with the wonderful acting, was it wonderful or did they just kinda have a bit of an accent on? The pacing was insane. The dialogue reminded me of what a dumb guy thinks smart guys sound like. Just bad.
Agreed- it was a jumbled, confusing mess with mediocre storytelling. The plot development was weakly constructed and the characters weren't properly written. It didn't have a cohesive theme or an integrated story line. The film was choppy, melodramatic and unnecessarily long. The courtroom drama was repetitive and mundane but became the whole focus of the film. I wanted to love it but it was disappointing.
One of the worst movies i have ever seen and this is coming from a big Nolan fan that usually likes his work. I also love the subject matter but all we got was a very long movie filled with a useless filler dialogue that didn't do anytbing for the movie. They could have essentially taken out all the RDJ bits and you wouldn't miss anything. The characters had no background and there was not a single image of Hiroshima explosion etc. The testing explosion was also incredibly underwhelming. The fake praise the movie gets it what annoys me the most. It's the first movie were I have seen endless ammount of poeple go down the cinema stairs and I never saw tgem back again. Around 10 people walked oit of the movie and now I know why. I felt ailly sitting through this horrible movie. I was looking at my watch every 5 minutes and I have never done that before.
Thanks for being honest.
I had to tap out after 30 minutes. This is despite being a fan of Nolan, having a perma-boner for historical biopics, not being put-off by of long movies, and being fascinated with the field of quantum physics. I couldn't bare another second of this Jackson Pollock approach to narrative structure. And the score - constantly screaming at you to be moved to slow tears, regardless of the actual contef the scene. What a mess.
@@AMurderOfLobs Bro, I read quantum physics stuff EVERYDAY, so you must understand what it was like seeing all of my fav scientists coming together like the Avengers to make a bomb. I also love Star Trek TNG, I don't mind slow burns, can listen to dialogue all day. But this movie was so empty and void of emotion. And even empathy for the audience outside of the cinematography. Felt like it was filmed by a psychopath. And I heard that he wrote the script in 1st person. Wtf would he do that? Even though he did that, it felt like it was written in e-prime.
I cannot understand how it reached 93, 91 on rotten tomatoes and 88 on IMDb.
fanboyism sadly.... we love NOlan and just can't accept he gave us a dud
It's other peoples opinion. They liked it, you didn't. More people enjoyed it than people not enjoying it. I dont know why you care so much about other peoples opinion
Typically I say something similar - “I don’t know why you care about it so much”.
But this time I see OP’s point. This movie was SO bad. We care about it so much because we simply can’t believe/trying to understand why so many people say it’s good.
lol
Thankfully the rating on imdb is falling down it has 83 right now
You described it perfectly! I think that Nolan's style works best for the big plot "mindf*ck" movies but not so much for a biopic. I would be repeating your words but I'll just say that the movie felt empty.
Thank you!
Just watched Oppenhiemer an hour ago and I couldn’t agree more. The run time was so bloated it just seemed long for the sake of being a biopic. Loved RDJ performance but the rest of the characters seemed aloof and emotionless.
You leave the cinema knowing very little about Oppenhiemer the man, he wasn’t a communist, he wasn’t a pacifist, he wasn’t anything really other than a bit boring.
And the shoeing in of his love life was so bland, even the suicide of his ex girlfriend was a yawn moment. I really had no empathy for any of the characters, of which there were so many I couldn’t keep up.
The non chronological order of the movie was also massively confusing and the random use of black and white just lost me.
All in all I feel like I should have gone to have watch Barbie instead.
RDJ really stole the scene every time
😂😂
The non linear style of the movie was really self indulgent and didn't serve the story at all. Like in pulp fiction, there's an actual function to non linear edits, since someone gets saved at the end of each scene, in every sense of the word, and its as if Vincent Vega is alive at the end of the movie, it's as if he still has a choice. Memento as well, since he has memory problems. But Nolan was really self indulgent and I think he's reached the stage in his career where no one can tell him no, and that's not a good thing.
This film proves that Chris Nolan's "Nolanism" are simply his filmaking ticks, not considered choices in service of a story
the cutting of this movie is absolutely horrible. it is like a draft, doesn't feel finished at all.
This is a pretty accurate review. I was really disappointed also. I was really hoping the film would be as good as Dunkirk, which is my favorite Christopher Nolan film. This is no Dunkirk. Maybe he should have gone more abstract with it and not even tried for any sort of linear narrative.
More abstract? It’s based on real life. Is Nolan supposed to just come up with random shit that doesn’t align with the rest of the film at all to make it better?
@@dexterliden It's based on a biography and not an autobiography, even then it's not "real life," it's based on a few people piecing together articles of information without ever meeting the man in person. An autobiography can be false as well, but at least you have subjective perspective. You have the thinking that went into the decisions made. The real life emotional wounds if any. But Nolan could have made his own movie without relying entirely on Prometheus. It would then be his own biography of the man, allowing him to color a bit outside the lines given the tools of the medium.
@@VonJay you are arguing for the line: “Maybe he should have gone more abstract with it and not even tried for any sort of linear narrative.”
This criticism doesn’t really make any sense, or at least it has no bearing. That’s why I argued against it. I don’t necessarily disagree, I just found it to be a very illogical reasoning for being “disappointed” in the film.
@@dexterliden to add to my point is that he chose a very detached version of American Prometheus. He chose a central theme that focused on a race against time.
When in the book American Prometheus, there were far more personal illustrations of Oppenheimer, dealing with his mysticism and his love for psychology. Dealing with how he was able to be a womanizer (certain personality traits) as well as other things.
But Nolan chose to focus on the ideas that supported a ticking clock, which imo is already inherent in the story of the making of the atom bomb, and couldn’t support scenes that expressed other aspects of the man within the biography that was written on him.
