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139: Oppenheimer (with Corey Atad) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-07-26 13:42:29
Edited:
2023-08-06 18:03:32
Imported:
2024-11
Tags:

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Content

The film writer Corey Atad returns to the show for a deep dive into Christopher Nolan’s historical epic Oppenheimer.

Beyond a discussion of the film itself we review the several film formats Oppenheimer has been released in theatrically, take a look at how this movie reflects and departs from the source material (the biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer), and compare the film to its major stylistic influences, including Oliver Stone’s JFK, There Will Be Blood and The Man Who Fell To Earth.

We also discuss the Christopher Nolan redemption arc in general; how he uses the IMAX screen to create intimate horror, his fantastic cast of actors, the callbacks to his earlier works (Memento and even the Batman trilogy) and how some of the bozo decisions he often takes as a director somehow don’t take away from this film’s power.

Follow Corey Atad on Twitter.

Trailer for Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy in the aisles of Vidéo Club in Paris.

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Comments

Jesper Ohlsson

Saw it on a pretty good cam that had ads for indian-based online slots, which was kinda funny (here's this undignified trash periodically floating on top of an incredibly expensive movie). I agree with whoever said this is "Nolan just doing too much", and in this movie, the cut-up editing style is really more of a hindrance, and kinda comes across as painting over a lack of confidence that the story is strong enough to just be told in a straightforward manner. The movie also had a few clunky "this is epic, as indicated by the script, but not neccessarily by way of how it comes across organically on-screen". The real stand-out in that regard was when Emily Blunt - who is annoyed at Oppenheimer's "failiure to fight back" - decides to "fight back, for him" in the hearing by.... saying her answers in a kind of slightly sassy tone? But the interrogator characters - who have been grilling Oppenheimer in a moustache-twirling fashion - react to Blunt's completely benign and reasonable answers in a way that I think comes solely from the script saying "is suddenly owned and very impressed by the moxy of this doormat's wife showing what's what, brackets, even the really old guy must admit that this lady is a spitfire; comments to this effect". ...it kinda reminded me of the Sarah Palin film with Julianne Moore, where we are told that Palin has been sucking when she's on camera, until the script says "Palin suddenly starts being epic in camera-interviews, the studio audience can't get enough of her, brackets, other characters in the movie remark on this fact outloud, and agree with each other that she is now really good at this". ...Einstein coming out of Oppenheimer's backyard like he was a raccoon was funny though. //looked up what Oppenheimer actually looked like after the movie, and the casting is maybe the most perfect "looks identical to the real guy, but glammed up just enough for the purposes of being a movie" (real-life Oppenheimer looks insanely high-class-anglo in that oddly gaunt way).

Jesper Ohlsson

...my other real problem with the movie is that a lot of air gets sucked out when it gear-shifts into largely inscrutable office-politics/obtuse ratfucking. I guess it's not something you can really cut out (you'd get shit for it) when you're doing a biopic - and Nolan's almost telenovella clunkiness doesn't really help - but in his defense it's just a really intrinsically difficult thing to make pop. You can make a gripping drama about blacklisting/red scare/ratfucking, but it would have to be in a context where the audience immediately understands the stakes. There's been a lot of movies about hollywood-blacklisting, and they work because you don't need any further explanation; everyone understands that "this means that this person's career is over. If they want to ever be an actor again, they would have to leave the US and give up everything". But with Oppenheimer it's "...ok so you didn't get to be the acting boss of the newly invented national radiation research department or whatever?" You can still go anywhere in the world and just be insanely famous. You can take a job at any ivy-league university and be fawned over. And if you don't want to do real work at all, you could be that era's Neil Degrasse Tyson and do talk-shows and media-appearances. Just be "the bomb guy". The stakes are really muddled (and are made worse by Nolan just leaning on the "faster, more intense!" button). But as an uninitiated outsider, the story is "this guy made the Atom Bomb. You know, I am become Death, destroyer of worlds? Yeah, that guy. Anyway, here's some inscrutable office-drama about a job he didn't get to have, after he did the main thing that you came to see the movie for." "This one time, this guy I knew treated me very unfairly for a job I wanted, because he thought I had made my friend Einstein - uh-huh, yeah I'm friends with Einstein, btw - dislike him. Hmm? What me and Einstein talk about? Oh, this and that, surely. Anyway, let's go back to what's important - my employment, at this place. And also, I guess, whether or not I have forever changed the fabric of reality by making that bomb, who can say. " I rarely do this, but I had to check wikipedia to see what the actual stakes were, cause it just felt so confusingly "...who cares? The bomb was the thing; not that one job he wanted afterwards." ...I guess to some extent this is just a problem with doing a biopic (which, of course, you don't really "have to do".) //In a way it's almost like the inverse of the Enigma Machine/Alan Turing movie, where "what happened afterwards" is actually really important to highlight (arguably the most important bit), and it's just completely glossed over, save for some cowardly worded remark flashed over the last frames of the movie, whereas with Oppenheimer a disproportionate chunk of the movie is dedicated to something that feels trivial in the grand scheme of things.