Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

[domino harvey]

That's on the nose, sure, but I've sat through the Life of Emile Zola and this movie has nothing to worry about (and I am going to take a wiiiiiiild leap and assume these YouTube content creators have nothing approaching that kind of context)

[flyonthewall2983]

At the risk of sounding provocative in order to drum up conversation but just about enough time has passed I think to ask. Is this his masterpiece?

[hearthesilence]

James Woods says he agreed to step back and remain quiet about the film because emphasizing whatever connection he had to it would’ve hurt its chances at awards and financial success.

[flyonthewall2983]

I did like that Chuck Roven name-checked him accepting Best Picture honors. Robert Downey, Jr. looked right at the camera smiled and gave a thumbs up to that.

[Yakushima]

At the risk of sounding provocative in order to drum up conversation but just about enough time has passed I think to ask. Is this his masterpiece?

Yes, this absolutely is.

[flyonthewall2983]

I still haven’t seen Tenet, nor Following so I can’t account for his work as a whole but that was my immediate feeling for sure. I hadn’t seen an IMAX screening since Interstellar, which in itself was a fascinating experience walking through what was a decent multiplex decked out with the kind of extravagance my small theaters lacked but have character of their own. 9 years later at a midday showing with the lights out at the concession stands, it kind of felt like the first real social interaction outside of normal routine I had been doing since lockdown and after.

This just added to the atmosphere in the screening room. I am really glad I saw this with my brother, despite differences that happen when you grow up as close as we did, it has been the common ground where I have made inroads being comfortable being around him again. Around anybody again really, but that is another conversation. Needless to say I think some of it whizzed by him but he was wowed by it for sure, we both agreed on Damon's performance.

As to the direct engagement it felt immediate how special this was as to how I have evolved in understanding the absolute despair or anxiety expressed right from the frame where we are introduced to him. The mechanisms within the storytelling, blowing completely past any fractional notions of a triumphant conclusion to the Trinity test, and how it connects to those opening images and then to how it ends, have not escaped my wonder as to how he also made it so entertaining and fun to watch.

[Aspect]

Dunkirk remains his masterpiece. The film where he finally discovered the poetic power of images over exposition. Then he promptly forgot everything he learned. At this point, I think it will remain an anomaly in his filmography.

[Mr Sausage]

Dunkirk didn't need explanation, tho'. There are no major concepts to explain, and the big structural conceit, overlapping timelines, only requires you to experience it. Nolan neither discovered nor forgot anything. Dunkirk is just a simple story with a set of classical themes structured in a novel manner. And as for the poetic power of images, I remember the imagery of more conceptual, explanation heavy movies like Inception and The Prestige better than the imagery of Dunkirk, which was mostly just typical war imagery. That's not a criticism; Dunkirk just doesn't use big, layered images like those other films. Mostly what I remember of the movie is the various small dramas woven into a larger whole by the odd structure, in which small and large are flattened into equal importance. There's nothing like cities folding in on themselves, doubles watching themselves drown, men falling into temporal interstices, or people fighting their temporally-inverted doppelgangers. Those are all grand poetic images, while Dunkirk has its interests elsewhere.

[Never Cursed]

The movie isn't good enough for me to revisit.

Just grabbed a PDF of the script. Page 21 of the Final Shooting Script:

OPPENHEIMER
Einstein can’t accept the Copenhagen interpretation-
LOMANITZ
'God doesn’t play dice.'
OPPENHEIMER
Except he does. Bohr showed us how...

Translation:
Oppenheimer says that Einstein doesn't agree with Bohr's interpretation of the meaning of QM. Lomanitz mocks Einstein. Oppenheimer agrees with him and venerates Bohr.

Thus proving my original contention. And I only skimmed up to page 21! There are more scenes dissing Einstein's lack of understanding regarding QM but enough is enough.

A fine theory, with just one issue: this dialogue does not appear in the finished film! The only mention of "god doesn't play dice" comes from Strauss in his first scene with Oppenheimer, which coincidentally also sets up Oppenheimer's warm and intellectually trusting relationship with Einstein. Not only is your malpractice comparison to Nolan's approach unfair, it's also untrue, at least to the actual film, and befits Strauss' reductive, utile caricature of physics.

[Walter Kurtz]

Dunkirk remains his masterpiece.

I liked Mrs. Miniver more. Nolan forgot the flower show.

[therewillbeblus]

Inception and Interstellar remain his masterpieces for me: Two films that use the grandest ideas and exposition to get at simple yet poetic and relatable human emotionality. What seems like a juxtaposition between thought and emotion becomes synchronized and profoundly harmonious. Oppenheimer is great, but doesn't graze the lucid and concentrated sensitivity of those two. Perhaps that makes it more impressive in some ways, but at times it threatens to lose its focus, purpose, and point, and sometimes does. I really like or love all of his films though.