And respectfully, I really mean this in a respectful way, but nothing I said was abstract. the character of Bohr for instance, indirectly discarded Oppenheimer’s relative ineffectiveness in mathematics and lab by asking him if he can hear the music. The film then consistently cuts to scenes of ripples in the water, explosions in reverse and to the wave function of atoms. I think this should have been the central theme of the film. I was saying that if Nolan chose to represent Oppenheimer “hearing and seeing the music” in this way, that he should have made it an analogy for his “fissile” interpersonal relations. Which directly matches how the atomic bomb works in that it uses “fission” of uranium. That’s not abstract because fission of uranium and fission in relationships are both real things. And those are things that are both talked about in American Prometheus and many other writings on the man and the event. So respectfully, I think you incorrectly deduced that the use of other methods of persuasion would be atomically abstract when that’s not the case at all.
Hehe. Nolan is now thoroughly in love with himself.
just because he likes to make movies a certain way does not mean you have to insult him as a person
I'm not a fan of non-linear storytelling in general. It can be well done; but I feel like 9 times out of 10, it just gets confusing.😅
Memento was cool. Not great but good.
Big fan of Memento here. But the structure was part of the point of that film.
In Oppenheimer, confusing or not, the non-linear narrative offered little fresh perspective to the story & frequently detracted from it instead.
Short-attention-span theatre?
_Memento_ felt like an exercise in non-linear storytelling. When Chris Nolan made _Memento_ , it felt like he was answering the question: "how non-linear can a story be without completely befuddling the audience?" Nolan has the rare talent required to make an extremely non-linear story coherent, because the non-linearity often supplements the stories he's trying to tell.
But in _Oppenheimer_ the non-linear storytelling feels unnecessarily tacky. The time jumps to Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing aren't revealing significant information to the audience which radically shifts the stakes for events chronologically preceding the hearing. It anything, the time jumps ruin the pacing of the movie. If _Oppenheimer_ was a linear story, it would be a fairly bog-standard rise and fall story, and the time jumps not only fail to change that, but I want the rising and falling action to have an uncontrollable inertia, where the stakes keep escalating non-stop in the rising action, and the aftermath keeps spiraling non-stop in the falling action. But instead, the inertia constantly gets interrupted and resumed by the time jumps. I want the events to feel like they don't have the room to breathe, especially since Nolan's frenetic direction doesn't leave the audience with enough time to breathe regardless. I guess I just really wanted Nolan to make something simple yet effective like _Dunkirk_ again.
It’s edited like a heist movie. If it the same film with Guy Ritchie’s name under it, it would have been panned.
Thank you, I see these ridiculous review where people talk about this film as if we are in front of a new Kuckrick or something. I think the fans of Nolan have lost their minds now, like with Interstellar, it seems that a cute well shot film with fairly good actors is enough to make a great film. Sorry to destroy their dreams but cinematography is more complex than that. I think Nolan as with other directors become too pretentious when they treat difficult serious subjects like this one. In fact the only films I like of Nolan is those where the subject is not that serious, like comic book character Batman I don-t understand also why cinema has to be so serious and cold nowdays, as we see in Dr. Strangelove, it was extremely deep and interesting treating important subjects but not in a way where we want to kill ourselves for the duration of the movie.
C. Nolan is the main reason why this movie is a 7 at best, instead of a 10. Nolan's work is hit or miss, in the past years it was only miss. Either he is smoking some strong shit, or he lost his touch.
Couldn't agree more buddy since tdkr he misses a lot
Cinematics were great, and I would love to watch this movie again with subtitles. But going to watch it at the theaters last week was a horrible experience. I couldn't understand what most of them were saying because I couldn't hear anything.
solution: get your hearing checked
@@sebbepvp1207Sounds like this is the first Christopher Nolan film you’ve ever watched.
It happened to me as well, I work in cinema... You need to go to the manager and ask them to put the volume up. Sometimes the films can be too loud and the staff is not checking properly most of the times.
Nah, there was a boombox in every scene blaring the score . Nolan is also on record saying dialogue in his movies isn’t that important.
I know I'm a little late to the party but I finally was able to see it. I had such high hopes for this film but it was not enjoyable in the least... I don't feel like I gained anything or learned anything from sitting in that theater for over three hours. I was trying to figure out what others saw in it, this was the video I agreed with the most. I think if this movie was released without names attached to it it would have fallen flat.
I loved this movie but had much more expectations. Firsst i thought it was based on science but it turned out to be more political especially the last part after trinity test. Even the test didn't seem so amusing or maybe cause I was expecting actual Hiroshima bomb. The movie during trailer or teaser gave idea about a man making bomb but the movie was more about how he tries to defend himself from his accusations of being a traitor to country and so on. Overall movie was cinematically subtle and i liked it, music played really important role and acting was good too. But felt that the story went lil away from what audiance thought it would be.
You said pretty much what I thought after leaving the theater. The confusing editing does not allow for the pivotal moments of the film to have the weight they deserve. It's too much dialogue, too many characters and every event is portraited as an epic and decisive moment without giving us the time to reflect on what we're seeing.
I think Nolan wants us to contemplate the aftermath of the making of the bomb, but it's editing and plot are too convoluted to let us breath and reflect about the stuff he's showing.
A real let down for me, but maybe it's my fault to expect anything else from Nolan.
