Oppenheimer (2023)
When drama feels like action.
Presentation:
Shot on imax Kodak 2383 and black and white film, the film has gorgeous depth of field, which leads to some out of focus shots which I didn’t mind too much. There are a few drop dead beautiful shots that you really wouldn’t expect, it may convert you to shooting more wide open. Sound is really a main character in this story. It’s a Nolan film so there’s going to be a lot of practical effects and wonderful music. It will be a disservice to miss this in theatres and your experience will suffer greatly on dvd viewing. The sound design is spectacular, watch with headphones. Ludwig Goransson does something truly magical with this score.
Story:
This is one of the fastest paced biography dramas. Court scenes are like action sequences and timeline follows Nolan’s typical nonlinear storytelling. With an all star cast, you can feel the gravitas of each performance. Everyone is on their A game. The film is over 3 hours and though some political drama parts were a bit muddy, the core story was truly captivating. The movie does fail in some regards. Although everything in the film is designed to be with Oppenheimers perspective in mind, the fast pace doesn’t allow the viewer to build a proper connection and understand the depth aside from visual representations of macro atomic shots. The best scene is easily the post bomb hallucination address, which finally begins to portray to heart of the film: the internal struggle. However, for the most part this aspect seems to have taken a back seat as a result of the massive cast and such intimacy is lost. This is also the consequence of the ambiguous representation of his motives as Nolan didn’t want to clearly paint him one way or another.
Conclusion:
A surprisingly good biography that feels riveting. It requires a lot of effort on the audience to follow the politics and characters, but the performances are outstanding. It may not be Nolan’s greatest film, but it has the most gravitas.
Recommendations
A compelling story even for those that don't care about baseball.