Oppenheimer (2023)

Somewhere along the line I developed a bad attitude about director and writer hail the auteur Christopher Nolan. I didn’t like Inception, I didn’t like Dunkirk, and I really didn’t like The Dark Knight Rises (is there consensus it’s his worst?). On the other hand, to be fair, there are as many that I do like, at least by parts (the first two Batmans, The Prestige, Interstellar, and especially Memento). But when last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenom went down, famously restoring movies to commercial oomph, I was dubious, especially when I ventured out to see Barbie first. But I finally got around to Nolan’s A-bomb and frankly have to file it with things that make me shrug. It’s long, to start with, it’s packed full of strutting stars (Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Kenneth Branagh), the sound design is pretentious, and so is the gaudy overall visual strategy, alternating color with black and white because what? Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer is a stout enough moral being, heart in the right place, all that, much like oh, say, Kevin Costner in Hidden Figures. Murphy mumbles too much but I understand that’s part of the sound design. Points for being reminiscent of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Still, by my lights the only certifiably great turn in this one, perhaps not surprisingly, is from Robert Downey Jr., who continues to bank the fires on being the best movie actor alive. The picture is arguably worth seeing for his performance alone. But I’ve heard enough disputes now about the historical veracity of Oppenheimer that I felt obliged to not believe any of it. I suspect the things I liked most and didn’t know already were the things that were made up. For a three-hour movie about A-bombs there was only one mushroom cloud. That’s probably for the best, at this point. Even nuclear anxiety isn’t what it used to be. Much too much was clonkingly obvious, like the quote attributed to “Oppie” out of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It came to remind me of Samuel L. Jackson’s faux Bible quote in Pulp Fiction. I won’t go so far as to call the fatally self-serious Oppenheimer out and out bad. But I’m willing to say it’s 85% mediocre.