I watched Oppenheimer last night for the first time. First regarding the 4K blu ray quality, the transfer both visually and for sound is basically stellar. It’s gorgeous.
This film is legitimately impressive in so many ways. It’s a fascinating story, and obviously an important one. So of course I would recommend to anyone that they watch it. For all the standard objective reasons I can think of it’s a great film.
But I’m now going to deviate into a more personal reaction and explore it to hopefully learn something useful (?).
As mentioned it’s easy to see why someone might even rhapsodize over this objectively exquisite film. For example, the one film critic that I follow on Twitter, Darren Mooney, loved it and he
makes some great observations about it: 1) he feels it is a deconstruction of the “great man in history” biopic, and 2) that it takes us into fundamental human psychological and existential themes related to opening the Pandora’s box of harnessing the atom. I can easily place a checkmark next to both.
This is a film that should be right up my alley! But honestly I really struggled with it greatly in terms of relatability and likability. My relationship to a film in some ways reminds me of relatedness to a person. It’s probably wisest and most mature of me to accept other people in their full depth and complexity, warts and all, enjoying things I like and accepting and tolerating things I dislike. And to maintain good healthy boundaries with! But as with people, with a film sometimes you resonate and connect, and sometimes you don’t.
I guess it’s what Mooney means by deconstruction of the “‘great man in history’ biopic” genre, but Oppenheimer is pumped full, and inflated with, a kind of an anxious and self-important emotional energy. I get that that mirrors both the personality of “Oppy” and the feelings elicited by subject matter of creation of the atomic bomb. The film does repeatedly show what I’m on about here in the scenes where Oppenheimer becomes immersed in his own internal thoughts—which is a highly energized and hyperbolic internal experience—and then he snaps back to the more mundane, low key reality of the actual moment in physical reality. And the entire film is infused with a sort of frenetic energy that I suppose must represent Oppenheimer’s internal efforts to wrestle inwardly with his own conscience—and in the immortal words of Linkin Park to try (in vain?) to make peace with “what I’ve done.”
Oppenheimer’s personal vanity serves as a metaphor for the mythic hubris of Prometheus, and the film shows that clearly. But frankly it’s still exhausting! And it’s actually pathetic, even. He’s not a very stable genius in the way that apparently Einstein was. Empathically getting into this guy’s head and walking a mile in his moccasins is challenging.
All the details to the story had me feeling at some level that hey, I’m sorry, but I’m just finding myself not at all gripped and absorbed by this. Especially the minutiae and Machiavellian plotting of his and Strauss’s Senate hearings (one closed, one open).
I usually love films with long run times. I generally prefer the cinematic long form of story telling. But this is a rare case where about halfway I was just wanting the movie to end already. That in itself compounded the weirdness for me, i.e., I felt slightly discomfited by that, again because the film is so well made and dealing with such important issues.
I remember trying to watch David Lynch’s Eraserhead many years ago, and I was simply unable to get through it. I jetted after about 10 minutes. It was just flat out bizarre unpleasantness. (Which was probably the point.) Oppenheimer of course doesn’t elicit that sort of stark uncomfortability reaction at anywhere near that scale. But personally I did find it to be a more low key, modest expression of a similar sort of energy. I was feeling that I really ought to stick this out for a variety of very sound reasons but honestly I’m actually not enjoying myself!
So what did I learn? I guess it is that at the end of the day I can’t deny that when I sit down to watch a movie, I fundamentally seek to escape comfortably into the fictional world of that film, of its story. And yes, I want for that immersion to come easily and effortlessly. The epitome of that to me is the experience of watching the Lord of the Rings. Not only do I love entering that fantasy headspace, I don’t want to leave it!
Strictly from a personal standpoint for me individually, I think I’m better off reflecting about the story of the creation of the atom bomb simply reading up on the subject as a student of history. Versus taking this film’s journey into the head of Robert Oppenheimer. And I do have mixed feelings about that! But that’s where I was left by it.
