Oppenheimer (2023)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer's role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II.
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What critics say influenced Oppenheimer
Film historians may recall that Paul Newman previously played Groves in Roland Joffé’s Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), which covered the same ground.
I first remember hearing Oppenheimer's name in my seventh-grade history class when we watched Fat Man and Little Boy, where Dwight Schultz from The A-Team played him.
The wide shots seem to be an homage to David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia .
He keeps the viewer on their toes with sizzling dialogue reminiscent of 12 Angry Men or Seven Days in May and keeps the visual and audio razzle-dazzle to a surprising minimum.
It’s a rather cold, hard end point considering the anxiety and excitement Nolan builds towards the first major test of the atomic bomb prior to its use on Nagasaki and Hiroshima (neither of which we see, instead crystallized in the imagined nightmares of Oppenheimer , envisioning how his creation eradicates life, albeit in less sensational ways than something James Cameron fashioned in 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day ).
Maybe it's about the fact that we are what the T-800 says we are in Terminator 2 : hellbound with an appetite for self-destruction, even as we're fucking like rabbits and procreating like there's actually a tomorrow.
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The movie, presented in a swift three act structure that mirrors the director’s own “Memento,” grapples with the horrors, innovation, and intensity of the project where the physicists in charge never could say with 100% certainty the bomb’s aftershocks wouldn’t destroy the atmosphere.
In this, Nolan is doing what he’s always done, all the way back to Memento : demanding that his audience work, and leaving them heaving with a feeling of intellectual reward.
If you want to understand how “Oppenheimer” fits into the larger picture of Christopher Nolan’s career, I think you have to go back to “Memento.”
Acclaimed director Christopher Nolan has come so far from Following and Memento in every way possible as a filmmaker.
This chronological experimentation will be familiar to fans of Director Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Interstellar, and Dunkirk.
This is a man who started off making arthouse films like Memento and Insomnia and then he changed the comic book movie genre with his Batman trilogy – a franchise that showed that world that comic book movies could be solid, brilliant films.
Though Oppenheimer shares visual and thematic touchstones with Christopher Nolan’s other films, its most obvious point of comparison may be Miyazaki Hayao’s The Wind Rises .
Consider what Oliver Stone brought to his American history lessons, once upon a time: a pure, unfiltered shot of screaming-hot madness; the homeless guy Stone played in his own The Hand who accosts you with his briefcase full of evidence and a bellyful of zealotic bile.
After blowing his audience away with the spectacle of the Trinity sequence, Nolan deftly switches into an equally compelling post-war narrative that recalls Oliver Stone’s JFK in its use of frenetic yet scalpel precise editing; Switching back and forth between the board hearing into Oppenheimer’s security clearance and the confirmation hearing preparing to initiate Strauss into the senate.
Oppenheimer is peak cinema, Nolan’s Oscar-worthy (on many fronts) magnum opus that will be remembered in the same vain as Oliver Stone’s JFK for its examination of all aspects of what transpired.
The clear but kinetic interweaving that frames the Strauss hearings in black and white and the rest in color is eerily evocative of Oliver Stone’s energetically edited and sharply acted bit of nearby history, “JFK” (1991); in “Oppenheimer,” that then-junior senator from Massachusetts poetically has a small hand in one of the three timelines.
As Oppenheimer realizes that “genius is no guarantee of wisdom,” and his superiors only want to expand America’s nuclear arsenal, the film’s final act becomes a dizzying mix of JFK , Amadeus and The Tell Tale Heart .
If anything, Oppenheimer resembles Oliver Stone’s Academy Award–winning docudrama JFK more than anything else.
Oppenheimer is a film that will live shoulder to shoulder with other historical biopics like Lawrence of Arabia, The Insider, Malcolm X, and JFK that showcased an important moment or figure in history and had the presence of mind to ask the audience hard questions about humanity as they are walking out of the theater.
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Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Themes
Daarna wordt het ook pijnlijk duidelijk hoe de politiek het overneemt als de wetenschap klaar is (kijk ook zeker Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb van Stanley Kubrick nog eens).
The cast beyond Murphy and Robert Downey Jr., who manages to make the eely Strauss human, is a long list of potential competing supporting-actor award nods, starting with Matt Damon as general (to be) Lesley Groves, who oversees the Manhattan Project and gets to deliver a fiery back-and-forth that’s almost on par with his indelible rant in “Good Will Hunting” (1997).
The actor is also known for their role in “Good Will Hunting,” their role in “Bourne Identity,” and their role in “The Martian.”