Every scene indeed is epic...both in rrality and in movie...if you feel that way then you dont know the gravity of all the things actually happened
WOW , really get you bro > my exact feleleing . toto much rushed . not allowing to sink in . Not being able to conenct with teh v=cahrector . only using vsiuals to state teh mind of oppenhimer . not trough dialogue or other tools. Nolan should keep away from biopics
It's hard to say this, but I will have to agree with this review. I have been really interested in physics for many years. So of course I was very excited for this movie. A movie about a well-known physicist that I of course knew of before? And directed by Christopher Nolan? I thought it had to be really good. And there were things that I was happy about. For instance, there were many famous physicists in the movie that I was happy to see. And it did at least mention certain physics concepts. But overall, the movie was just too long and messy. This movie was of course about the man, and not the physics, but even then it just didn't explain very much of what was happening. It crammed so much of his life into one movie, without going into much depth on any of it. The story was moving forward too fast, making the story unappealing and a bit dry. I already knew much about his story before, and could at the very least follow the entire storyline up until the Trinity test (and various things after that too, although I probably should have looked more into the trial and his relationship with Strauss). But I wonder what the movie was like for those who just went to the theaters without having looked into his story at all. It's hard to admit that a movie didn't meet your expectations, especially when it is a movie that you really wanted to like. But that's just how it is.
The most annoying part of this movie is when they switch to black and white to show it's the past. If you just made good dialogue and a semi-sensible timeline, and any plot line, you wouldn't need to assume the viewer is lost in time and space.
It felt like the entire movie was a trailer. Or like they filmed each individual scene entirely separately of each other. Literally feels stitched together. You can spend 10 minutes in a communist party with no needed details for the story, everyone yelling. Then the next scene you're an indefinite time in the future, getting hired at a school, talking to Einstein, and starting a program in 3 minutes, with almost no dialogue.
My biggest issue with the film was the sound mixing. Everyone in the group that I went with said they couldn't understand like 40+% of the dialogue, and this is a film where the dialogue was really important -and there was a ton of it in this 3+ hour film.
It was difficult especially with the foot stomping sound effects and the soundtrack
@@Ericthecameraman Did you watch it in IMAX??? It was MUCH BETTER than Tenet and I could hear and understand at least 90% of the dialogue. The scenes and dialogues were very rapid but I could easily hear it.
@@nikitamohan3390 It was mainly the beginning that was inaudible
@@pvkom26 I saw it in Canada too. No doubt there are scenes were the score and music kind of overpower or are louder than the words being spoken. I see why that might bother some people especially older people with diminished hearing but I am younger and was sitting in the 4th row at the corner front and could hear most of it surprisingly.
Sound was the best thing in this movie. If you couldnt understand 40%+ dialouge maybe dont watch movies when you are 11 y old and havent finished shool yet.
Thank you for posting this. Most people loved this, and historically, it covers an extremely important piece of history. yes. As a Film? It felt off. The psychological/emotional/historical layers were so finite...when major events occurred? They didn't feel engaging.
Agree it's "a mess". Most of the film felt like “Previously on Oppenheimer”. I was waiting for the high-density, restless scene-setting to end and for the actual film to begin, but it never quite did. No space is given for subtlety or character development. It felt like all dialogue had been rejected unless grand, smarmy or explosive; or clunky scaffolding to set up an opposing character for something grand, smarmy or explosive (hoho). The non-stop music bed daubs all emotionality with big dumb cues for how you're supposed to feel in day-glo highlighter like "THIS IS A POIGNANT MOMENT, YEAH? ARE YOU FEELING MOVED?", leaving you feeling totally detached from the performances.
I would describe the film as emotionally hamfisted, and large chunks of it feel like a coked-up bore spouting unsolicited facts at you at a party, never letting you get a word in, oblivious to whether you're even interested or following.
It's frustrating, because there are strengths in so many other areas: it's visually impressive, there are neat little moments of imagined/hallucinatory storytelling, some great sound design choices - when the music shuts up for five seconds - and some memorable performances (despite everyone speaking in unreal, trailer-friendly soundbytes while walking down a corridor or being shallow DOF focus pulled or lurching towards you on a dolly or whatever). Oh and don't forget Einstein popping out of thin air from behind a car to drop pearls of wisdom like he's the ghost of Yoda or something - people were laughing at the screen, utterly ridiculous. Haven't been this p!ssed off walking out of a cinema for a long time, what a waste.
Immaculate comment, especially the coked-up-party analogy lol
In particular, thank you for calling out the “grand, smarmy” and “unreal, trailer friendly soundbites while walking down a hallway” style of dialogue. I was about to say that Nolan is “prone to it”, but even that is an understatement; it seems to be his baseline for dialogue. Tenet was particularly insufferable in that regard, among others
Oh god I hated Tenet so much. That film was like a 2 hour long Rolex advert. Utter wank.
Thank you for posting this review. You thoroughly explained many criticisms of this movie. As a physicist myself and a Nolan fan I was also disappointed.
At last someone is being honest.
What annoyed me the most was the soundtrack. There was always music playing in the background, even during boring dialog scenes.
Main actor sucked and the audio was way outta wack (sound fx way too loud!) Robert Downy was the only one who was engaging enough to make me feel like I wasn't watching a b level movie.
Agreed, RDJ was the only one who made me watch the whole movie, his charisma is unmatched
I read a comment on another thread that I think sums up the movie. “Oppenheimer is a good 1 hour and 30 min movie that is buried within and 3 hour bad movie."
My favourite comment was someone who felt it was like watching a three hour musical - With no one actually singing anything!
I got a free ticket for this on the regular cinema screen, and honestly I was glad I didn't pay for the IMAX experience. I don't think there was enough visual effects to justify it. That was not the real problem I had with this film though. In my opinion it tried to grasp too many themes or subplots, and therefore it became longer than it should've been and less consistent. I would've personally gone into more detail about the moral dilemma Oppenheimer had to face while building this bomb and it's consequences on a human level. And discard alltogether the incessant and boring scenes where he is being hunted or investigated for banging the wrong woman or shaking hands with communists. Also, the movie introduced too many characters which I feel didn't add anything to the movie, it is hard enough to empathize with Oppenheimer to have to pay attention to a new character being presented every 5 minutes. I would watch Memento, from the same director, 3 times in a row, instead of rewatching this movie again... It felt like a scamm even though I saw it for free. I advise everyone to not go to the cinema to watch this, watch, BArbie instead, or anything else. THis was Christopher Nolan doing whatever he wants and not putting himself in the audience's shoes...I might be wrong, but that's what I felt near the end, I heard his voice saying "F*** you, stay put for 3 hours and get bored" and I saw the whole room in the same situation, desperate to get up from the seat. Good review btw. Sorry for the rant.
