This movie was deeply disappointing. If you want to see a good movie about a WW2 STEM project leader, see The Imitation Game instead.
I think if someone else took all the raw footage from this movie and completely re-edited it, and re-did everything else, like the music/soundtrack, etc, there is a really great movie that COULD be made...the acting was fantastic, and historically this is a fascinating topic...but this movie isn't it.
This felt like watching a Jackson Pollock painting being made... like paint randomly and chaotically splattered againt a canvas with little rhyme or reason, and no discernable forms or shapes. It felt like the makers of this movie cared solely about proving they were "arTISTEs", and what suffered was actual storytelling.
The first 30 to 45 minutes were a mess. The whole movie suffered from absurdly short scenes that jump all over in time through out of context events that assault you like a random spray of shotgun pellets. Scene changes are jarring, and have no flow.
I expected something more to do with the Manhattan project and scientists, but instead got something that was a muddled mess of unspecified time periods, with the maker of the movie trying way too hard to be mysterious in order to confuse the audience for 2.5 hours before allowing them to realize that the movie was really mostly about a beef between Oppenheimer and one senator, with a little bit of Oppenheimer's introspection and Monday morning quarterbacking whether he had made the world a better or worse place thrown in. Again, Oppenheimer's introspection was so random, and chaotically scattered that it has no flow. You couldn't feel him changing over time, instead it bounced disjointedly all over the place. One scene he seems to have no regrets, the next he does, the next he doesn't, the next he does. His love life was similarly revealed in scatter shot, and seemed irrelevant to anything else. The movie seemed to be trying to tell too many stories: his love life, his college life, his professional life, his politics, his blacklisting after the Manhattan project, his beef with that 1 senator, all as separate stories that didn't tie together at all. It would have been better to pick 1 or 2 of those stories and gone deeper into them than to try to tell all of them in 1 movie. Way too many time periods shown, in way too confusing of a method. Again, terrible storytelling of a story that had so much potential.
Visual and audio representations of Oppenheimer's psychological state, essentially delivered to the audience as hallucinations, were randomly thrust upon us, so the movie bounced violently between seemingly more documentary to suddenly dreamworld fantasy. Unlike the tv show Scrubs where JD's daydreams felt like a natural extension of his character, the fantasy world here felt unnatural, and like the director was grinding the flow of the movie, what little flow there was, to a halt to make a public service announcement of how the character was feeling.
Music was over the top. Everything had music. It was annoying. It was noticable how the music was trying to manipulate my emotions, to make up for the poor storytelling being too impotent to do that on its own.
Note to all directors: Don't be afraid to use title cards indicationg time and location when you suddenly change time or location. There's a reason why movies do that.
I think if someone else took all the raw footage from this movie and completely re-edited it, and re-did everything else, like the music/soundtrack, etc, there is a really great movie that COULD be made...the acting was fantastic, and historically this is a fascinating topic...but this movie isn't it.
This felt like watching a Jackson Pollock painting being made... like paint randomly and chaotically splattered againt a canvas with little rhyme or reason, and no discernable forms or shapes. It felt like the makers of this movie cared solely about proving they were "arTISTEs", and what suffered was actual storytelling.
The first 30 to 45 minutes were a mess. The whole movie suffered from absurdly short scenes that jump all over in time through out of context events that assault you like a random spray of shotgun pellets. Scene changes are jarring, and have no flow.
I expected something more to do with the Manhattan project and scientists, but instead got something that was a muddled mess of unspecified time periods, with the maker of the movie trying way too hard to be mysterious in order to confuse the audience for 2.5 hours before allowing them to realize that the movie was really mostly about a beef between Oppenheimer and one senator, with a little bit of Oppenheimer's introspection and Monday morning quarterbacking whether he had made the world a better or worse place thrown in. Again, Oppenheimer's introspection was so random, and chaotically scattered that it has no flow. You couldn't feel him changing over time, instead it bounced disjointedly all over the place. One scene he seems to have no regrets, the next he does, the next he doesn't, the next he does. His love life was similarly revealed in scatter shot, and seemed irrelevant to anything else. The movie seemed to be trying to tell too many stories: his love life, his college life, his professional life, his politics, his blacklisting after the Manhattan project, his beef with that 1 senator, all as separate stories that didn't tie together at all. It would have been better to pick 1 or 2 of those stories and gone deeper into them than to try to tell all of them in 1 movie. Way too many time periods shown, in way too confusing of a method. Again, terrible storytelling of a story that had so much potential.
Visual and audio representations of Oppenheimer's psychological state, essentially delivered to the audience as hallucinations, were randomly thrust upon us, so the movie bounced violently between seemingly more documentary to suddenly dreamworld fantasy. Unlike the tv show Scrubs where JD's daydreams felt like a natural extension of his character, the fantasy world here felt unnatural, and like the director was grinding the flow of the movie, what little flow there was, to a halt to make a public service announcement of how the character was feeling.
Music was over the top. Everything had music. It was annoying. It was noticable how the music was trying to manipulate my emotions, to make up for the poor storytelling being too impotent to do that on its own.
Note to all directors: Don't be afraid to use title cards indicationg time and location when you suddenly change time or location. There's a reason why movies do that.