@nemediv4086
Thank you for putting the problems with this film so much more eloquently than I ever could. The best I could come up with was that the film's climax is halfway through and then you still need to watch over an hour of uninteresting plot resolutions. I really wish the movie was just what you called the biographical timeline, with more focus on the ramifications of the A-bombs being dropped, and with some actual emotion in the story. For such an esteemed filmmaker Nolan really doesn't seem to know how to film humans and not just plot objectives.
@Dinamittin
I am so glad that I've found someone that speaks every single thing in my mind about this movie that I can't tell people without them crucifying me. Amazing video, keep up!
@HBlankenship-wi8qr
Finally, thank you for making this. Very thorough and so many good points. After the film ending I kept thinking "thats it?"...for a three hour movie. None of the emotionality landed for me and I couldn't figure out why. Thank you for all of your research, when you said you were still annoyed at having to do that, coffee almost came out of my nose. I was fighting the urge to do the same so I could grasp the whole story that was supposed to be there but really didn't want to just to know how to feel about the movie lol. What a great video! I think for a video this long, some chapters or an overview at the beginning about each topic you'll touch on would be very helpful! I saw that you're a newer channel, so I thought you might appreciate some feedback (apologies if im mistaken cause you seem very professional). Your vocal quality and pacing is wonderful. Your ideas and explanations are excellent. Also i adore your subtle sense of humor. Subscribed!
@homealoneuniverse1221
You are easily my favorite writing-related subscription. This is a long video but worth every moment of time invested. As for my own connection to the story, I had an uncle who was on the Manhattan project. He was rather low in the hierarchy, and he related only tiny fragments of his experience. But I had grown up with his 'framing' of that history and the movie was not in the same space at all. My uncle was a bona fide math genius. He could look at a column of 30 numbers and instantly tell you the sum. He could do simultaneous equations in his head in 100 unknowns. He would try to tell us there was a trick to it, but there was no trick. His brain just wasn't the same as ours. His role on the project was to act as a truth checker for the huge, early computer they were using. The computations for the process were more complex than anything humans had ever attempted, and we didn't have implicit trust in those early computers. So my uncle would watch for the outputs and be able to tell at a glance whether they were in the ballpark for the computation being attempted. He tells me he didn't get much sleep, during the whole thing, never more than about 4 hours at a time, at random times. It was a furious race, so far removed from the ego wars of the movie, from uncle's perspective, there was one overriding concern: They had to do anything and everything they could, fair or unfair, to beat the Germans to the solution. If the Germans figured it out first, the war would be over, and we would lose. It wasn't about being a devil or a saint. It was about being strong enough & fast enough & smart enough to not being destroyed by fascism. Now THAT'S a narrative thread that could hold a story together, and that's how I always thought about it. Like I said, the movie was coming in from such a different place I barely recognized it.
@Steven-z9s6h
Oppenheimer was so pretentious me and my friends were all giggling within five minutes. When he smashes the glass we all lost it. The theater must have hated us, an unruly bunch
@quesoconbumblebee857
I feel as though the movie was easy to follow without any previous historical knowledge, i think alot of the movie is supposed to explore character from an objective lens with emotion and judgement creeping up only to be shoved away like the development process of the bomb itself. As the character is flip flopped you surely lose a clear sense of character development but that begins to make you question to core of the man. Our first real introduction to him is an attempt to assassinate his proffessor, but he goes back on it. It paints a picture of a complex man who needs to face judgement and through the rest of the movie your judgement of him wavers back and forth. I believe that for the non-historian the story functions just fine as a character piece set in the tension on WWII. A critical eye is never harmful to a good movie, great video
@3dchick
After Dunkirk, I couldn't bring myself to watch Oppenheimer. If Nolan would quit messing around with time and POV and just tell the d**n story, it would be one thing. But, clearly he can't.
@SanDiegoSouth
The biggest dislike I took away from the one and only time I watched Oppenheimer in the theater was that I felt absolutely nothing for the characters. At least with other Christopher Nolan movies I've seen, I actually cared about the characters and the events of the plot. I thought the cinematography in Oppenheimer was spectacular. Some of the actors did a really great job. But ultimately, the characters were all forgettable, and I didn't feel like I learned anything new or astonishing that took place in history at that time.