Agreed- your critique is insightful and analytical. However, watching Barbie isn't going to help... The current state of filmmaking is pretty abysmal. However, I do applaud Nolan for tackling this topic and assembling a great cast.
This movie felt like I was having a seizure. I’d be watching one scene…then the next scene I’m like what just happened how does this scene relate to the last how and why are they now here.
Just a 3 hours trailer.
The quality of the film immediately looked amateurish and didn’t seem to have a cinematic quality but more of a RUclips video or movie made for TV weird quality
Watched this last night and have to say it was very boring, this coming from someone who has an interest in physics.
Its getting great reviews, but for me films are meant to be entertaining. They do this either by being fun to watch or interesting and thought provoking. Oppenheimer did neither for me, so critics can rave on untill they are blue in the face about cinematography, lighting, narrative structure, ect. But this kind of pretentiousness wont change the fact that the film was just boring.
Several people in the theatre actually had fallen asleep.😂
EDIT: this is a subjective opinion, I do understand that others way enjoy film for reasons other than which i stated.
it's for a very specific audience who have a decent attention span
I'm surprised that a physics interested person found it boring, quite an embarrassment you are to the scientific field ngl 🤷♀️
learn how to read a novel and skip marvel next time, maybe you'd start loving good movies or the very least "understand"
I too am very interested in physics, and I too was a little disappointed. I honestly wonder what everyone is so hyped about. The vast majority of people do not have a strong interest in physics or in the life and work of physicists, so what is it that they liked so much about this movie and that I am somehow missing?
@@frede1905 it's not about physics or the bomb, it's a biopic of a person so if you're not a good reader in a novel perspective then it'll appear very bland, but for me this was easily inside my top 3 of all time because the sheer display of excellency in story telling
@@onilisa8823 an interesting perspective. the movie seems devisive, people seem to love it or hate it. perhaps its that people who are into STEM expect it to be about STEM - and are dissappointed, and the people who arent see it as a pure character based movie, and enjoy it bacause of this. Can you elaborate slightly on "a good reader in a novel perspective"? As i do like to read both fiction and non-fiction, just curious on how i can translate this to film?
@@onilisa8823 yeah , even that depiction was horrible. Sloppy, disjointed mess. Like tenet. Atleast tenet is watchable. Nolan simps will label any crap he directs as "masterpiece". Storytelling,lol. Non linear crap
I don't understand why Robert Downey Jr got an Oscar....
I understand why he got it, he was easily the best part, I don't understand why Cillian got that Oscar, he wasn't good
That 3hrs felt like 6, I was excited the first hour til I realized nothing was going to happen, fell asleep woke up Twice ! 😂 it was boring ! 🤷🏾♂️
im sorry but nolan's recent films have been so pretentious
nailed it with last line. will probably never watch this movie again, there is nothing in it worth a recall 😮
I was so excited to go see this and thought for sure that I would love it. Instead I am very disappointed and don't understand what all the hype is about. I was trying so hard to follow along with the loads and loads of dialogue and constant switching of topics. I guess I didn't know enough about all of the details about what happened before going into the movie. Maybe that would have made it more interesting but I found myself bored mostly.
The more you know history the more you can follow.
i knew nothing at all about the topic, going in blind and yet i understood most of what happened and can confidently say it is one of my favorite movies of all time. This sounds like a you problem.
@@sebbepvp1207 not really just a me problem. A lot of people have been saying the same thing actually
@@livia5158Yeah, it isn't you at all- just a sad assessment of the current state of the film industry. People want to be moved by a film so badly that this particular film has been elevated to an undeserved status. Yes, I applaud Christopher Nolan for covering this compelling subject. Unfortunately, it was done in a less than intriguing manner. Cast and acting was top notch and the intent was obviously there to create a great film. When the characters aren't properly developed, the plot has too many themes and the story jumps around too much, a film falls flat.
@@sebbepvp1207 You know pretending to like this shit isn't going to make you look smart.
you nailed it! had the same problems with this movie :(
the only thing which is hunting me is the very last "what did he say to....." scene.
but the rest is a mess of crosscuts and too much dialog. film is a media which should tell the story which less text/exposition as possible.
His conversation with Einstein was really well handled
Its a biopic. Not an action packed movie.
^ another troll account😂
@@bubba418 i know that. i like for example the imitation game... no action. well done storyline, even with flashbacks
Guys not everyone that disagrees with this guys is a troll lol Maybe it’s possible he’s just wrong about some things lol.
Thought the Trinity Test didn’t look good at all. The buildup was clunky and felt I was looking at a zoomed in fireball. Check out the footage of the actual trinity test . Looks way better, shot in the 40’s and not in imax. Didn’t even seem horrifying in context of the picture. Oppenheimer just seemed nervous it wouldn’t work. And everyone afterwards else seemed pretty happy about it.
In the context of the movie, he helped create a weapon of mass destruction that killed 70,000 people in Hiroshima and another 35,000 in Nagasaki. He got off light by only losing a security clearance .
The first half was a mess with people just going from room to room/ scene to scene just talking with weird artsy shots and sound effects. When they started actually making the bomb it got interesting.
