Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan

JFK? I thought this was about rescuing a child who was being sex trafficked.

Saw it yesterday. Usually I don't care about seeing movies in theaters, but my options were wait a month or two, pirate a poor quality copy full of ads for a shady online casino, or theater, so, theater was the best option.

Theater was definitely the way to go for the Trinity Test scene alone.

The scene where he was being interrogated about his affair was pretty good too, although I think it would have been better if it was a tad more subtle.

As far as what I didn't like:

The run time. While theaters will bring food and drinks to your seat now, they won't bring you a chamber pot or pause the movie while you go to the bathroom. Intermissions used to be a thing for a reason.

They should have cast Bryan Cranston to portray Werner Heisenberg. That would have been the perfect cameo.

Not enough nudity.

I like a good nuke movie scene. However 15 dollars and sitting through a movie that does not need a big screen for one scene seems a bit much. It justy seems like a movie to see on the little screen with someone who wants to discuss things. Besides I saw T2 over 7 times in the theater when I was in my teens so.

Not to mention my favorite nuke testing scene came from Nightbreakers mainly because of the context. For those who do not know it you would want to go back and see it. It is about how the US used soldiers to test the effects of nuclear exposure. Oppenheimer sounds like a good exploration of what we were doing, but Nightbreakers shed some dramatic light on what we wanted to know about how soldiers could survive near a nuclear blast. They also used some real nuclear test footage like pigs being placed in a sort of mailbox and heat suits burning in the heat of a blast. Worst yet it is shown to the soldiers who put them into that position and were going to be the experiments. The nuke blasts were not the best shot, but their effects were shown in devastating context.

Full frontal nudity from Miss Piggy.

Wait until you read about the highly advanced computer controls they have.

For ‘Oppenheimer’ 70mm Print, Imax Needed to Write Software to Emulate a 2002 PalmPilot Device to Control Massive Film Platters

A 33 Mhz processor and 16 MB of RAM? Do you think you're man enough to handle that kind of blistering performance?

A good historical primer for the movie.

OMG the movie's gravitational pull is sucking me into a nerd hole of drugs and quantum theory.


YAY!

Japanese indeed be mad

Saw it tonight on the giant IMAX screen and in 70 mm. Have to say, I don't really see the need for the screen the way the movie was shot. It really only made sense for a few shots, really. I'll have more to say later.

Okay, now that I've had a chance to sleep, I will tell you the best shots for the IMAX experience: The tower for the Trinity test being constructed and the bomb being hoisted up the tower. A good chunk of those shots would be 2nd unit shots and not ones done by Nolan and his prime crew. If you haven't seen Fat Man and Little Boy and/or Day One (which can be hard to find on IMDB's site), then its absolutely worth a watch in a theater (IMAX or not) but if you've seen them, eh, then it's up to you.

The movie is three hours long, and if you're like me, you'll feel it because you'll be worried if you can find an Uber driver when you get out of the theater at TWO O'CLOCK IN THE GODDAMNED MORNING!!! Otherwise, it doesn't seem all that long of a flick.

Now, some of the stunt casting (even though it appeared to contain a bit of a "fuck you" to Kenneth Branagh) is a bit fucked up. The guy who played Einstein is a regular in Nolan movies, but he's also too fat to be Einstein. And I'm sorry, but while Matt Damon's performance was fine, it cannot hold a candle to either Paul Newman or Brian Dennehy as Gen. Leslie Groves. Both of them perfectly captured the "Old guy who just doesn't give a shit, he's a got a job to do, and he's going to fucking do it, goddamn it." Matt Damon was, well, sort of Matt Damonish. He just doesn't have the ability to pull off being a crotchety old fuck, and that's what the role needs.

The biggest issue that I have with the film is that it doesn't convey the sense of isolation as well as the incredible pressure the scientists were under during the project. They did a nice thing to indicate the passage of time with the marbles, and there was some discussion between the characters in the beginning of the film about the Nazis putting Jews in "camps." (No discussions about how horrific those camps were, or who was dying in them.)

