ExNotes Movie Review:  Oppenheimer

By  Joe Gresh

I don’t go to the movies very often because it seems like superhero stuff is all that plays at our local cineplex, so it’s unusual that I’ve gone to the talkies twice in the last couple weeks. After seeing the big movie of the summer, Barbie, CT and I decided to go to the second big movie of the summer: Oppenheimer. I’ll be dropping a few spoilers so click out of this blog if you plan on going to Oppenheimer.

I became interested in the United States atomic program about 15 years ago. It may seem gruesome to some, but the mechanics of the Manhattan Project intrigued me. Those old-timey scientists did some amazing stuff way back in the 1940s. Everything they were attempting to do was based on theory and done for the first time.

I went to New Mexico’s Los Alamos to tour that once forbidden city and visited Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was exploded. For an insider’s perspective of the super-secret project the book, Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman by Richard Feynman has a lot of Manhattan Project stuff along with other excitement from the anything-is-possible era. I liked the landforms in New Mexico so much we ended up moving here.

As it turns out I really didn’t know all that much about the dawn of the atomic age.  Oppenheimer the movie is mostly about the adversarial relationship between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, a man that I never saw name-checked in the information I had read. This kind of smoke-filled-room stuff doesn’t interest me although Strauss caused a lot of trouble for Oppenheimer after the war.

From my limited research I thought Oppenheimer was sort of a figurehead for the Manhattan Project but the movie portrays him as critical to the project’s success. Luckily for New Mexico (or unluckily if you were downwind of the blast) he loved the state and picked a site west of Santa Fe for the new atomic age.

CT and I drove down to El Paso, Texas, to see the movie in large format Imax. An old-style mall, set 25 feet lower in elevation than El Paso’s Montana Avenue, was the closest place we could find. The mall was interesting in that the entire commons area was filled with a flea market. You could find hand-made crucifixes or plastic crucifixes made in China. There were places to get your car key battery replaced and a bar of colorful, homemade soap. We had an hour or so before our show started so we went into a madhouse called Dave and Buster’s. Dave and Buster’s is a huge, chain gaming center with a restaurant attached. The place looked mostly like a Las Vegas casino except it’s ok for kids to go because you can only lose.

The restaurant was not too bad. CT and I split a turkey club sandwich. The racket was so loud I needed a gin and soda to calm my nerves. I can see a parent at the end of their rope taking the kids to Dave and Buster’s and turning them loose while mom or dad get plastered at the bar. Really a great business model if you think about it.

I don’t know if it’s due to the lack of employees or matinees are so sparsely populated that there is no need for employees, but we waltzed past the unmanned snack bar into the Imax theater unmolested. The Imax had very steep steps leading to steep seats with plenty of space for mid-aisle stragglers to wander in front of the punctual people. No need to worry about a lady with a fruit basket on her head sitting in front; you’ll be able to see the screen.

My ears were still smarting from Dave and Buster’s when the movie started with an ear-splitting explosion followed by thousands of random lights racing towards a center point roughly 3 feet in front of my head.  The room thundered and shook. I thought the place was coming down but this was just the Imax theater showing us what it was capable of doing and had nothing to do with the Oppenheimer movie. I began to see the reason there were no ticket takers. The usual series of advertisements you see in a theater were not shown, maybe because there are so few Imax theaters it’s not worth shooting the ads in their large format.

Oppenheimer’s story is told out of sequence with scenes jumping forward and backward in time.  Maybe this is a nod to quantum physics and the impossibility of knowing the true state of matter at any particular time?  The jump scenes are mixed in with fantasy sequences that represent Oppenheimer daydreaming. The film switches between color and black and white. All this jumping to and fro, along with the deafening audio levels and rattling chairs, kept me disoriented. I’m mostly deaf in my left ear and still it was actually painful at times. CT wanted to stick wadded up tissue paper in my ears. I should have done it.

Actors playing famous physicists make cameo appearances throughout the movie. You never know who will pop up at a dinner party. Matt Damon plays a loud General Leslie Groves with a comical Jackie Gleason style. Robert Downey is Oppenheimer’s antagonist. He does a good job for most of the film even if he did fall into a paranoid Captain Queeg riff near the end.

The early, red-scare communists were the beautiful people in the movie and their party meetings were more like cocktail socials. Even though it appears he went to the meetings solely to pick up chicks, this dabbling in communism would prove to be a problem for Oppenheimer later in his career.

I like 40-foot tall ta-tas as much as the next guy, but the nude scenes in Oppenheimer seemed to be there to bump the rating and didn’t really contribute to the story in any meaningful way. Which is exactly what you want from gratuitous sex scenes. I feel the director went a little light in this area. There should have been 15 or 20 more. During the kangaroo court to take away Oppenheimer’s security clearance there was a creepy fantasy sequence with Oppenheimer’s dead lover staring at Oppenheimer’s wife while straddling him naked on the witness chair. She wasn’t decomposing with her nose falling off or anything, but it did seem weird.

The director had a tough job making Oppenheimer exciting enough for our 2-second attention span populace. It’s a story that wants to be told slowly and with great detail. I fear that movie will never be made and if it was would not earn much money for the studio. Instead, we get clip after clip that somehow are supposed to make sense at the end. Those Superhero movies have ruined us.

Oppenheimer was sort of a let down. I was expecting a more nuts and bolts experience, like I would be able to build my own small thermonuclear weapon after seeing the movie. Don’t let that deter you from seeing the film; it’s probably just me. I had a hard time following the story and it took 75% of the run time before I began to connect all the disjointed scenes. I think in a regular theater I would have done better. The Imax experience was too overwhelming for me. The constant shaking of seats and booming audio put me in a fight or flight mode. Picture reading a good book, and every few minutes a guy walks up, shakes your shoulders, and shouts “You’re reading a book!” in your ear.  It’s that kind of annoying. Imax never lets you forget that you’re in a movie theater.

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