I was disappointed with the movie overall. It's two movies in one. A third regarding the bomb and two thirds regarding politics. Both important but I'd have preferred the balance to be switched.
The part after the Bomb test was too long. Needed to be compressed bigtime. The whole time youre thinking about the Bomb going off and its like "who gives a shit about all this
other stuff?"
I agree that the movie does not connect on an emotional level. It will be forgotten after first viewing.
Nolan is a horrible story teller and cohesive moviemaker. He is Michael Bay 2.0. Most overrated director in human history.
Exactly as I said in my review "Oppenheimer Is Not Great ", Tony Talking The Talk.
Just watched, good job on your review!
Agreeeeee!! it's so bad ... I gave up after 20 mins ... it wasn't confusing to me .... Cloud atlas is also nonlinear but it's so good and I have watched it over and over without getting bored. This one is just stupid, boring and too rigid...
The Non-linear storytelling was not confusing in the slightest, and I found memento/intersterlarr/inception confusing. But I think the non-linear narrative was unnecessary and just an excuse to use black and white. A good use of non-linear is social network(very similar to Oppenheimer)
First of all, I'm a huge fan of all of Nolan's movies with the exception of Dunkirk. I thought Dunkirk was an okay movie, but it didn't enthrall me like his other movies. Oppenheimer was in the same boat as Dunkirk for me. I have mixed feelings about it. The movie is long, tedious, and boring to get through, but it does have some really great moments. The first half of the movie was a mess in terms of editing and pacing. The movie jumps all over place, and its hard to connect with the plot and characters. There is also excessive exposition that is needlessly conjolted. The second half of the movie improves significantly in editing, pacing, and character development. I enjoyed the second half of the movie far more than the first half. The lead up to the atomic bomb scene was epic, and the movie really makes you feel the impeding doom and moral dilemma of the situation. But after the atomic bomb scene, it goes back to the tiresome and drawn-out exposition. The final interrogation scene where they question Oppenheimer went on far too long and the conclusion wasn't worth the build up. There were some mildly interesting moments during the interrogation scene, but it didn't justify the long screen time and was far less engaging than the atomic bomb sequence. This movie really suffers from over-exposition, poor pacing / editing (especially in first half of movie) and sub-par character development. With the exception of Oppenheimer himself, we really don't get to learn too much about the supporting characters. The supporting characters are all pretty one dimensional for the most part. I understand the movie is being told through the perspective and eyes of Oppenheimer, but it would have been more interesting if the supporting characters were a little more flushed out giving more emotional weight to the movie. I will say that Cillian Murphy was amazing as Oppenheimer which really elevated the movie. But overall, this movie falls under C tier for Nolan movies. Its worth watching once but not a movie I would want to watch again
I was so hyped. I love Nolan and his approach to timelines. I was disappointed. 4 timelines. To resolve the most dinamic one 1h before the end of the movie, made the last par tanti climactic.
Yep it should end 10 minutes after the Bomb is exploded. Nothing can compare to a nuke going off
the last hour was absolutely best part of the movie hahah
@@pablo-z-dragon it's quite subjective. But even if I take your argument I would argue that a court drama is probably not the best choice to follow origin story, followed by litherally a nuke blast 😀
@@worsethanhitlerpt.2539 or move the nuke to the end and move the court drama earlier. Also why the original story with the university and the apple? To show his ambiguous morality or something? Maybe to illustrate decision and regret or his passion for physics. Either way the first 40 min ad nothing to the story, didn't even develop the character much
@@pablo-z-dragon i almost felt asleep after the bomb exploded. such a bad expierience. for me that was the worst part of the movie
That's three pretty dire films in a row from Nolan, I think he may be out of good movies.
what I don't like about this movie is the overwhelming amount of dialogues and info dump it gives to the viewers. It doesn't give enough time for us to breath and digest the conversation. Coupled with extremely fast talking by the characters and layers upon layers of flashbacks and cutscenes, I couldn't get through the movie in one sitting. I wanted to enjoy it and I generally love dialogue -filled shows/drama but the pacing in this movie sucks for me.
Nice review. I was also disappointed by the lack of explanation in theory and visually, as to how they came up with the shape and technical workings of the bomb.
All you get are some quick sketches, 2 test of heavy firecrackers and some snap shots of the assembly of the bomb's core.
Just like the detonation itself, you can clearly see, Nolan struggles with re-creating the enormous blast, he was lucky they did it at night, so you don't get any visual
references from the scene to compare the fire-ball to.
But still you feel it some how won't come close to the real thing. And there fore it makes no impact. And if it was to difficult to create such a blast,
the shock wave the sand and debris that would be pulled in by the explosion and violently spit out would have made for some awesome slow-motion shots.
I think it's sad we now know every little detail from his personal life, but almost nothing of his biggest achievement. (if one can call it that)
Remind me again of the movie’s name? Oh yeah it’s about him not about the bomb
I can’t people are that dumb exist
@@Belomoh6genuinely braindead ppl, they have a shorter attention span than toddler and expect this to be an action movie 💀 for me this was a masterpiece because I love reading novels and this was like a book came to life
But…we didn’t really get every detail of Oppenheimer’s personal life? There were almost no scenes where he talks about his inner thoughts or reasoning. What motivates him? For example, he repeatedly says he isn’t a communist but we never see or hear him explain **why** he rejects communism. We are told he loves his country, but are never shown or told why….was his father a WWI veteran? Was he horrified to witness the mistreatment of Jews in Germany during his studies? Why did he decide to attempt to MURDER his tutor at Cambridge? Why did he decide not to go through with it? His personal relationships are completely shallow and do nothing to reveal his character. So many stones left unturned…three hours and I still have no idea who Oppenheimer was as a man.