I haven't read the book that the film was based on, but I have read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, and that's one of the things that he talks about. I realize, the focus on the film wasn't Feynman, but a few scenes scattered during the ones set at Los Alamos where people talk about how the war's going would have been a big help. Oh, and out of all the movies dealing with the Manhattan Project, only Day One has a scene where they discuss dumping massive amounts of radioactive material over German if they can't get the bomb to work. (And yeah, they did discuss that.)

The film gives us a portrait of a man who was driven by academic curiosity to help develop the bomb, while neglecting to mention that the amount of pressure everyone was under to try and win the war was as great, if not greater than Oppenheimer's desire to understand quantum physics. There were also no discussions of supply shortages and how they should ship things around the country without alerting spies to what was going on.

Okay, now the "fuck you" to Kenneth Branagh. He plays Neils Bohr, who was a mentor to Oppenheimer when he was younger. Oppenheimer nearly poisons him by accident, then he disappears from the story until much later on. He's mentioned when Oppenheimer and a few others are discussing the German program, with Oppenheimer saying that the only way he could be certain that they'd actually build the thing was to have Bohr working with the project. That would require smuggling him out of occupied Europe and bringing him to the States. Eventually, they do this (Oh, and the guy playing the bongos at the Christmas party? Feynman. IIRC, one of the reasons he took up the bongos was to deal with the boredom at Los Alamos.) and instead of it being a moment where you get a deep discussion about the issues going on, Bohr (Who, when he heard Einstein's statement that god doesn't play dice with the universe responded with, "Albert, if god wants to play dice, let him. Let him."), you get Bohr saying, "Eh, I just stopped by to say, 'Hi.' you'll figure all this other shit out sooner or later."

So, why is this a potential "fuck you" to Branagh? Ever seen Branagh's Dead Again (and boy does that movie raise some issues in the 21st Century, but that's another story)? That movie is pretty much a very clever nod to directors like Orson Welles (Branagh cribs a number of shots from films like "Citizen Kane" and "Touch of Evil") and also has a structure like Oppenheimer where you're shifting back and forth through multiple periods of time. (Not to mention parts of it being in color, while other parts are B&W.) So, you make a movie that's clearly influenced by Branagh, and what role do you hand him? The guy who's important for a couple of minutes in the beginning, then shows up to say, "How ya doin'?" near the end of the film. That might be a nice nod to your idol, I suppose, but when you remember that the "villain" in this movie (RDJ, Jr's character) is named Strauss and that Branagh's character in Dead Again is named "Strauss" (and is seen as a villain for part of the film), you start to wonder.

Oh, and look up pics of RDJ, Jr in this film and pictures of Boris Karloff in his later years. Fuckers look almost identical.

In thinking about this and the last Nolan film I saw (Intersteller), I think that he's got a milder form of whatever's wrong with JJ Abrams. Abrams can put together some beautiful shots in movies, he just can't think of a good storyline to tie it all together and goes for the great shots. Nolan, can't always get the great shots, like Abrams can, but he can tell a story better than Abrams, even if it is a little too focused on certain shots, instead of on the story like it needs to be.

But don't feel bad if you don't live near one of the 19 giant IMAX movie theaters in the US. If you watch it on any other IMAX screen, or even a large movie screen, you won't really miss out on anything that the giant IMAX screen has.

Something else I forgot to mention. If you've seen the movie Creation, you quickly be reminded of it in the opening scenes of the movie. Since it's not easy to drill down on IMDB listings, I've no idea if the two films share any production members or not, but I find it hard to believe with the nearly identical shots that Nolan, or someone influential in the production, hadn't seen the movie. They are that close.

Interesting, I had no idea that Nolan refuses to use ADR for his movies. This is really surprising if you no anything at all about IMAX cameras. Because, apparently up until this film, the fuckers were so loud that you had to use hearing protection when they were on. According to that article, they're still noisy, but they're not so noisy that the actors have to shout to be heard over them, and modern noise-canceling software is good enough that it can eliminate it from all the recordings.

