Oppenheimer review: just a dude bombing for peace
I, a notorious man hater, did not enjoy this film.
Yeah yeah yeah, I know I’m very late to the party. There is a lot to think about with this film. It’s basically two films in one!
Before I begin I should probably confess that I am no Christopher Nolan fan. I thought Dunkirk was ok, until a lecturer at my university teaching a course called Britain, Europe, and Euroscepticism pointed out that it was just one big Brexit wankfest starring Harry Styles for some reason. I have had the misfortune of seeing Inception and some Batman crap he did. Fucking dreadful. Nolan makes films for boys that are overly serious to the point where no joy can be gleaned from them. Honestly, the men just need to smile more.
I am going to start with what I liked. The audiovisual parts of Oppenheimer were spectacular. Seeing it on film in the big screen at the Eye was very much worth the €5 supplement. It was deafeningly loud and frankly people should have been offered earplugs. But the sound design was superb and very effective, and like all good design probably went unnoticed by much of the audience. It was a feast for the eyes and a somewhat more painful feast for the ears. It was fun to watch and beautifully shot. Emily Blunt has one good line. Florence Pugh is amazing and I love her. Cillian Murphy is quite fit and it’s very nice gazing at his weird looking face. The rest of the enormous cast are great.
Ok now let’s move on to the extremely over-exaggerated greatness of the story and the dubious message it conveys.
Christopher Nolan is a former public schoolboy who attended Haileybury Imperial and Service College (yes, a school in 2023 in Britain has the world “imperial” in it), founded by the East India Company who colonised most of the world and committed genocide and ethnic cleansing, and caused many of the world’s current suffering for brown and black people that is still felt today. I am therefore not the slightest bit surprised that a British public schoolboy of his pedigree took the story of an intelligent man who got swept up in American wartime patriotism and made a bomb that killed 100,000 or maybe even 200,000 civilians, and turned it into a portrait of a “tortured genius” who thought you could bomb for peace and never acknowledged the harm he caused.
Nolan has said numerous times now that Oppenheimer’s bomb was the most dramatic story - fact or fiction - than he has ever come across and that “like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse” according to Time Magazine. Maybe I’m just terribly ignorant, because I’d never heard the name Oppenheimer until the press for this film came out. I knew the plane was called Enola Gay and the bombs were called Fat Man and Little Boy. I know they were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I’ve seen the horrible photos of the flattened cities and the adults and children with radiation burns all over them. I knew about the method and the consequences of America bombing Japan. I don’t know what led to it, maybe because I cannot get my head around the sort of decision-making process that builds a nuclear bomb and decides to use it on civilians, on purpose.
The film is presented in nonlinear fashion, which I usually can’t stand, but remarkably well done as it is clear which bits you’re flitting to and from. You see Oppenheimer as a young man at the universities of Cambridge, Gottingen, and Leiden (featuring a cringe scene where he’s supposed to be speaking Dutch and instead speaks German, because American production companies can’t be bothered to learn the difference); then as a professor at Berkley; his romance with the communist and writer Jean Tatlock; his subsequent relationship with Kitty Oppenheimer (who is MARRIED! have some class, Robert!! Though he apparently had loads of affairs though, because men are disgusting in any era). We then see him getting recruited for the Manhattan Project, despite his communist leanings (honestly, will Americans ever be able to distinguish between threats from socialism and threats from fascism?), his time at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study after the war, his hearing by the AEC to determine if his security clearance ought to be renewed, and some excellent scenes by Robert Downey Jr. playing AEC chairman who is trying to get into the senate. I did think it was Stanley Tucci for a second though. That one’s on me.
One of the quite odd aspects about this film is that the big climactic moment - the bomb test in the desert and the subsequent mass murder of civilians - is in the middle of the film. The whole first hour and a half leads up to the big boom moment (literally and figuratively), and then… another entirely new film begins and we have a procedural drama to watch. It’s rather exhausting, especially as basically everyone in the film is a real life person and not really knowing who they are or what their role is makes it quite hard to follow. I could have really done with a guidebook. The notable exception to this is Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti aka Emily’s dad in Friends, who looks so much like a cartoon of Einstein that I struggled to take any of the scenes seriously.
As a Nolan hater, I don’t really know much about his directing style, other than he has in the past really struggled to understand how to write female characters. I understand, of course, as we’re very complicated and mysterious creatures, as well as being a minority. Maybe he just hasn’t has much exposure to us and doesn’t understand our essence. If only his wife, a film producer with whom he regularly collaborates - including on this film - could give him some pointers about how to include the elusive woman into his films. It’s her I feel the worst for. She has to live with this guy who has never really perceived a woman, ever.