@@lalaLAX219Yes, spot on - BIG problems with connecting the viewer to the character Oppenheimer. I wanted to love this film; that would require a deeper understanding of him and some other main characters. What made them tick? Why were so many in higher education turning to Communism? Where was Oppenheimer's pain, drive, obsession, passion, philosophy etc. Please, in three hours time, give us more to ponder than repetitive courtroom scenes and sketches of LANL.
So True 🙁🙁
Exactly!!! A biopic drama really really didn't need a non-linear story which made everything all the more confusing and unappealing. On top of that the non-linear story was also poorly executed. I mean, compare the editing in this movie to The Prestige, a fantasy drama about magicians. Editing in Oppie was very shoddy, and certainly not needed in the first place.
Leaving out showing the bombing of Japan was so disappointing. It undermines the destructive power of the bomb. Dunkirk had some great Spitfire scenes. Would have loved to see the Enola Gay B29 in this film. Everyone always "says show, don't tell", yet they seem to be giving this a pass for some reason.
Such a let down there was no Hiroshima scene. All in all it was just a bunch of guys making bland small talk for 3 hours.
But I think you are missing the point Nolan is trying to make with a historical BIOGRAPHY. This movie is not about the documentary about the Atomic Bomb. This is about biography about Oppenheimer and his life. Showing the bombing makes no sense bc no character ever saw the bomb drop so it would be completely out of place. Not to mention the logistical concerns without using CGI. But I understand the disappointment bc I have no doubt it would’ve been epic
@@PayneBumpus I think you’re the one missing the point dude. This is being billed as an IMAX experience. Massively misleading marketing. Watching it at home on a flat screen TV is just as adequate.
@@samlee86421 cap
@@samlee86421 You don't like seeing blank walls or maybe one bookcase in the background in IMAX?
I wasn't impressed. Adding music to literally every scene got trite and it felt forced at many moments.
I've really enjoyed your take, however I respectfully disagree. I thought the narrative and means by which the story was told was excellently crafted and the pacing was fine. It didn't feel like a long film to me.
I do agree with your take on why the IMAX format was used. Seemed a little unnecessary given the vast majority of the film took place in small rooms. I'd only see this at an IMAX cinema for the sound - which was excellent (typical of camera op to overlook that :D).
My main criticism was the casting. Don't get me wrong, all the cast were great in their roles (Cillian Murphy was outstanding), however I would've liked a few more jobbing actors to take more of the bit-part roles. It took me out of the film when all of a sudden another A lister was dropped in for a very brief moment.
Is it Nolan's best film? No, Momento is going to be hard to beat. Is it up there with The Prestige and Inception? Again, no. But it's a very good film in its own right, and I expect 99% of people will disagree with me on that :D
Look forward to more videos!
I like your take! You are right the sound design did benefit, especially during the trinity test, and there is a lot of things to be commended on that scene
Casting was interesting, everyone was great, but the onslaught of cameos took me out of the film, I did really like the portrayal of Edison- could have gone in the typical cartoonish mad genius sort of fashion, but kept a reverence for him, still brilliant, but older and wiser
Thanks! Always glad to hear your take
Is Nolan now in his Ridley Scott phase?
I knew little to nothing about Oppenheimer (the dude, not the movie) and watching the movie was okay. It was fun at times but all the time skipping was confusing and I couldn’t tell who was who. *spoilers ahead* I thought when Oppenheimer was already married to kitty (I think that was her name) when the other girl and Oppenheimer talked about the other girl (who I now know was kitty) being pregnant and getting married before she was showing. I thought kittys son there was his third kid or something. It was a mess of a movie
Same, I purposefully didn’t look up his backstory and history but it’s almost necessary to do a bit of homework before seeing this
The scene where Florence and Cillian are sitting on the floor legit explains this bruv. You just gotta pay attention
@@chancepope7395sorry I was bored out of my mind wondering if Oppie was going to keep his security clearance by the end. Riveting stuff 🙄
@@chancepope7395 I paid attention the entire movie, I was trying to understand it but it just didn’t click until the end
Why does this movie even needed to be seen in IMAX ? Nothing happens for the entire 3 hours. And the constantly playinh music showed no respect to silence. Most overrated film I've seen.
For the film to really work, they should’ve either: A) leave an hour of it on the editing room floor so it packs a proper punch or B) make a six or seven-episode miniseries that could cover more ground - something that the brilliant “Chernobyl” miniseries achieved so well.
damn completely disagree with everything, nolan's storytelling through sound is what always makes it magical...absolute masterpiece
The sound is absurd. Second time I’ve seen a Nolan film in theater (interstellar). Second time my ears have been blown out and the sound drowns out the dialogue or is so distracting you can’t pay attention to the screen because it hurts. I’m fine with sound. I’m fine with using sound to drive the story. I’m not fine with being genuinely concerned for my health because the volume hurts my ears and makes me wince. I can’t see the screen when I’m closing my eyes from the pain. Absolutely stupid.
@hamsandwichindahouse I mean listen, health always comes first, maybe some ear plugs would come in handy for next time. I watch specifically in imax because of the increase of sound, I think for specific movies sound is really cool when it is loud and chaotic, and for this one, it just elevated the movie experience for me and made it epic because of the way he integrates sound within the movie.
Sorry, Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now, Dr. Zhivago or Lawrence of Arabia were masterpieces. This film was just decent.
@@pablo-z-dragonthey weren’t talking too much about the music, rather the dialogue which is drowned out. If watched in imax, you probably didn’t notice, because it’s legitimately a problem that Nolan acknowledges and defends by telling us to watch in imax
@@TheReeelBradPitt ahh okay i see what you're saying...thats valid, i watched it in imax😅 thx for the infoo
I absolutely LOVED the movie. Even though sometimes I didn't fully understand who is who. But I was still entertained, because of the incredible pace of the movie. The scenes just jump on you one after another.