[Mr Sausage]

I’m maybe the only Nolan fan who dislikes Interstellar (its grand cosmological ideas were let down by what I found to be a trite emotional end). And I don’t like Insomnia (weaker than its source) or Tenet (exhausting and borderline incoherent in its current form; ought to’ve been a miniseries) either.

My favourite remains The Prestige, a wonderfully artful and tricksy but also emotionally devastating movie on several fronts. What I would follow that with, I don’t know. Oppenheimer is surely his grandest and most complex movie, but there’s a lot to be said for how moving and poignant stuff like Memento and Inception can be, and how they reward multiple viewings even after you’ve figured out all the tricks. And then there’s the excitement of Dunkirk, its way of invigorating familiar stories.

[nicolas]

For me, Oppenheimer is his sixth masterpiece after Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar and Dunkirk. I have particularly strong emotional connections to the latter three but the more I see of Oppenheimer the more surreal this gigantic achievement appears to me. I was initially surprised to read Paul Schrader’s comment about this being the best and most important film of the century so far and honestly, I’m not that far off from subscribing to that too. Nolan has mastered his craft so perfectly by now that such a complex and layered film like Oppenheimer comes across as effortless. Whenever I feel discouraged by bad films or the occasional miniseries I watch, I put in my copy of that film and sample one or two scenes to cleanse my mind. The only films of his I think are “merely” good are Insomnia and Batman Begins whereas the other features are all upper-tier in all their unique, wonderful ways.

[Walter Kurtz]

At the risk of sounding provocative in order to drum up conversation but just about enough time has passed I think to ask. Is this his masterpiece?

Oppenheimer may be Nolan’s "masterpiece" but its still not a very good film. Nolan demonstrated a child’s understanding of quantum mechanics where Bohr's epistemological obfuscations were preferred to Einstein’s trenchant ontological incisiveness.

Nolan’s seeming patronage of the superficial Bohrian “just shut up and calculate” practice is laughable in the face of the deeper-thinking explications by present-day philosophers of physics.

His presentation of Einstein as a doddering dummy is especially problematic and demonstrates his absolute cluelessness to the fact that Einstein ‘s EPR paper was presented in 1935… 30 years after the annus mirabilis.

Einstein's EPR paper... commonly noted as the most cited paper in the history of physics... led directly to Bell, Clauser and quantum entanglement. And this was thirty years after his papers that laid the foundations of both quantum theory and relativity.

Doddering dummy? If this movie were a medical procedure, Nolan would be guilty of malpractice.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't recall Einstein depicted as anything like what you describe. And I think the fact that the movie has Oppenheimer constantly return to Einstein for advice, guidance, and whatever else gives the lie to your description.

[Walter Kurtz]

The movie isn't good enough for me to revisit. But I remember at least one scene where a group of physicists snicker about Einstein being over the hill and not understanding quantum physics... and at least one scene where physicists show veneration for Bohr. And so my description didn't "lie" because I'm talking about quantum mechanics and not moral philosophy. Oppenheimer was approaching Einstein more about morality and not about interpretations of the meaning of QM.

As far as the intellectual foundations of QM itself (and not moral philosophy) is concerned... it seemed to me at least to side with Bohr. This may not be obvious to you if you don't know the history of various interpretations of quantum mechanics, the historical debates, and the evolution of thinking regarding locality vs non-locality.

As far as the movie as a whole is concerned I agree with whoever said that someone saved a straightforward History Channel movie with fancy editing. The only thing I enjoyed about it was that Emily Blunt got nominated mostly for looking soulful.

[flyonthewall2983]

With what she was given she made an impression, with how dramatically inert some of Nolan's women can seem on paper but brought alive sometimes rather illuminating the whole film. Just an example, but I thought Marion Cotillard's performance in Inception had more than enough in the surface of her expression meant it had me locked to the screen. I think that Nolan has beneath this heavy male lead cast, these two haunting and memorable performances reflective of how Oppenheimer remembered them.

[Walter Kurtz]

The movie isn't good enough for me to revisit.

Just grabbed a PDF of the script. Page 21 of the Final Shooting Script:

OPPENHEIMER
Einstein can’t accept the Copenhagen interpretation-
LOMANITZ
'God doesn’t play dice.'
OPPENHEIMER
Except he does. Bohr showed us how...

Translation:
Oppenheimer says that Einstein doesn't agree with Bohr's interpretation of the meaning of QM. Lomanitz mocks Einstein. Oppenheimer agrees with him and venerates Bohr.

Thus proving my original contention. And I only skimmed up to page 21! There are more scenes dissing Einstein's lack of understanding regarding QM but enough is enough.

[Walter Kurtz]

With what she was given she made an impression, with how dramatically inert some of Nolan's women can seem on paper but brought alive sometimes rather illuminating the whole film. Just an example, but I thought Marion Cotillard's performance in Inception had more than enough in the surface of her expression meant it had me locked to the screen.

