Originally Posted by Hammock Parties:
are you sure? nolan thinks you should. i can only assume it's to fully appreciate the mind blowing explodey/chemical reaction bits.
Cinematography was beautiful and all, and I’m sure you will enjoy it in IMAX but I don’t see how it would add much. People shouldn’t sweat seeing it in a “regular” theater. Interstellar it’s not. You’ll see what I mean. [Reply]
Originally Posted by DCTwister:
No spoilers.
I saw Oppenheimer tonight. Here’s my balanced view. Disclaimer - I am an immense Christopher Nolan fan. I think he’s the best filmmaker of our generation. Loved movies like Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, etc. I love his work. Inception is a top 5 movie of all time for me. Also loved Memento, Dark Knight, even Tenet.
- Acting from Cilian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. were absolutely incredible. RDJ is a ****ing master of his craft. Impressive. Matt Damon very good also.
- Cinematography and musical score were also excellent, very polished.
- This is not an action film (as you might have guessed). More on this in a moment.
- While the scenes have flashbacks out of sequential time order, this is not a tricky “over-thinker” type movie. It’s pretty straight forward. The “thinker” part of it as Oppenheimer begins to realize his moral dilemma.
I really enjoyed the film and for a “talky” type drama movie, 3 hours flew by pretty quickly. If you like Nolan and historical dramas, you will enjoy the film. Just know that it’s a historical drama, it is not an action film. There is no reason to see this in IMAX.
I liked it, but I’ll be a little bit of a contrarian and say I was a little bored. It’s not among my favorite Nolan films. The best way I could describe this film in the last 1/3 of it is think “A Few Good Men”. A courtroom drama culminated by a brilliant performance by a top-tier actor (in that case Jack Nicholson, in this case RDJ). But I didn’t come to see a Nolan movie about a court case. So I’d give it an 85 Rotten Tomatoes.
As someone who has become a definite NOT Nolan fan, this review gives me hope that I might actually like this one. No labyrinthian plot twists or arty-farty time hopping? Perhaps I'll give it a shot. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Frazod:
As someone who has become a definite NOT Nolan fan, this review gives me hope that I might actually like this one. No labyrinthian plot twists or arty-farty time hopping? Perhaps I'll give it a shot.
You might! No time travel, space travel or dreams within a dream within a dream, or telling the story backwards. It is overall a great film. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Demonpenz:
Lots of sex in this movie. Something you don't see in movies anymore.
Only 2 scenes that were like 10 seconds long.
Great movie, for me, it’s one of those movies you gotta see twice to fully grasp everything. Worth the watch, all the white people clapped at the end. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Frazod:
As someone who has become a definite NOT Nolan fan, this review gives me hope that I might actually like this one. No labyrinthian plot twists or arty-farty time hopping? Perhaps I'll give it a shot.
There are 3 different timelines jumbled together, especially in the first hour of the movie. Eventually it all kind of merges together. I enjoyed the middle portion and ending portion of the movie a lot more than the first 30-40 minutes of it. [Reply]
It was a great movie, but not the mind-blowing, life-altering experience people are saying it was.
I actually think they should have leaned HARDER into showing the devastation of nuclear war. Oppie walking out of that gym should have been a house of horrors.
One thing Nolan continues to do that annoys the fuck out of me is his fucking music is too loud. Now, this could have been an issue with the theater I was in (IMAX Dine-In 28 in Olathe), but I'm not 100%. I will watch it again at home and see how the levels are.
But he has a real issue in his movies where there is too much fucking dialogue coming way too fucking fast, and either he gets lazy in post or it's some weird "artist" decision to have about 1/4 of his dialogue be fucking unintelligble. This is present in all of his movies for me. It basically ruined Tenet for me, and each Batman film needed two viewings to sort through it all.
For a three hour movie these two issues gave me some watcher's fatigue, which is an issue when you're trying to keep track of a lot of moving parts with characters across a long period of time. And adding the black and white was jarring, although I see what he was trying to do there by contrasting between time periods. I would have preferred a less jarring visual separator (a vignette perhaps).
I will certainly say the movie got me to think more than any of Nolan's other movies. We went home and watched an Oppie documentary. Very interesting to see how the A-Bomb was intertwined with the Red scare.
RDJ was absolutely incredible and stole the show from Cilian. The bit players were also amazing. Blunt was great. I wanted a lot more Truman, because Oldman was terrific, although I felt they were heavy-handed in villifying Truman - was he a dick? Yes. But a vital one.
Didn't really like Alden as, uh, whatever that character was, but maybe just because I'm so used to him as Han Solo. Quite enjoyed Casey Affleck as the communist bloodhound. :-)
The documentary made me wish they had focused more on Oppie being an utter crackpot as a youth, partially because he was borderline abused at school. Also wanted a little more expansion of the bombs being dropped, they glossed over the second drop, too.
One thing I was fascinated to learn from the documentary (also not in the film, but mildly hinted at) was just how ignorant the general US public was about communism. No international TV or internet back then so they were able to keep all the, uh, MURDER largely out of the news. They had thousands of people in America duped into thinking communism was a utopian bliss of jobs and bread for everyone.
The score was excellent, but again too loud, but can't fully judge until I watch at home. It's up there with insterstellar for me and I'll download it just to listen to it again. The practical effects looked great, although the aged makeup at the end was slightly goofy, but I appreciate Nolan bucking the CGI trend.
Another thing that was much appreciated is the film never got preachy, and was free of woke bullshit. I'm eager to read some leftist fishwrap decrying the film's portrayal of communists :-)
8/10 will watch again. Not Nolan's best film (that is still Interstellar), but his most important one. Thank god we didn't build an H-bomb first. [Reply]