I generally love non-linear story-telling in movies and here there was not only that, but also each one presented a different plot line. Seeing it all come to its conclusions by the end was very satisfying.
One of my favorite movie genres is a court drama, so no surprise I found the last hour of the movie the best. I thought it was a strange choice not to end the movie with Trinity test, but as far as I am concerned it worked out perfectly - everyone kinda expected Trinity to be the climax and it wasn't.
Music was perfect. Acting was perfect.
I agree on the issue with the sound though. I was watching with subtitles so I had no problem but without them I wouldn't understand everything (especilly in the beginning until my ears got used to English).
Edit: And my favorite actor of all time is Gary Oldman so you can imagine my reaction when he suddenly appeared as Truman, I didn't expect him to be there and in that moment I just knew that for me this is the movie of the year.
Went into the cinema thinking it was an action-packed historical depiction something along the line of "The Imitation Game" ended up watching a fucking boring drama about Oppenheimer's personal life and that stupid post-war committee interrogation. The fuckers that made this movie might as well made a movie about Mother Theresa or Nelson Mandela and not ruined the Oppenheimer story altogether.
And the score, although having elements that were excellent as standalone compositions, was wielded like blunt object as if batter us into submission with overly omotional music that never stops building in crescendo, suggesting we are always near climax - nevermind the actual context -was jsut so plainly inappropriate. I was fatigued within 30 minutes and had to tap out.
Strongly disagree, tone was clear to me and the jumps in time were not without meaning, in fact they served the plot really well. This is not a perfect film, but not for those reasons, I do agree however about the visuals, they could have done a lot more with color coding. Still a solid 8/10 for me
Most of all,there are so many characters I this movie and can’t tell the difference because they are all Europeans look all the same since I barely see any of them in my country…
Just streamed on Prime, fell asleep on it three times, didn’t even get to the halfway point
It's easily the worst film Nolan has ever made. Fitting, it'll be the one to finally get him his Oscar. I'm just glad I didn't spend money on this trash in theaters.
It was like Blade Runner 2049. Incredible stunning looks, lacking a good story.
Blade runner actually had a story it is 10x better than sleepenheimer
Dear Eric,
I think yours is the first objective criticism I've heard from a technical perspective. In terms of rewatchability however, I think that isn't something film makers give conscious consideration.
Frank.
Thank you Frank, I believe you are right, rewatchability is most likely not something most viewers are conscious of
Always happy to hear from you!
I really love any audiovisual type of art: movies, shorts, animations, video games, art installations, audiovisual performance, etc. And I have a saying “try to respect filmmakers cause you never know how hard it was to make that film, and the world is everyday more unnecessary demanding”. And lastly I really love how Nolan bends the laws of existence; I mean, even if everybody hates Tenet, I do love it very much.
So I thought one can spect something interesting with Openheimer, at least. But when I watched it I felt literally ALL what you said in your video. Is like you read my mind and articulated the idea better than my thought could do it in a shorter time.
I do liked that Nolan tried to make all visual and special effects Only on camera for the sake of keeping 70mm IMAX negative free of digital post process, that can interfere in the organic feel of particules structures (a very long conversation that talks about arguments to take people to the teather instead of watching at home). The other interesting thing is how color time, instead of color grade, can keep some beyond HDR color physic behaviors, and more with natural light. A thing that Emmanuel Lubeski (many Oscar’s winner) will explain better. that’s why him and Terrence Malik have a Dogma that scientifically and artistically prove many points of all of this.
But is sand how Oppenheimer didn’t get to my heart, no even in the historical side of particle physics and quantum physics. For that anybody can read Feynman and at the same time reverse engineering all the novel awards, from Higgs to backward in time.
It was very hard to me to conclude all of this and many details I don’t want to share, cause I don’t want to be toxic. So thanks to take the leap 🙏🏿
I saw the film in the 70mm IMAX print format now several months ago, so what do I remember. Bad color correction with skin tones shifting badly within scenes and from scene to scene. Bad framing for IMAX (maybe it works better in Panavision). Blah cinematography. Checking my watch out of boredom. A muddy, predictable, and uninspiring sound mix. The only performance which still haunts me is Emily Blunt’s two wordless stares. The rest as you say I will never crave to see again.
This movie has amazing ingredients. Truffles, fois gras, caviar, gold leaf, and were thrown together to make a cake
A great analogy!
😂 this comment is better than the movie
I thought the movie was good with the acting being especially exceptional. However, I didn't like or even understand the ending (or the 3rd act). Maybe that was just my perception, but it felt like a different movie or like I walked into some sort of a "law and order" episode. The whole thing about the security clearance hearing didn't make sense. After the success of the project and his fame, he could have gotten a tenured position in any university that he wished so there was really no need for the government clearance. More to the point, given his regret or "I'm a destroyer of worlds" attitude he wouldn't have wanted anything to do with these types of projects and so again no need for clearance. At some point he replies to his attorney that he has some sort of alteriour motive behind going through the hearing but we never find out what this hidden agenda was all about. A more powerful ending could have simply been (if Nolan really wanted to incorporate this clearance angle), "hey lets take away his security clearance" with Oppenheimer replying: "you can have it" (mic drop). This would have made more sense given the tenor of regret throught the whole film. The 3rd act just had too many new details and plot lines that changed the character of the movie. Felt very forced and needless. Maybe I need to watch it again. This being said, terrific cast and production.
quite agree with this review.. Oppenheimer itself didn't know what genre it exactly fits or what basic idea is it depicting. and trying to capture all genres like period drama, history, war or simply a biography.. It doesn't make audience connect to even one perspective..
Hmm, interesting set of conclusions. Didn’t feel any of these issues. It’s wild how different takes on art can be so so different per-person.
