FILM REVIEWS · 09/08/2023

Oppenheimer - Nolan's worst film

Rarely have I been this indecisive about a film than about Oppenheimer. It’s been a bit over two weeks that I’ve watched it, and I still can’t really make up my mind whether I enjoyed it or not at all. Although I have such a complicated relationship with Nolan’s newest film, one sad thing is certain - I can’t hide that for me, the film was a crushing disappointment.

You need to understand that when I was in my teenage years, as so many other teenagers, Christopher Nolan was like a god to me. I discovered the true power of cinema through Interstellar, and DiCaprio in Inception was like the coolest person on earth for me. Saying that Nolan was my favourite director for many years would be an understatement - he was the single greatest inspiration in my life. Starting from Inception, every one of his films was a 10/10 masterpiece for me. Then came Tenet. I disliked it the first time I watched it, understood it the second time I watched it and absolutely loved it the third time around.

And now there’s Oppenheimer. Certainly a big and extremely ambitious film, although many already don’t see that it was much easier to shoot than Tenet. Much less locations, less action scenes, much less complex when it comes to timelines etc. Many say Oppenheimer was his most ambitious film yet, but I don’t necessarily agree. It's his most character-driven, that’s for sure, and in this way maybe his most personal, but it’s not his biggest film. That’s what I expected though, when I went to watch it. Although Nolan doesn’t hold the pole position of my favourite directors for a few years anymore, I always expect to watch a masterpiece when watching a Nolan film. When Oppenheimer ended, I sat through the critics until the very end, and even a few minutes more, very quietly. After a long while, the friend I went with (to an IMAX theatre outside Paris), asked how I liked it. After a pause, I answered: “Honestly? I’m not sure I liked it.”

The next 2 weeks, I would take every single opportunity I had to talk about Oppenheimer. It’s been a long time since I've discussed a film with that many people. I’ve read articles, watched essays, debated - and still, I can’t really say I found an answer to the question whether I liked it or not. The fact that no other film gave me this much to think and talk should normally speak for itself, and I can’t deny Oppenheimer fascinates me like no other film at the moment. But on the other hand, there are so many things which truly bother me about Nolan’s latest film. I managed to break those down into 10 central points:

Rushed.

Nolan takes 3 hours to tell Oppenheimer’s story, but the film somehow still feels rushed. Nolan has so many things to say that he rarely manages to truly take his time for something. Yes, when he finally talks about the test of the atomic bomb, he gives it the space it deserves (and the silence), but the rest is a breathless hopping from one story event to the next. No matter how heavy with action scenes his previous films were, Nolan trusted his audience enough to take his time for his scenes. Take for example the highway scene in Tallinn from Tenet - compared to other contemporary action films, quite a slow scene. For some reason, Nolan seemed to be afraid of boring his audience by making a biopic which (naturally) features loads of dialogue, and tried to solve this issue by rushing through the whole book which served as the literary source. The best example for this is the film’s exposition. Nolan developed an exposition problem with the years, having seemingly more and more difficulties to explain the film’s core themes and theories to the audience in an elegant way, but Oppenheimer’s exposition might just be the worst. The first half hour of the film was for me at least insanely hard to watch. It felt alike watching a typical life-compilation video on YouTube: “ALL of Oppenheimer’s life from university to Trinity in only 20 minutes”! Or “BEST OF Oppenheimer as a Student”. The film rushes from one professor to the next, from one city to the next, etc. In one scene, he puts poison into an apple, a few seconds later, we see him run back to get the apple back. Then, we see in a few shots how he meets his first great love, Jean Tatlock, a few scenes later, we see him meeting Kitty, then a few minutes later they’re already on horses in New Mexico, and then Nolan cuts back to Tatlock, crying in Oppenheimer’s arms. That’s how much space Nolan has for those two women - we barely got to know the first, and he then already separates from her to be with the second. Of course I’m aware that Nolan wanted to show everything out of Oppenheimer’s very personal perspective, and it’s maybe true that Oppenheimer actually perceived it just this way - that he rushed from one girl to the next and gave most of his cerebral space to physics. But then it makes no sense that the parts about physics feel equally as rushed. The main reason everything feels rushed is part of the next problem

Dialogues, but no dialogue

Like so many other people, I was surprised to find out that this film features very few scenes about the actual Atomic bomb, let alone the aftermath etc. It’s essentially 3 hours of dialogue. Which is not what I expected, but nonetheless absolutely fine. Quite a few were disappointed by that, but after all the best films of all time are all based on great dialogue scenes. Except that in Oppenheimer, there are no dialogues.

