hate to join the bandwagon here, but this movie is both immoral, and dumb as bricks. immoral for crafting a dramatic arc that manipulates its audience into feeling sympathy for poor mr. destroyer-of-worlds; dumb because the script is non-linear for no other reason than that is mr. nolan’s signature gimmick—not, certainly, because it adds anything to the viewing experience; dumb as bricks because the drama is unbelievably hollow.
i can’t help citing this since-deleted tweet about how no women speak for the first 20 minutes, and then there’s almost immediately a sex scene. i also thought it was interesting how we get an early reference to oppenheimer’s wife and three children, but there is no representation of his family for a while (didn’t count), and the children are almost entirely shown as screaming nuisances. nolan apologists will want to say that the film is not “about” those things, but its representation of women, family life, and war are all a function of the dramatic inertia of its script.
this movie wants to be a character study—that’s why the sequence involving cillian murphy crushing his balls sitting cross-legged, ass-naked in a leather armchair is played with high gravitas—but almost all of the scenes with florence pugh treat drama as an infodump. one unit of expository speech is stacked disjointedly against the next, with no sense of connection, no sense of dialogue. the character-based scenes had no flow because the film is deeply disinterested in drama. this film, like all of nolan’s oeuvre post-batman, is a vehicle for his own vaunted ambition.
plenty of seriousness is given to oppenheimer’s dramatic relationship to other men, especially the RDJ character, but the way nolan treats his subject’s “marginal” drama is a sign that he is only doing his due diligence to those elements. his real interest lies in all the galaxy-brained bullshit he’s always been into. the reason that nolan chose to adapt this narrative (i commend him, it was a very good choice for him and his brand) is because the topic of quantum mechanics and the a-bomb is epic AF, dude! it gives him an excuse to include abstract imagery (which i liked, even if it was a bit loud) and to justify the non-linear plot that he is hopelessly addicted to. it’s a good vehicle for nolan, but the film FAILS to represent the core of its character’s drama—for as we all know, the text does not exist without a margin drawn around it. you cannot represent a human being, much less a family man, without getting to the heart of how they love.
the film also FAILS to do justice to its own dramatic stakes. the turning point comes when the bomb falls, and oppenheimer experiences a crisis of conscience and changes his behaviours. but nolan is explicitly against representing the horrors of war! he tries to convey the ethical stakes at the heart of the story of the invention of the a-bomb in purely human terms, like he’s a fucking student doing a writing exercise. how convenient that this is where you place your lightest touch, eh mr. amerikkkan director? the film features no images of war; there is one scene where characters react to such images, but they are out of frame. for the viewer, the stakes are lowered, even as the narrative arc of the film manipulates us into sympathetic alignment with the character ostensibly responsible for the crimes in question. it’s fucked up, it’s immoral, this movie sucks.