@austinnorton4682
It's an absolutely awful movie. The only reason I sat through the whole thing is that I saw it with a friend. Had I been alone, I would've left within a half hour. Between this waste of three hours and Tenet, I've come to the conclusion that Nolan is washed.
@johnstjohn4705
I'm a history buff, but I was unable to follow a lot of the movie. In the end, I wasn't sure what Nolan's message was. If it was a character study of Oppenheimer, it failed. I would have voted for Barbie. It had a story to tell, and it nailed it.
@arturoaguirreart
Thank you for accurately describing what the storytelling issues were with this movie . I didn't like it when I saw it in the theatre and I didn't like it when I saw it at home. I didn't connect emotionally with any character and I didn't know much about the history of the atom bomb beforehand. Great video.
@john-t5r4q
The film was like a tiktok feed designed to disorientate you away from it's attempt at perfectionism, and it's rather blatant iniquity that could not be justified and glamorised to the audience if it was directed in a way that might give us room to actually contemplate for even a second what we were seeing. The whole film was a big wank over how glamorous and sexy and sapiosexual the man who invented the atom bomb was. I was with a bunch of pseudo intellectual 20 something's when i watched this in the cinema (something i swear not to do again) and the starry glaze slathered across their eyeballs like jam, the arrogant postures as if they'd actually just learned something other than "Oppenheimer was smart and deep and my new masculine role model", combined with the ammount of times i had to hear the word 'genius' (and the film certainly made them feel like little geniuses) made me leave early that night.
@chaithanyadass8742
If it wasn't for Leonardo DiCaprio's insistence on rewriting "Inception", Christopher Nolan would have messed up its storytelling like Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.
@NineVoltDigitalCinema
Thank you for this! I would agree with you on every point, except visuals. This was also Nolan's visual laziest film as well.
@incog.nyto.
it's funny because the solutions you're giving to fix this movie are basically why Citizen Kane works so well. It starts in media res at the end of Kane's life and is constructed of two timelines (Kane's life and the investigation on Rosebud's meaning). The investigation timeline acts as the clock which sets in motion each mini-arc (could this be what Rosebud means? What about this? And this?) and builds momentum as the investigation eventually reaches Kane's mansion and we see the grandeur and misery of his life in its entirety. This is what Oppenheimer couldve done; do a character study through a main question that we want to explore (what does regret mean to Oppenheimer) and tell it through a series of problems to solve to get to that answer, in a more linear fashion. Kinda like an equation that your write, one variable at a time.
@ruthielalastor2209
Good share. I found this by accident and as an avid movie watcher, I appreciated hearing your opinion and suggestion. 1. I agree that this is the kind of film that needs a lot of historical context already to understand properly. It feels like there's a lot of befores and afters but the actual climax moments between them aren't clear. 2. The storytelling showed Jean's death twice, the second time as if a reveal, and that seemed particularly sloppy compared to the rest of the presentation.
@67LMcC
Thank you for this! I HATED Oppenheimer with the intensity of a thousand white hot suns. I was so bored and so confused. I knew nothing about the man except that he was involved in the creation of the atomic bomb, and when I left the theater, I still knew nothing about the man. I was so looking forward to learning about how everything happened, and then the bomb part took all of 5 minutes of the movie. I still do not understand why it has gotten all the love and positive hype because it is a textbook example of bad storytelling. You've done such a great job explaining why!
@thelisthero4774
Thank you! Why did everyone pretend that they enjoyed this movie?! The storytelling was ALL OVER THE PLACE
@foo_tube
You articulated perfectly the reasons why this movie was so confusing and hard to parse. Though for me it was because I literally could not make out the dialog - it was terribly mumbly and whispery and indistinct, something probably more to do with the quality of the streaming service. One thing I did notice, perhaps part of the disjointedness was because he wanted to place all the political "fallout" after the bomb explosion scene. And there was also an underlying question of just where exactly was his loyalty. Did he have any morality at all? Or did he just shift loyalties as it suited him? Especially, was he more loyal to science than to humanity and life itself? A similar question, incidentally, one might ask of contemporary AI development
@peaklife8047