Oppenheimer is 500 fragments of conversations somehow soldered together. There are only a few scenes in which Oppenheimer calmly says a sentence to another, the dialogue partner answers, then Oppenheimer answers, and so on. Most “dialogues'' are not longer than 30 to 60 seconds, and mostly work like this: Oppenheimer meets somebody, they present themselves, Oppenheimer says an important and difficult sentence, sometimes we get a very quick and complicated answer, and then editor Jennifer Lame (who I think is an extremely unsuitable editor for Nolan’s films) already cuts to the next “dialogue”. Well, that’s not how dialogue works. In his earlier films, Nolan already had this obsession with his “Nolan-esque” dialogue. He basically writes a text about a topic, breaks it up into phrases a character could say, and puts those phrases into several different scenes (different locations, different time, sometimes even different characters). The scene from Inception in which Cobb explains to Ardiadne how dreaming works is a perfect example for that. Or the scene from Interstellar, in which Professor Brand explains the station and mission to Cooper - another perfect example. The Nolan-esque dialogue works so well in those films because it’s used in modesty, and in a very elegant way. Dialogue, says Nolan, doesn’t need to be limited to one space at one time, as in the real world, but can be adapted for the film. I’ve explained Nolan’s dialogue extensively in <a href=https://letterboxd.com/mariusgsc/film/inception/4/>my review for Inception</a>.

In Oppenheimer though, Nolan takes this technique to a tiresome extreme: in each scene, the character only has a single, very important sentence to say, one which suits Nolan at this point of the film. All three hours consist of little fragtments of actual long dialogues. I would have had a suggestion for Nolan, which actually also concerns my first problem (about the film being rushed): Why not choose fewer, but take the time they need? Why not leave some of those dialogue fragments out - the ones which are not that necessary and don’t bring the story forward (there are loads of those), and instead focus on one important dialogue, and just let it play for a few minutes, uninterrupted? Which leads us top the next problem, the interruptions

The narrative structure.

This is an easy one to recognise, and once again it’s a problem created in the editing room. I’m gonna say it how I feel it, Oppenheimer is a mess. It’s a chaotic, unwieldy and difficult film. But it really didn’t need to be. Because the funny thing about Oppenheimer is that it’s not a complex film. It’s not multi-layered like Inception, Interstellar or let alone Tenet. No, Oppenheimer tells an insanely easy, linear story. First the life, the Trinity, then the interrogation, then the trial. It’s as easy as that. But Nolan chose to search for the most complex narrative structure for a very simple story - but obviously, he could only find one which looks and feels complex. In reality, as mentioned above, he breaks the film into 500 little fragments, mixes them all like puzzle pieces, and puts them back together.

Of course I’ve read the people saying that this is the true art of this film: that the film’s form reflects how the atomic bomb works, with fission and fusion etc; one event in the past being reflected in the interrogation scene in the future, etc. I really get how some people say that Nolan mixed everything around to have the scenes connect to each other not in the chronological order, but thematically - something you could call associative editing. But I simply didn’t think it worked. As I already said, the dialogues became extremely alienating, really far from reality through this narrative structure. But another reason is not how he mixes together, but what he mixes together:

The Focus.

Look, I get why Nolan would decide to shift the focus away from the atomic bomb towards Oppeneheimer as a person - after all, the film is called Oppenheimer. I also understand why he made Lewis Strauss the film’s antagonist, and showed Oppenheimer from an objective perspective in those B&W-scenes. But I don’t get why he would give those other scenes so much room. Strauss’ scenes, which nobody went to the cinema for, took an enormous amount of space, only to conclude that he simply didn’t like Oppenheimer. Especially considering that the exposition scenes were rushed and hectic, Strauss scenes - which happen in two rooms only - feel redundant and sometimes even pointless. But the even bigger problem might just be this overlong interrogation scene. Nolan clearly fell in love with the literary source and couldn’t bring himself to cut one piece out of it. Everything seemed important to him, even if it wasn’t for the overall context. That’s how we ended up with an interrogation scene in a little backroom in which all important and less important characters get interviewed, and in which everything we’ve watched so far gets taken apart again in a verbal way. It’s insanely repetitive, and takes way too much space. In a recent video in Paris’ video-club Konbini, Nolan explains how he loves the concept of making dialogue feel like action. You can clearly recognise he was trying to do that in his new film - just that simply putting loud music over the people speaking, until we can’t properly hear them anymore, isn’t automatically suspenseful dialogue.

No, this interrogation scene is flawed from start to finish, and the focus shouldn’t have been on this particular part of his life. The biggest flaw though is that it features way too many characters. Which leads us to the next problem:

Too many unnecessary characters.

