Just saw it at a regular theater. Not a big movie guy, so my opinion likely means little. It was OK. Pretty good, I guess. Long, but not horribly too long. I like Cilian Murphy. My biggest complaint was the loud noise, and difficulty hearing some dialogue - with the accents and background noise/music. I also often have difficulty telling all the middle-aged white guys in suits apart in films from this era. Coulda used subtitles and names.
Emily Blunt was pretty great. I coulda easily waited until it streamed.
Yes, it’s the same movie, but IMO the vertical space used when viewed on a true 1.43 IMAX screen is simply incredible. With the Trinity test itself being such a vertical image, it just makes the viewing experience all the more impressive. Of course, that’s why those screens are pretty much 100% sold out for the run, so most people unfortunately won’t be able to view it that way.
Understood, but I would still roll that into the art side of things. The aspect ratio isn’t inherent to film; digital projection can do that too. It’s just that IMAX specifically uses a taller aspect ratio. And 70mm IMAX has better resolution that the best digital IMAX theaters.
So when Nolan says he prefers filming on 70mm IMAX film, there is a technical aspect in that it beats digital in resolution at the moment. But part of it really has nothing to do with digital vs. analog, or even technology at all, like the choice of aspect ratio. And I suspect it goes even farther, like that using the heavy IMAX cameras requires an approach to filmmaking that’s different than tiny digital cameras that can be put anywhere. It restricts what kinds of scenes you can film and how you go about doing that.
It’s like, say, oil painting vs. a digital illustration system. The digital system is undoubtedly more flexible. But the oil paints force you into a certain way of doing things, which might be beneficial for the effect you’re trying to achieve. And it will do a better job at being an oil painting than whatever simulation the digital version provides.
However, once the film has been made, the purpose of the theater is to convert the recorded imagery into photons I can see. The technology is irrelevant as long as it meets the minimum quality bar (which might be very high). Digital has lots of practical advantages (especially cost), and undoubtedly a system could be made that matches 70mm film, but it hasn’t been done yet.
Thank you for expressing what I wanted to say.
A decent movie, but nothing to get excited about.
One good thing–I did manage to sit there for the full three hours without feeling too bored. The acting was good enough to keep me paying attention… and waiting for something interesting to happen.
The female characters were one-dimensional. Even the nude scenes would have worked better if the actors were clothed or under the sheets
There’s a review right now on yahoo that says the movie " felt like three hours of frantically listing off the motivations and emotions I was supposed to be seeing portrayed in the characters, but with none of the impact
By the final scenes of bureaucracy and backbiting politics ( the Senate hearings), I just didn’t care whether Strauss got his appointment to the Cabinet, or whether Openheimer got to keep his security clearance.)
And the “music” was bad
VERY loud train engines and railroad wheels making metallic screeching noise on the rails.
-Why was some in color and some in B&W? At first I thought the B&W somehow concerned the past/memories, but near the end the confirmation hearings were the most current action, and were filmed in B&W.
-What was the deal with moving the floral centerpiece? I get the metaphor that the different characters were not “seeing” each others’ positions, but they must’ve shown it 20 times!
-The cinematography seemed like only some things were in focus - such as one person’s face, but the other person and the scenery would be blurry. I found that distracting.
-I was a tad surprised they showed Feynman as much as they did. While he was an amazing scientist and interesting personality, I think he was young and relatively insignificant in the Manhattan Project (compared to the giants), and VERY insignificant to telling this story. Was he included just because more movie goers would know his name than many of the other scientists?
I was not a big fan of the quick cuts to the loud explosions. Personally, I just found it too jarring for my taste.
How far along did the test occur? I estimated about 2/3 of the way through the 3 hrs. Some neat developments after that, but at that point the film impressed me as seeming a tad overlong.
I guess they didn’t have time to flesh out everything, but I never understood Oppenheimer’s relationship with the communist woman. The parts we were shown don’t explain his obsession/devotion to her.
No need to go to Germany when Operation Meetinghouse killed 100,000. There’s a park along the banks of the Sumida river where at least on the Asakusa side there’s a plaque and a small altar for the victims of that bombing run. Which, when I saw it, had burning incense and offerings 74 years later. The New Mexico “downwinders” using this as a chance to get more recognition aside, I’ve been annoyed at the predictable “think pieces” and such that have come out for the same old arguments.
Anyway, you’d think I’d be right in the target market for this movie. But I’m tired of the way Nolan makes movies, very tired of what he calls sound editing, and I think I’ll wait until I can watch it at home.
Plus, I fear this isn’t a historical biopic as much as it is an existential tone poem on how troubled Oppenheimer was. That it is as accurate historically as Amadeus.
I don’t know how historically accurate it is (it appeared to me, and the guy who wrote the book said it was), but I didn’t come away from the film thinking he was unusually “troubled.”
I saw the movie yesterday as a matinee in a dinky local theater. I didn’t find it visually compelling, and “The Scene” was underwhelming for me after how I heard it being built up. Maybe seeing it in IMAX would have been better but frankly there’s so much actual footage of atomic tests out there that trying to make something equivalent without CGI seems like a waste of time.
There were several points where the sound design and mixing stood out to me, which is bad. At one point there was a scene where a character gets out of a car and walks up to the door to a house with loud obnoxious strings playing for no apparent reason, and another scene in a loud party where the background noise abruptly fades while a character speaks a line then comes right back up again. In my opinion, good sound design should heighten a viewing experience without being overt and obvious. This is a known weakness of Nolan who likes to maximize
The movie itself was fine, though at points it felt more like montage than a coherent story, especially when rapidly cutting back and forth between characters talking about events at a hearing versus seeing the events. Somebody unfamiliar with Oppenheimer’s life would likely be lost during these sequences until it’s later made clear when exactly they’re happening, since the movie hangs itself to the outcomes of those hearings and they hang over the entire story. Watching the movie mostly made me want to read American Prometheus, the book it’s based on, and wonder how much of the story was genuine given how many transcripts and records exist around his life.
“Oppenheimer got the idea for his famous quote when a half-naked depressed bisexual communist woman insisted he read the Bhagavad Gita out loud during sex” struck me as especially absurd, even if it was genuinely true (the relationship at least is) it was a strange way to tie his personal life to his professional one. In general the women in the movie had little to do, and I think that has more to do with a lack of imagination regarding the ways women contributed to Oppenheimer’s life. Nolan could have done better than naked co-ed Sanskrit study sessions and one scene where his wife verbally spars with a lawyer (probably taken directly from a transcript).
I don’t think the movie is propaganda in support of the atomic program or the atrocities committed against Japan, Oppenheimer is shown to be deeply conflicted about the way the weapons were used, and includes his post-war activism against continuing to research even larger weapons of mass destruction which eventually ended his career. He was the “father of the atomic bomb” and lived with the guilt of knowing how much death and destruction his creation caused, and died fearing how much more death and destruction was yet to come. I think the movie did a good job portraying that. It doesn’t show Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they were not a part of Oppenheimer’s life beyond the guilt and despair he lived with in the aftermath. Personally, I think the use of atomic weapons on Japan, especially Japanese civilians, was an unjustified crime against humanity, but I don’t need every movie to unambiguously lay out that argument. Oppenheimer pulled the genie from its bottle and spent the rest of his life regretting it. For me, that is enough.
That may indeed be true, but I didn’t get that feeling from the movie. Even in the 1965 CBS interview I watched, he conceded that he didn’t see a better alterative to using the bomb on Japan.
Wait! It’s the scripture’s association with a sex scene that’s offensive? But being quoted upon the creation of a machine capable of obliterating the human race isn’t a problem?
