As HE commenter Kristi Coulter noted a few hours ago, Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer has been, in fact, dishonestly sold and promoted. Because it’s basically a bait-and-switcher.
It’s not some kind of awesome, slam-bam-whammo atomic bomb film. It’s not a tale of acute scientific obsession or about a fine, fevered, steadily building madness. And it’s not a WWII horror film about the becoming of death and the destroying of worlds or even cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Instead it’s a dialogue-driven saga of a blindingly brilliant but conflicted and finally self-crippling Jewish physicist who oversaw and guided the building of the world’s first atomic bombs (Fat Man and Little Boy) but was mainly out to punish Nazi Germany…his European kin will have vengeance!
But when that quest ended and Japan became the target the physicist didn’t feel the fire as much, and then, in the wake of the deaths of tens of thousands, he turned into a “crybaby” (Harry Truman’s term) and a kind of squishy, under-motivated turncoat in the matter of the H-bomb’s development, and as a result he wound up being persecuted and devoured by Robert Downey, Jr. and the D.C. wolves in 1954 and thereby lost his “security clearance.”
That’s it — that’s what the movie is. The saga of a slender, pipe-smoking, genius-level candy-ass with cold blue eyes. A guy who built the bomb but didn’t want to know or even think about it after the task was completed. Treated unfairly and with cruelty, for sure, but who would argue he didn’t make his own bed?
And who believes that Cillian Murphy’s Oppie was able to feel sexual desire, or was even capable of attaining stiffie-hood? I didn’t buy it for a second, especially in the company of the stocky, short-statured, moon-faced and rather morose Florence Pugh.
On top of which my trapped legs were killing me in that third-row-center seat.
