I quite liked it!

It felt like I was watching a great biopic and I liked some of the cinematography as well and the way they shot certain things.

But also, it felt a bit like a Guy Ritchie film with the film constantly cutting back and forth between different eras… which I sort-of liked but I can understand why others didn’t like it and it has its limitations (not to mention: it’s hard to do effectively).

The problem is that, unless you’re a communist or a history buff, you won’t always understand the references. There’s a lot missing, even for a film that’s 3 hours long. I don’t mind the 3 hour duration. But people talked vaguely about shit or were kinda obscure with what they said. I will say that it captures the Cold War and Second Red Scare aspect well. But you won’t, say, care who Stimson is unless you already know who Stimson is, so to speak.

I’m surprised that the communists are described and shown to be, more or less, sympathetic. Oppie says something about “appeasing the Soviets” but that’s probably just fluff and we all know that he doesn’t mean it (plus, he was likely a Communist Party USA member at one point anyway so, in a way, it doesn’t matter what anti-communist thing he might say here and there because we know that it’s bullshit). Does the audience know that? They probably sort-of do. I say “sort-of” because no doubt it’ll go over other peoples’ heads.

It definitely feels like Christopher Nolan made it… for himself, so to speak, in the way it just glosses over things that the audience could’ve probably got a primer on to begin with. Like, I felt like the director and the people behind the film really liked the subject matter but they still had to dumb it down in the end. They still had to do it all fast within a 3 hour framework.

It’s amazing that none of the other characters besides, say, Teller (for example) have personalities. Well, certainly, Groves has a personality, Jean has a personality, but you can tell that, for example, Lomanwitz doesn’t have much of a personality to begin with. Whatever his historical significance, the movie will gloss over it at times, and you can tell that, even when the movie references things from an hour previously (it is a bit tightly written), it’s not… able to do so in a way that’s always significant. I see what Nolan was trying to do by revisiting certain scenes and seeing it from a different angle. I like it. But it doesn’t always work.

I understand that most MLs will hate this film. I’ve seen many that do.

But I went in not expecting that much in terms of accuracy and was pleasantly surprised by, well, other aspects of the film, including the Second Red Scare aspect.

Also, Kitty saying that she sees a difference between communism and Soviet communism was honestly a good answer. I liked it, but again, that’s a theoretical debate that MLs sometimes have all the time (I don’t believe that the Soviet model is the only model of socialism). I don’t know. I just liked it. You can glean things from the dialogue of the movie… if you fill in the dots with what you already know (and use sub-titles all the while).

On another note: I don’t mind “no-personality” characters per se (I’ve read A Song of Ice and Fire, for crying out loud, and I like it, but I’m doing a re-read and there are certainly third-party characters that come off as basically being there to enliven the scene, act as a go-between for certain characters, or expand the world). As bonkers as it might sound, I don’t think every character (not even a secondary character) has to have an expanded backstory and personality so long as they’re there to explain things and support the secondary characters or main characters… To give an A Song of Ice and Fire example, Robett Glover (a character from the books, not Game of Thrones) isn’t going to be on the same level as, say, Jon Snow or Davos Seaworth. And I get that. But sometimes, it seems that even the secondary characters in the film Oppenheimer could’ve used a bit more oomph, a bit more presence, a bit more of the it quality (and, hell, sometimes the main characters too).

Again, interesting ideas.

Interesting way of doing things with the film.

But obviously, the film can’t get a high score in all the things it’s trying to do.