Oppenheimer finally viewed

I'll be kind and first list the good points:  yes, I think the acting is fine, and Cillian Murphy is aged very realistically in the multiple periods in which he appears.  I like the fact that an incredible scientific and engineering undertaking is given attention in a widely watched movie, and that (as far as I can tell, in checking up on various websites since seeing it) the movie is mostly historically accurate.   As a rider to that last point, though, it is a tad annoying to find out that a really important - virtually the pivotal - scene is an invention*.   Still, it seems the truth is almost never palatable enough for dramatic re-creation if it's a bio-pic instead of a documentary.

OK, so for the bad points.  And the first is really bad.   I realised after perhaps 30 or 45 minutes that the orchestral soundtrack was always there, far from subtle, and would simply never shut up so we could have some dialogue experienced as in real life - in silence, or with just some ambient sound.   It felt like there was barely 5 minutes of audio calm (specifically, no orchestra, or the various "jump booms" which happen every now and then) in the entire movie.   At the half way point, I had already decided that it felt like the composer was using a hammer to try to beat me into submission.    

Now, I know, lots of people on line have praised the score.  But there are some on line who agree (and who complain that the audio mixing generally sometimes made dialogue a strain to hear.   Even my son agreed with that.)  Some examples of commentary I agree with:

Everyone talked like they knew they were in an Important Historical Drama and the music was constantly insisting on emotions the film wasn’t doing anything to earn....

The draining score was there to artificially inject superficial tension....

For me the sound was so unnecessarily loud that I literally facepalmed during the movie. The sound mix was so brazen that it made me wish I’d watched this on streaming with subtitles, it’s borderline disrespectful to the audience to make a movie so loud. I’m amazed that Nolan gets away with it. Surprising that the score doesn’t get an acting credit, it’s so blatantly front and centre in so many scenes

And, by the way, given that I am something of a Nolan sceptic (while liking some of his films), I didn't realise that loud and peculiar audio mix that interferes with hearing dialogue has been a repeat feature of many of his films.  There's an entire article about that here, from before Oppenheimer opened.  This film has only confirmed the problem.

On a bigger point, and why I think the movie is interesting but far from great, is it felt more like an exercise in  Nolan showing us how clever he is with his complicated and dense screenplay, rather than making something that could have been much more emotionally affecting.  And from a dramatic structure point of view, while I understand that the back and forth can make for a more interesting way to tell a story, I still didn't understand why it needed to feel exhaustingly frenetic from the start, and to have a sense of urgency during parts of the story that, well, didn't need it.  Arguably, I suppose, you could say that it does become less urgent in the last third - which is the opposite of normal dramatic structure, and does have the odd effect of making you wonder why the narrative has always been about a different character we don't really have any reason to be interested in.

In short, I don't think the dramatic structure works, and the movie would have been much better if it had some breathing spaces ever now and then, and let tension and urgency build more naturally.  The climatic explosion, by the way, felt somewhat "flat" to me, and I was disappointed that one true detail that has fascinated a lot of people (Fermi throwing pieces of paper into the air to see how the blast wave affected them, and using this to come up with a reasonable estimate of the blast yield) didn't make it into the movie.

I see that of the major movie critics in America, Richard Brody in the New Yorker was about the only one who didn't like the film, pretty much on similar grounds that I've outlined:

Nolan cuts his scenes to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and details that don’t fit—contradictions, subtleties, even little random peculiarities—get left out, and, with them, the feeling of experience, whether the protagonist’s or the viewer’s. What remains is a movie to be solved rather than lived.       

Brody adds some interesting detail about the real Oppenheimer in this section:

...the film is so intent on making Oppenheimer an icon of conflicted conscience that it pays little attention to his character over all. He was a renowned aesthete with a bearing so charismatic that his students would try to emulate it, but we get little more than a couple of artsy name-drops to suggest that he has any cultural life at all. The “overweening ambition” that Groves saw in Oppenheimer is never in evidence, nor is there any mention of his chilling readiness to go along with a plan (one that was never put into action) to poison German food supplies with radioactive strontium. There’s no glimpse of the ailing Oppenheimer, who was suffering from tuberculosis and joint pain even while running Los Alamos. It doesn’t help that Murphy portrays Oppenheimer as wraithlike and haunted, a cipher, a black hole of experience who bears his burdens blankly as he’s buffeted by his circumstances but gives off no energy of his own. The performance, no less than the script, reduces the protagonist to an abstraction created to be analyzed. “Oppenheimer” reveals itself to be, in essence, a History Channel movie.

That very last line is probably unfair - there's no way a History Channel movie would make the telling so complicated and with visual flair - but in terms of how it deals with character, I get his point. 

I'll wrap this up tomorrow... 

Update:   

*  well, as far as I can tell, it's invented.   I'm talking about the "Stauss introduces Oppenheimer to Einstein" scene.  It is clear that the content of the conversation is invented - Oppenheimer had never asked Einstein to check if the bomb would set the atmosphere on fire - but it has been harder to find any site which explains specifically whether or not the meeting with Einstein (while Strauss watched) happened at all.

OK, to finish up a couple of things which provide some interesting context -

a.    an article about his love life, with some amusing details

b.    a pretty good Youtube video showing what modern day Los Alamos is like, including the slightly surprising detail about the way radioactive waste has been buried all around the place:

Update 2:   I'm pleased to see there are quite a few people on Reddit prepared to criticise the film as being underwhelming for them, for similar reasons I outlined.   I haven't even mentioned the oddball scene that was tweeted about (in response to someone who said "see, no one is talking about Oppenheimer any more") as follows:

Ha.  :)

(Quite a few people think the female characters are a bit unfairly treated - there was a lot more to both of them than their flaws, which are pretty much the only aspect that make it into the story.)