Oh, I agree in both cases. Blunt and Cotillard are two of my five favorite female actors. Soulful looks in both cases always work for me. Blunt can sing, do action, do comedy, do action comedy, do rom-com, do soulful looks. A totally underrated performer.

[Mr Sausage]

The movie isn't good enough for me to revisit. But I remember at least one scene where a group of physicists snicker about Einstein being over the hill and not understanding quantum physics... and at least one scene where physicists show veneration for Bohr. And so my description didn't "lie" because I'm talking about quantum mechanics and not moral philosophy. Oppenheimer was approaching Einstein more about morality and not about interpretations of the meaning of QM.

As far as the intellectual foundations of QM itself (and not moral philosophy) is concerned... it seemed to me at least to side with Bohr. This may not be obvious to you if you don't know the history of various interpretations of quantum mechanics, the historical debates, and the evolution of thinking regarding locality vs non-locality.

As far as the movie as a whole is concerned I agree with whoever said that someone saved a straightforward History Channel movie with fancy editing. The only thing I enjoyed about it was that Emily Blunt got nominated mostly for looking soulful.

A group of characters talking about someone in a particular way is not the same as the movie endorsing, let alone participating in, characterizing them that way. I know you know this. And while I don't know off the top of my head, what you describe may well have been Einstein's reputation among Berkley scientists at the time. You seem to assume as a matter of course that the things the characters say are things the movie also believes, without distinguishing if those statements are simply historical. In general you treat the film as beneath you and therefore beneath any sort of care or consideration in how you describe it.

The rest of your post just reads like you really want to tell us that you know a lot about quantum mechanics.

And so my description didn't "lie" because I'm talking about quantum mechanics and not moral philosophy. Oppenheimer was approaching Einstein more about morality and not about interpretations of the meaning of QM.

Your description was that Einstein was presented as "a doddering dummy". This has nothing to do with quantum mechanics and it's false, which I think you know as you're trying to move your goalposts now. Einstein was granted considerable gravity by the film--indeed he was made its moral centre. Oppenheimer himself was often shown to be foolish in his decisions, but Einstein not.

Also, "give the lie to" means to prove something to be false. It does not accuse someone of lying. I'm very sure you know this, so I don't know why you phrased things the way you did.

[Walter Kurtz]

I don't know why you phrased things the way you did.

I'm probably overly sensitive due to the Einstein vs Bohr arguments and debates that have been summarized for the better part of a hundred years as "Einstein was past his prime and just didn't get quantum mechanics." I thought the movie was just presenting that old viewpoint once again where tens of millions of moviegoers are going to come away with the same opinion because the only thing they will ever know about quantum theory will be this movie..

Einstein was a deeper thinker and other physicists just didn't understand at the time what he was saying. BTW in a nutshell... the EPR paper says that QM cannot be complete if the universe is local... and Einstein was right about that. Ironically this is true because the universe is non-local. This is the "entanglement" that people are now aware of. Einstein was decades ahead of his time in quantum thinking as well as relativity.

But yeah. I'm way too thin-skinned about this. My bad I guess.

PS --- this post keeps showing up in the past instead of the present. Time travel! It's actually in response to Mr Suasage's post further down. I think the site is mixing up my PST with prior response's EST.

[Mr Sausage]

A maintenance issue has made the posts all out of whack. Hopefully it'll be fixed over the coming days.

[erok910]

I liked this movie. It was cool. Its a bit of a 'children's' flick for adults. It simplified everything from serious math to personal conflict. And I understand being annoyed by its simplicity- but how much can one ask for? It's pretty and it's tame and it does the best it can to be harsh and soulful. A bunch of people watched it.. A lot of falsely created tension out of conflict interpersonal. But this is not really new for Nolan. Not something I can really complain about other than in SERIOUS specifics. Almost like excuses to use cool shots and pithy dialogue to get away with a theme not depicted. I want to like it more: but as time goes on, I feel I need to just be thankful for works delivered like this.

Parasite was more fun, perhaps, but similarly- this is what we get from this pop culture cinema. Matt Damon was very good after Cillian. I don't know about Emily Blunt, personally thought it a bit self conscious. But people like it. Very cool. I'm more impressed by Nolan now, but it almost broke the dam further than Tenet. It's what he's got, best we will get. Always apologies on language, English second language is all.

[therewillbeblus]

Matt Damon is the MVP player. It's such a genuine performance of a real kind of person. I wish he was nominated instead of RDJ, but that was never gonna happen - too subtle

[erok910]

I agree on Damon comment. I love Downey jr and have since around Shortcuts, my end. But I thought this was the Damon show after Cillian. A great performance, his best in a while considering the size. Then again I did really like him in a lot of Stillwater. Unrelated, of course. My girlfriend and I couldn't stop talking about how serious Damon was in his acting here. Unexpected, IMO.

I might even go as far to say Damon was best of performances too. But I'm a sucker for good actors not having to move to do their thing, that Marlo sort of thing in the Wire or Pacino in Godfather- which I think Cillian was doing a bit.