Oppenheimer (2023) review
The term "Magnum Opus" has always been confusing to me, because it seems to imply that someone's most grand expansive work is also their best. In regards to being grand, then yes, Oppenheimer is certainly Nolan's magnum opus. It's a sprawling story that covers decades of scientific revolution and political unrest, in a time that undoubtedly birthed all the modern mechanics of war. However, from all other definitions of the term, this is not Nolan's magnum opus.
I found this film exhausting to say the least. Not because of tension or unease, but because it's towering scale meant that it lost any sense of a cohesive story or an intimacy with any of its dozens of characters. Nolan has cited Terrence Malick as a big influence, and unfortunately I only felt the influence of Malicks weaknesses. Scenes which lack any context and constantly go back and forth, leaving us no room to slowly become invested, and probably most exhausting of all was the feeling that the movie was simply a 3 hour montage.
The movie felt like there were barely any real scenes. Ironically enough, the constant music and the incessant intercutting between different moments actually becomes so fatiguing that it makes the movie far more boring than if it spent more time letting some moments sit in silence. I want to actually feel like I'm at the Christmas party, I want to know what these people joke about in their down time. And to say "there isn't enough time" or "it's not the point of the movie" is a lousy excuse. The Great escape, Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, even a movie as frantically fast paced as Magnolia, are all sweeping epics with grand implications that have dozens of little moments of humanity. Oppenheimer had near zero.
Perhaps the movie would've been easier to deal with if it had more visual storytelling, but like a lot of Nolan's work, almost every piece of story is told through dialogue. Not behavior, not visual composition, just characters explaining the very convoluted ideas which make up the story. While this happens, we simply cut from one shot-reverse-shot to another. They're all gorgeously lit, but they add absolutely no subtext or efficiency. The visuals don't give us any additional insight into the story beyond seeing Oppenheimers internal conflict.
This movie has several key narrative threads. It's hard to say what the primary one is because, well, there isn't one. The movie is awkwardly divided between building the bomb, and then a political scuffle that happens some years later. These two events have such little cause and effect that they feel like they should be two separate movies. In fact, when I was watching the film I became interested in the idea of a film that covers the hours leading up to the trinity test, and the entire film is centered around the tension of knowing there's a small chance that the bomb could destroy the atmosphere. In all the press junkets the cast and crew talk about this idea as if it's a central part of the movie, but in actuality it's only alluded to a few times and barely holds any weight. It seems very little effort was put in to show the tension of that, even though you could dedicate a whole movie to scientists weighting up such a deep moral quandary. But rather than being a movie about the trinity test, or a subjective biopic about Oppenehimer, or a larger study of the effects of nuclear war, or a political drama about a friendship falling out, it's this weird blend of all of them which doesn't have any overarching mission statement. I don't know what the movie wanted to say, and there isn't enough coherent information for us to come to our own conclusions.
When I walked out of the theatre I found myself comparing Oppenheimer to last year's Blonde. Both movies are biopics with very long runtimes which rapidly jump back and forth in time, using both color and black and white footage without a strong justification. While I think Oppenheimer is a better film because the ideas within it are far less problematic, it felt just as incoherent. Nolan often manipulates the mechanics of film to emphasise subjectivity, and in films like Memento and Dunkirk he does that exceptionally well. But in Oppenheimer's case it acts as a detriment, and the lack of context actually draws us further away from both the characters and the story as a whole.
It's also worth noting that this movie is very clearly incredibly well researched, and it tackled very high brow ideas in a way which feels convincing. However, just because your characters say smart things does not mean that you have a smart movie. Anyone can blindly transcribe text from a book on quantum psychics, but it's the film-makers job to take all of this information and find a way of molding it into a narrative with its own individual perspective. I don't feel like this movie did that.
It seems a lot of people love this movie, which is absolutely wonderful and I don't want to take away from that. These are my own thoughts from one viewing, and maybe two years from now I'll do a complete 180. For now, as much as I could continue waffling on, I'll leave it at that.