I, personally, didn't have any real problem hearing the dialogue in the film, but I also have better-than-average hearing for someone my age. I have to have my hearing tested every year because I work in loud environments, and the techs are always amazed at how good my hearing is.

I take it you didn't see Tenet?

Not yet, but I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.

It got a lot of complaints for notbeing able to understand the dialogue because the actors are wearing masks in one scene and Nolan recorded the dialogue without ADR.

They said the same thing about Bane in whatever his last Batman movie was. Given how shitty mixes are for theaters these days, that's not really surprising. I read an article a few months back that said the initial mix is done for theaters with "premium" sound systems (Dolby, THX, or similar), and then the rest of the mixes are just done with automated software that really isn't designed to figure out how to do it correctly. It just gets it down into a size and format that the other systems can use, and nobody gives a shit about the audio quality.

I think I read the same article (or at least something similar).

Yeah, and if you want to get right down to how stingy those Hollywood motherfuckers are when it comes to paying for such things, then this is a prime example of it. Because the software you need to have a person fix it is free. Yes, the paid programs out there that cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, can do a lot more, but you don't need any of them to do this. If you have the right set of skills, and believe me, this isn't the kind that takes thousands of hours of schooling to be able to do, any podcast you listen to that's not produced by a major company, but just somebody in their basement or wherever they've got the kind of skills needed. They might want $100/hr, but it probably isn't going to take them much more than a day, and quite possibly as low as the running time of the movie, to fix it. I don't know, let's say that the average cost is even as high as $10K when you factor everything in, that's nothing when you're talking film budgets in even just the tens of millions, let alone the half billion they're eventually going to spend on a movie if they haven't already.

I've test-driven a couple of the free programs and they're crazy good. Almost too good, in fact.

Yeah, and have you played with DeScript, which even with the kind of license you'd need for a major movie is nothing? How do you want to edit the thing? Like a video editor? It can do that. You want to just edit the audio to have it synch up with some video? It can do that. You want it to do ADR with an AI-generated voice that is damned accurate? It can do that. Do you want to edit it like you would a text document, meaning you're not dealing with the audio or video parts, just the AI-generated transcript that is very accurate? It gets things wrong, but not so wrong that you can't figure out the right words. It also does all kinds of audio mixing.

Christ, man, in 1988, I was helping my friends in college record stuff on the same kind of gear that was used to do TNG. No shit. We had all of it. That fucking pales in comparison to what I have at my disposal today for almost nothing. I just wish I had the brain power and the time I did when I was 18. I could have so much fun with all of this stuff.

Whelp, I'm going to have to drag some more politics into this discussion, of the kind I didn't expect.

The Bizarre Oppenheimer Movie From Ayn Rand That Never Got Made

Yeah, I wanna see that script. And, hell, if somebody wants to do an AI version of it? I'll watch.

It's now the fourth biggest movie of the year.
https://collider.com/oppenheimer-global-box-office-777-million/

Hmm, I wonder why it took them so long to do an Honest Trailer?

Finally got around to seeing it. Not understanding the hype. It was a decent enough film (albeit too long, as is usual for Nolan) but not worthy of the all the praise. Also, I don't think seeing it in IMAX or super-duper THX DTS surround sound really would have changed my opinion. I agree with @Tuckerfan that most of the film didn't require being shot in IMAX.

This is on Peacock now for those, like me, who didn't get to the theater to see it.

Great movie. Probably my favorite Nolan since his first two Batman films.

I knew it would be, but what really impressed me the most were the Los Alamos scenes. The color grading looked so much like 1940s color slide film that it had to have been a deliberate choice.

Don't forget Joker.

Yabut, it wasn't IMAX good cinematography. The only really impressive shots in IMAX were the ones of the tower at Los Alamos. This isn't to say that it's not shot well, just that that was the only scene that grabbed on the giant screen. It sorta reminded me of the Meg Ryan/Russell Crowe film Proof of Life where the best shots were the ones during the end credits. Though, I will admit it was a vastly better film than Proof of Life. (Granted, not saying much.)