Awww! That means Tom Cruise has even more to complain about with Oppenheimer hogging all the showtimes. It’s not right to deny the world’s richest Scientologist just because of some moviefilm about the creator of the atomic bomb.
And atomic bombs are the tools of Xenu!
Saw in 70mm last night. Really good (long) film but I really see no need to to go out of your way to see this in any special format. There nothing very cinematic about about the way it was filmed. Lot and lots of dialog in very close shots. Even the climactic trinity test didn’t merit any need to see this in a theatre.
If you hold out and wait to watch this in the comfort of your own home I really don’t think you’re missing anything.
All the CGI power in Hollywood and the pyrotechnics team went with a gasoline explosion to portray the image of releasing the atom?
And they just now extended it at that IMAX through Aug 30(!) if you’ll be in NYC during those weeks.
Serious question: why didn’t Nolan just use the film of the actual explosion? Not loud enough? 
Or just too well known?
The fireball depicted is what my brother’s campfire looks like on Memorial Weekend. They needed a different effect, is what I’m sayin’.
Upon further research, the color footage I’ve always had in my head of Trinity might not actually be Trinity, but another test. I can’t find it, at any rate. I thought the original film was in color, but it turns out all I can find today are colorized versions. Who knows what I remember - I’ve seen a lot of nuclear test films over the years. They all run together. You’ve seen one big boom, you’ve seen them all. 
(haven’t seen the film yet) I think they should have used some of that ultra-high speed footage. That’s different, not as well known, and puts a new perspective on nuclear weapons. Almost looks alive:
Thanks!
Supposedly Nolan was making a point of using as little CG as possible in the VFX, but I agree the explosion itself was underwhelming, thanks to the decades of exposure to footage of actual nuclear bombs. I suspect his goal was to convey the feeling of being there that night, and the feelings Oppenheimer was experiencing in particular, and I think he did a better job of that than of trying to convey the ridiculous overwhelming power of a nuclear bomb.
There’s plenty of documentaries that go into great detail about atomic weapons, and the Atomic Testing Museum mentioned upthread probably has the definitive simulation of what it would be like to witness an atomic bomb.
I consider myself a Nolan fan, but i just rate the movie as good not great. Maybe his “worst” movie in my mind, but still better than most movies. My main complaint would be running time. I see little reason this needed to be a three hour movie. Compress the first hour and last hour of the movie into half hours and a two hour running time should be more than enough.
Just saw it today so I’ve opened the thread.
Let’s put it this way. With the planning for operations Olympic and Coronet there were estimations of US casualties. Purple heart medals were ordered and manufactured to cover the estimates but, with Japan’s surrender, the invasions were cancelled and the decorations warehoused, to be parceled out post-WWII. They finally ran out last year.
And this says nothing of the incalculable Japanese casualties.
I don’t understand the objection to “long” (three hour) movies. It’s not like you have somewhere you have to be after most movies. If it’s enjoyable, surely 3 hours of fun is better than 2. Most people (myself included) didn’t think this movie had slow boring parts. If it did, that’s the problem, not the length.
So where would you place the limit on your attention span? Five? Six? Seven hours? Like Lord of the Rings, most movies don’t need to be that friggin’ long in my opinion. Maybe if you can’t say it in two hours, it’s not worth saying. They could easily have cut Oppy down by a half hour or an hour and not lost anything crucial.
I don’t think everything has to be crucial. I can’t think of a scene I didn’t want to see. In fact, i think I would have liked to see a little more background explaining his attachment to the communist woman.
If I’m not in danger of sobering up, it’s not too long. 
What, you can’t handle the 5 hour cut of Das Boot?
When I was quite young my parents parked me (at my insistence) at a movie theater showing all five Plant of the Apes films in a row - about 8 hours, 9 with intermissions. I’m not sure I even took a bathroom break. Y’all are weak 
.
Agreed. I think 3 hours was about as short as you could make this movie, particularly if part of it is to get viewers to feel a sense of Oppenheimer’s internal strife.
I loved the film and thought it was Nolans best but you can easily have cut 20 minutes out of that last hour, it definitely started dragging for me at that point. Too much Strauss sidebars.
Fundies gonna fund.
TBF the title of Nolan’s movie is Oppenheimer not How I Made the Bomb.
There was two season series on WGN, Manh(a)ttan, that covered the project and got more technical. It was highly fictionalized – Bush, Groves, and Oppenheimer all made appearances but for some reason the Hungarian physicist who circulated a petition asking Truman to not drop the bomb on Japan without warning them first was not named Szilard for some reason – and some of the focus on the lead characters got kind of soapy at times but the the stuff they had to figure out was prominent, too.
It streamed on Netflix which is where I saw it but when I checked just now, it is no longer available.
And speaking of technology, I saw it in a 70-mm IMAX theater, one of 30 in the world from what I’ve read. I noticed the tiny-little flaws in a physical print, black specks that appear and vanish in a literal instant, which brought back the old days. They probably wouldn’t have been noticeable in even a 70mm - 5 perf print but sitting in the 3rd row of an IMAX theater, the furthest back I could get, they sure were.
The same chain has Tuesday Night Classics* every week and frequently they project a BluRay copy of the film, probably because while The Wizard of Oz has probably been digitized, The Misfits has not. I notice the difference when the movie first starts but once I get into the story, I stop paying attention.
*“Classic” being defined as late as 1995. I was that’s not a classic but then I considered, when I was first interested in old movies in the late 60s I was watching film from the 30s that are the same 30 years back. God, I feel old.