That’s what makes it so great as a medium!
@@Ericthecameraman especially film, it’s all together.
Nice to watch a film that's complicated, but will reveal deeper meaning with repeated viewings. Makes a change from the superhero garbage.
This felt exactly like a historical movie turned into a marvel superhero movie to me
@@swegatron2859 Explain?
@@ally11488he probably can’t because it doesn’t even remotely make any sense!
@@Ayyyoooo16 I understand him.
I understand him.
Ich verstehe ihn.
i understand him
Ich verstehe ihn
the first half felt like a trailer compilation, editing so fast you thought it was pitting scenes against each other instead of people. Nolan is great for imposing action, not insightful drama. Felt superficial
@@Ayyyoooo16when they name dropped Kennedy like they were teasing a sequel 😂
Not to mention the quippy dialogue, fast paced scenes that don’t take a moment to breathe, it’s all in montage style, Celebrity cameos, sex scene while reading religious text like nolan had a boner from making an r rated film like if written by a 16 yo film student, and adding black and white portions also like a film student (b and w Isn’t inherently bad)
Glad im not the only one, i had to take breaks to finish this one
Yeah I hear you, was a battle to stay awake. Really annoyed that I got sucked into the hype and sat through 3hrs of this in a cinema. The topic just seems such a waste for a Nolan movie. 30mins of this film was truly brilliant, leading upto the detonation. Somehow they managed to squeeze another hour of garbage after this scene to ensure that you are truly bored shitless.
I tried 3 times to watch this movie and I couldn't finish it. The paranoia and jumping back and forth was just too much. This was a turd and I'm surprised more movie goers didn't voice complaints when it hit the box office. They were suckered into the theaters for....wait for it.......super duper hi def 3d sharks with lazers ultimate filming.....to see a paranoid crazy guy walking up to a park bench or...really nothing!
For those who haven’t seen it, go watch the film and make up your own opinion about it.
No, don't bother, it is a snoozefest
Can you make an essay on Wally pfister lighting techniques ? I love how the dark knight and dark knight rises look....
Man... I appreciate your lucidity. It's very easy to fall for Nolan's very agreeable seduction. A very overrated movie....
Yeah, I got really bored halfway through this movie and I really like most of Christopher Nolans movies.
Oppenheimer was a big disappointment in a time of overall disappointing movies.
I thoroughly enjoyed Oppenheimer but agree that a more linear narrative was needed. This is a biopic and Nolan's obsession with non-linear story telling didn't add anything here, just detracted.
Having said said that, the wonderful performances held it together for me and made it a great cinematic experience. Saw it with my 16-yr-old and she preferred it over Barbie.
Always respect your opinions though, even when I disagree. World would be a boring place if we all felt the same.
Edit: i did notice they avoided clichés. No mushroom clouds and didn't use the 'I am become death..' quote as the final line of the movie (which i was fully expecting). The actual Einstein ending was unexpected and far superior.
Glad you both enjoyed it, and I respect your opinion as well! I do agree I thought the ending with Einstein was the right note to leave the film on, and his portrayal was very well handled
That's exactly what I thought about the non-linear narrative
@@Ericthecameramanalthough the line was so predictable I muttered it to myself as he said it on screen ha
I couldn't get beyond 45 minutes of this film before cutting my losses. Terrible, clumsy, cliché laden script, absurdly chaotic structure. Some stories are just not meant to be films and this is one them. A great deal of the fascination is in the technical details, and of course this film could only pay lip service to them, having to dumb them down to the level of the stupidest person in the movie theatre. So then you get the painful sight of someone muttering some banal physics catchphrase, to the bewonderment of the PhD standing opposite them. Don't bother, just get hold of one of the many great books available on the subject.
Thanks for the video. Your explanation resonates well with the reasons I didn't like this movie. Besides of all the confusion, the first feeling I had when I left the cinema was "why did I paid extra to watch this movie in iMax?".
This film showed Nolan’s limitations as a writer / director. 1:03 I watched a few Oppenheimer documentaries and mini-series before this film so I understood the story and just focused on the way that Nolan was telling it. The Non-linear structure doesn’t cover up the mess, but it might get some fans to re-watch. I wasn’t confused by the story because I’d done my research so the flaws in the non-linear approach to Oppenheimer became apparent.
4:36 IMO Nolan is too caught up in being an “auteur” for his loyal fans. I watched the film on an IMAX screen but only a few scenes required IMAX. It’s almost as if they shot in IMAX as part of the Nolan brand.
5:45 Yes, I felt no connection with Oppenheimer. It’s a shame because Cillian Murphy is one of the finest actors of our generation but this film is not going to be his “Oscar moment”.
Unfortunately, I left the IMAX cinema thinking one of the “New Hollywood” era Directors ( *Sidney Lumet, Coppola, Spielberg, Scorcese* etc) would have done a better job creating an emotional connection and telling a compelling story. Heck, *The Prestige* tells a better story in less time.
I remember Spielberg was known for Summer Blockbusters until *Color Purple, Empire of the Sun and Schindlers List* proved he could takle drama. In contrast, Oppenheimer is not a crossover film that will get fans of Christopher Nolan’s action movies into drama like Spielberg did. I think Oppenheimer will be forgotten within a generation unless we’re revisiting the scenes with Einstein. *I’m going to re-watch it* without IMAX this week because I’m a film nerd but only Nolan fans or viewers with a specific interest will rave about this film ten years from now.
Well put! I agree I would have liked to see different directors take on it, especially Spielberg
@@Ericthecameraman Yes Spielberg would have provided an emotional connection. I hope Nolan takes a risk with his next film and dares to abandon some of his “style” in favour of telling a great story.
@@jimkellysafro I really think so, especially looking at how he handled period biopics before, like Lincoln, for example