At some point, after Oppenheimer shook the 50th hand and the name Oppenheimer was mentioned for the 200th time, I started to doubt this film could still save itself. As I’ve already explained, Nolan simply had great trouble “killing his darlings”, i.e. leaving out some parts of the book. This resulted in giving almost every side character a speaking role in the film. And by god, there was no need for that. Honestly, after a while I had the feeling Oppenheimer was simply a who-is-who of the most famous male actors working at the moment. I also wouldn’t have been surprised if even the cleaning woman in Los Alamos would have gotten a speaking part in this film. There’s no doubt that all those scientists were important in the process of making the first atomic bomb, and putting them all in was certainly historically accurate, but there was really no need to have them all in it. That’s not how a film works. In a good film, you write characters which are important for the story, and even more important, for the audience to understand the story. Characters need to serve a cinematic purpose.

Of course it was cool to see Casey Affleck again, he proved in his couple of minutes screen time once again that he’s one of the very best working in the industry, but would it have changed anything if he wouldn’t have been in the film? It wouldn’t have changed anything at all. It would just have made the film a little bit less confusing.

Another big problem of putting so many side characters into the film was that they all distracted from Oppenheimer, although Nolan desperately tried to make this film as much as possible about him. But that leads us to the next problem, that the film is:

Emotionally too distant.

With all those non-dialogues, all those side characters and all this loud music, Nolan ultimately failed to do what he set out to do: an intimate character drama. Of course Cillian Murphy is undeniably amazing, and he should get nominated for an Oscar for this, but after those 3 hours, I couldn’t say I felt any more closer or connected to Oppenheimer than before. Neither did I understand him, nor could I form an opinion on whether I would apologise or condemn his actions. Now you could obviously argue that this was the whole point, and that Oppenheimer was simply a very contradictory persona, but I’m talking about the fact that the film is overall so emotionally distant from the character that Oppenheimer doesn’t feel like a conflicted person in the end, but like a lifeless one. For example, the film repeats and repeats how Oppenheimer has so many scruples about what he did and how it was used, but in the whole film, it was barely shown. Of course there is this speech scene after the bomb has been dropped, but as impressive as it may be, with all those cheering people and the sound of their feet, the scene felt like a joke to me. Nolan always hinted towards it, and how dark it is, but it’s not dark at all. Watch a film by Gaspar Noé or Guillermo del Toro and you’ll understand what dark is. The scene is one of the only times we can actually understand what Oppenheimer feels on the inside, but it’s merely a vision of a few seconds (once again rushed) in which we see a face with peeling skin and a burnt body. That’s it. There were so many more effective ways to show the scruples of Oppenheimer concerning the almost 200,000 people that were killed in Hiroshima.

It’s a very common problem in Nolan’s latest films, which leads us to the next problem:

Say too much, show too little.

This is essentially a part of Nolan’s exposition problem, that he seemingly has more and more difficulties to explain the film’s core themes and theories to the audience in an elegant way. Nolan usually still found ways to portray what he wanted to say in a cinematic way, for example explaining dreaming in Inception by letting the characters actually dream, explaining the wormhole in Interstellar by actually showing it. That’s the main difference between book and film: a film shows, instead of explaining. Well, Oppenheimer doesn’t work at all in that regard.

Of course wou need to choose verbal explaining when talking about the atomic bomb. That’s not what I’m talking about. The problem is that in Oppenheimer, so much is only said, and never actually shown. First of all his scruples: they are just mentioned, but we never actually see him regret what he did. The consequences of the creation of the atomic bomb? Just mentioned in a few sub-clauses. Oppenheimer being a womaniser and temperamental? Why does Nolan need Matt Damon to say it in the scene he meets Oppenheimer? Why not actually show him as such?

After all, we’re just bluntly told that this is the operation which apparently changed the world. How, in what way, we never get to know about any of this. And that’s the next problem:

Nothing to say about Hiroshima.

