Oppenheimer

  Oppenheimer is a prestige biopic from Christopher Nolan about the 'father of the atom bomb'. It tracks Robert Oppenheimer's life (played by Cillian Murphy) from his youth at European universities to his fall from grace at the hands of politicians, going through his political experimentation, romantic misadventures, the creation of the A-bomb, and any other number of things besides in a tightly packed, breakneck three hours. It's kind of a mess.

 A lavish mess. Nolan directs with his usual verve, eye for experimentation and lush visuals, and keeps digital effects to a minimum. Nolan regular DP Hoyte Van Hoytemna is in place too, so you know it's going to look great, complete with very crisp black and white segments for one of the storylines.
 The acting is phenomenal, with a ridiculously stacked cast that besides Murphy includes Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon, Macon Blair in a pretty significant role (he does great!), Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett... I mean, any movie that has Niels Bohr as a character is going to be worth watching, and it's pleasure to see him played by Kenneth Branagh. My main disappointment in that department was that Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid) barely gets a couple of lines and is mostly just a weirdo in the background playing the bongos. They also have to don some dodgy-looking old-people makeup later on, but that's a minor complaint.

 The movie's got a few more significant issues that (I feel) work against it. One is that Nolan, in adapting the source novel, took the maximalist approach and tries to put everything in there. While I really respect that, maybe a (very) Hollywood film is not the best medium for a non-fiction novel. The film does try to tie its disparate elements thematically by adding some small flourishes in its depiction of Oppenheimer's internal life and, say, private conversations with Einstein (Tom Conti) and other luminaries, but it still comes across as a jumble of disparate events and throughlines.

 None of these is worse than the film's focus on Lewis Strauss (Downey Jr.), whose beef with Oppenheimer caused his downfall (spoilers!). Here he's given his own villain arc, complete with evil monologues, pinning the beef on extremely petty concerns, a voice of conscience in a fictional character played by Alden Ehrenreich, and a crowd-pleasing comeuppance complete with a mention of JFK. It is, as the Irish would say, cat altogether. Cat melodion, even.

 And that takes up a whole fucking hour. The film has other moments of pure Hollywood bullshit, such as giving the 'I am become death...' line its own cheesy origin story, but if I'm to be honest that involves Florence Pugh in the buff... so I'll allow that. There's also a bit where they compare mathematics to reading/feeling music, and the (gorgeous!) score by Ludwig Göransson goes into a symphonic overdrive as beautiful landscapes pass by, intercut with shots of Oppenheimer looking awestruck and jolts of abstract sub-atomic visualizations. It's a great scene, expertly directed, but... let's just say I don't really rate Nolan much as a scriptwriter these days.

 The editing of the film also exhausted me. It's kind of a thing of beauty (editor: Jennifer Lame), every shot consisting of no more than three seconds or so- it gives the movie an incredible sense of momentum, but after a while it becomes a bit punishing, especially as this is a film built out of conversations and quiet moments artificially jacked up (the soundtrack is particularly guilty of this) to build a sense of excitement.
 Nolan's usual timeline switching is more successful. There's a lot of effort and technical skill behind keeping a script that features so many characters and events presented in a non-linear way so relatively easy to parse. It still feels like it's there to make the movie sexier, to keep viewers engaged by making them work to figure things out, but that aspect felt to me well-made. 

 I sometimes I think I'd prefer Nolan would make smaller, less blockbustery films; That way we'd have an Inception without shitty, unnecessary action, and maybe he wouldn't feel the need to fill this one with all this nonsense. But that'd mean we wouldn't get Dunkirk, either, so what are you going to do. He's just not the best fit for a sprawling biopic, at least not one without a crystal-clear throughline.
 As it stands, Oppenheimer is two thirds of a good, not great, movie, and it's got some huge marks against it. But the amount of craft behind it cannot be denied, either.