He gets so tantalisingly close to writing one - just one - good female character that it almost feels like he is teasing us. Emily Blunt plays Kitty Oppenheimer, who is very much presented as the wife of a famous dude with no discernible talents (real life Kitty was in fact a talented biologist and committed labour organiser). She is shown to be an irresponsible alcoholic who hates her children and being a mother. She’s also a DIRTY COMMUNIST who tarnishes her great and amazing husband’s reputation. Near the end of the film she has one good line that makes her look very clever and sophisticated, and that’s kind of it. The end. No actual character development or introspection.
However, this is not the film’s greatest hate crime against women. Florence Pugh, a fellow low-voiced and septum pierced perfect angel who seems to be condemned to putting on an American accent forever, plays Oppenheimer’s sidepiece Jean Tatlock, another communist hottie and clever clogs psychiatrist in her own right. She is seen, again, leading Oppenheimer astray to the left, and overcome with depression, dies tragically by suicide at the tender age of 30. In the film, Pugh spends most of her time naked in ways that seem fairly unnecessary at best and indulgent at worst. The one saving grace of this is that we get to enjoy how comically small Cillian Murphy’s nipples are. The only woman under 30 who is a named character spends more time with her tits out than not. There is also a pretty gross scene where Kitty Oppenheimer has a vision of Jean Tatlock riding on her (fully clothed) husband during his AEC trial, which is so clearly an opportunity to get Pugh naked AGAIN and present a rift between the only two female characters (rather than focusing on Oppenheimer who is the one who did the infidelity). It’s just nasty and voyeuristic. Can we just move past this? It’s not the 2000s, we don’t need this women turning on each other and constant tits to tell a man’s story.
The film very gently teases the idea of doubt about the bomb’s ethical implications. The scientists at Los Alamos, upon hearing of Germany’s surrender and Hitler’s death, begin to discuss whether it’s needed any more. Indeed, one of Oppenheimer’s motivations for joining the war effort was that he knew his people - Europe’s Jewish population - were being rounded up and murdered by the Nazis. With this problem having somewhat sorted itself out, was a destructive weapon like no other necessary any more?
Well, yes, apparently, because despite there being plenty of valid reasons to assume that Japan would surrender pretty soon, it was very important to bomb them to smithereens anyway to show the Soviets what America had in its arsenal, and -checks notes- save Western colonial interests in the Pacific from being occupied and mistreated by the Japanese, so they could be returned to their imperial overlords and be occupied and mistreated by them instead. Yay?
Then after the bombing, there are some vague allusions to Oppenheimer himself having regrets about what he did, as he meets with President Truman and expresses that he felt as if he had blood on his hands. Despite plenty of news reports that were conveniently written after the film’s release claiming that real life Oppenheimer regretted his part in the bombing of Japan, he actually didn’t, as this Scientific American interview with nuclear historian and university professor Alex Wellerstein explains.
Anyway, that’s enough whinging for one day. I get that this film is important and I get why people like it. I liked some bits of it. Many moments of it were very nice to look at. The actors were fantastic, even though there were too many of them and I couldn’t keep up with what they were all meant to be doing. It is an interesting story about an interesting, yet regrettable, part of recent history. And to the considered and intelligent viewer, one can see past the jingoism and understand that what the United States did in bombing Japan was a monstrous and unforgivable act, and that it being a scientific milestone doesn’t excuse it.
Unfortunately, the world is full of people who aren’t considered and intelligent. In fact, it’s full of total idiots, many of whom are men. Therefore I can’t not see this film as something that will resonate with a certain type of male viewer. They will see a scientific genius getting swept up with the excitement of winning wars and killing Nazis, which was then just diverted to another target when the Nazis were defeated without nuclear weapons. They’ll see mass murder of civilians explained away as an important foreign policy objective. They’ll see a world with barely women in it normalised, and whichever women who are miraculously present as just being narrative tools to tell the story of men. They’ll see women reduced to sex objects and baby makers, and ignore their own achievements. In a world where men, especially white men, are only becoming more violent, more right wing, more misogynistic, more racist, I can’t see how this film will do much to remedy that. It might accelerate it.
This is a film by men, for men, starring men. And in this day and age, these films are so, so boring.
i needed josh peck to say 'meghaaaan'