I’ve just recently watched Alain Resnais timeless classic Hiroshima, mon Amour, and although the film was just telling a love story set in the city, Resnais still took his time to show in a truly heartbreaking way what the atomic bomb meant for Hiroshima. Watching Oppenheimer, the film which will go down into cinema history as THE film about the atomic bomb, I was truly shocked to see that Hiroshima was mentioned in only three scenes. The first is when the bomb gets dropped on the city - we see Oppenheimer listen to it over radio for a few seconds. The second scene is when images are shown in a conference room - we only see Oppenheimer looking away from the images. The third is in the interrogation room, when Oppenheimer is asked if he knows about the consequences - he then replies the exact numbers of deaths related to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. I completely understand, as I’ve said a few times above, that the story is told strictly from Oppenheimer’s viewpoint. But still, it’s Nolan’s film about the atomic bomb. I respect his decision if he didn’t want to show the atrocities of Hiroshima, the dead bodies, the disabled, the babies. But I don’t understand how he could give that little attention to the victims of the atomic bomb. Instead, he has nothing better to do than constantly portraying Oppenheimer as the victim. He never explicitly apologises his actions, but he always finds a way to make you remember he “only built the bomb for peace”, and that he “tried to regulate the use of it afterwards”. The movie’s essential themes—the ironies and perils that arise when science, ambition, and political power mix - are discussed thoroughly; but the human side, highlighting the awfulness of the whole project, remains unseen.

Nolan said a few times in interviews that his target audience would be people who know little to nothing about Oppenheimer. That’s ironic - if that’s truly his main audience, he should have known better and expected that most young people nowadays know as little about Hiroshima and the bomb’s consequences than they do about Oppenheimer. And yet, It’s a 3-hour epic only about Oppenheimer and Strauss. In my eyes, Nolan had a moral obligation, an obligation as an American, to give the victims a little bit more space and respect than just a few seconds.

Despite Christopher Nolan’s british roots, the film feels so, so American - and not in a good way. It’s a comfort movie for Western audiences, revisiting American history without making you feel bad for it. When it comes to the ones who suffered from American foreign politics, the film remains blind.

But that’s not only it. The film is equally as blind when it comes to the whole topic of atomic bombs and nuclear wars in general - and that’s maybe even more shocking:

Nothing to say about nuclear threat.

It’s 2023. Putin started a war against Ukraine, and de facto against all NATO-states a bit more than a year ago. Several times, Putin threated he wouldn’t hesitate throwing atomic bombs. A fear almost forgotten, back in thye heads of millions of poeple worldwide. The nuclear threat is as omnipresent as it was a few decades ago.

It’s 2023. Nolan, one of the most influential directors of the 21st century, releases a film about the father of the atomic bomb. And yet, - and I’m honestly shocked I’m writing this - he has absolutely nothing to say about the nuclear threat we are facing nowadays. I left Oppenheimer bombarded with names and pseudo-dialogues, but I took absolutely nothing away from it. Nolan had nothing to say about the implications, the consequences, the history that followed. He never put the events in Los Alamos in any kind of context. There wasn’t even a coherent political message in this film. It even seemed as if Nolan tried to avoid the topic of the atomic bomb as much as possible, almost as if he feared otherwise people would notice he had no clue how to react to today’s situation. It would have been so easy to make his film a plea for peace and disarmament, but he fails to do so. Honestly, what a shame. What a missed opportunity.

But again, here you could argue that Nolan had no obligation to make any remark about our political situation nowadays. Of course he doesn’t, but that makes it simply an entertaining film with great images in the end. But wait, is it really?

IMAX and the (missing) entertainment value.

I have an unlimited-cinema-subscription for almost all cinemas in Paris, and still, I cycled to a suburb outside the city to watch Oppenheimer on the biggest screen possible. In paid 17€ (my monthly cinema subscription is 18) to watch it on an IMAX screen, like Nolan wanted it. Because as everyone else, I expected an absolutely mindblowing spectacle, with images I’ve never seen before, that I’ll never forget again. As you can imagine, I didn’t get that. Those images the trailer promised - explosions, fire, etc. - we got them for merely twenty minutes. There is no doubt that the trinity test scene is one of the greatest scenes of the last years, absolutely electrifying and awe-inspiring, definitely worth watching in IMAX, but it’s just a really short part of the film. For the rest of the the three hours, I was seriously wondering why Nolan urged audiences to watch this on an IMAX screen. Yes, it’s really cool that he and his DoP found a way to film faces, but that’s what were seeing for almost the whole time hours. Close-Ups of faces. And where the trailer promised action and suspenseful events, or a big war story which could have thaught us so, so much for today, we get redundant images based in little backrooms.

Of course I don’t mind dialogue-heavy films which are solely set in little backrooms. Some of my favourite films match that description. But as I’ve thoroughly explained in everything I wrote above, the film isn’t even good at that.

But still, it’s a Nolan film. Despite everything that went (terribly) wrong, I immediately wanted to rewatch it, let alone for the outstanding performances, the best soundtrack of the year, the sound design. I maybe won’t rewatch it in IMAX - I honestly think that isn’t necessary at all, and I’ll go into it with much, much lower expectations. Because unfortunately, Oppenheimer is by far the worst film Nolan has made in his career.

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