Oppenheimer (2023)

Oppenheimer
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Christopher Nolan from a book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
2023/US
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

J. Robert Oppenheimer: Albert? When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world…
Albert Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: I believe we did.

i can understand why people would like this movie without liking it much myself.  Maybe I’m just getting old.

The story chronicles the life of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy); his association with far left-wing politics; his leadership of the development of the atomic bomb; his character assassination during the McCarthy era; and the eventual accolades he got as the Father of the Atomic Bomb.

In between we learn of his career as a womanizer including a bunch of gratuitous nudity and sex.  We are shown his fraught relationship with his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt).  Finally we explore the political ambitions of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who was seeking the advice and consent of the Senate for appointment as Secretary of Commerce.

I was predisposed to like this movie and to sympathize with Oppenheimer.  In the event, I didn’t find him or any of the characters all that likeable and did not care all that much what happened to any of them. I thought the running time could have been trimmed  by half an hour or more with no harm to the story.  I did not think that the out of order exposition or the constant transitions between past and present and color and black and white worked.  In short, I was cranky and the whole experience left me flat.  I’m probably in a minority of one.

Oppenheimer won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing.  It was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, Best Makeup, Best Original Score, Best Sound, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design.