Oppenheimer — The Man, The Stardust, The Propaganda

Three hours was two hours and forty-five minutes too long

Cillian Murphy, the actor who played J. Robert Oppenheimer, gives good face. His pale, long and pensive stares spoke volumes in the movie. I take no issue with his quality of acting.

Although, after the first two or three times the camera panned to linger on his eyeballs, I was bored. I felt the same malaise after a few brushes with Oppenheimer’s vivid, sparkly and electrifying imagination. It was an artistic hand overplayed.

That said, the strong lead character’s pale, long and pensive stares are clearly the director’s attempt to hold the attention of the audience when the story simply cannot stand alone.

Eventually, I began to think that the diversion to his eyes and his scientific mind were fillers for what the movie dreadfully lacked — energy.

It’s just that a person has to have a pretty compelling story to distract my focus from what that person did to disrupt the lives of thousands of poor people who lived far away and who had no comparable defense.

I cannot ignore my awareness of that fact with American delusions of grandeur, because Cillian stared me down into a shimmering, foggy haze of brutal disregard.

The director’s attempt to make Oppenheimer’s genius and ambition sexy enough to overshadow the great harm done by the prolific scientist and a host of others, pseudo-guilty conscience’s and all, falls short.

Oppenheimer invented the atomic bomb that was intentionally detonated in Japan. The attacks killed more than 200,000 people between two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That number doesn’t account for those who suffered the effects of the radiation expelled, and for years to come.

What the movie felt like to me instead

I couldn’t help but feel like the movie was less about the greatness and volatility of Oppenheimer and more about a specific message.

The story I watched yanked my mind back to a time many love to call America’s greatest period. We were most feared, overreaching, self-gratuitous and willfully ignorant to any version of morality but our own convoluted idea of what a great nation does and doesn’t do to be great.

I felt as though we were being spoon fed a dollop of remember the good ole days for white men, and pretty much no on else? “We can have that again.” We can make ourselves great, and we can explain it away, as necessary.

We can make ourselves believe that we’ve been right, are right and will always be right…even when we clearly are not. I believe the hoopla and overwhelmingly positive movie reviews are contrived also.

It’s not because they are, but because I consider myself pretty even-handed when watching and reviewing movies. I want to see what’s new, how a story is told in a new way and admire the arts like never before.

What I found was a story told, as it’s already been told so many times before — white genius dude needs to realize his full genius, damn the consequences. He easily navigates to brown people lands to have his way.

His sexual depravity is worked out through greed, destruction and other abuses. He’s cold and perpetually surrounded by his echo chamber. He’s willfully tone deaf, and in the worst way.

There was really nothing new about Oppenheimer. Outside of the goldish, colorful splashes of glitter and sound meant to replicate the liveliness of Oppenheimer’s mind, I found the work dead.

Even worse, there were some of the most talented and in-demand actors featured in the movie, but their characters were all so hollow to me.

I read somewhere that the black and white scenes of the movie denoted historical fact, while the scenes in color (most of the scenes were colored) represented the director’s creative liberty.

I suppose that was the director’s way of promoting his integrity, for the world to see. Frankly, I was bored. It wasn’t a new story. It wasn’t inspiring or reminiscent of a time I or my ancestors could look back upon fondly.

It was just way too much time spent glorifying white power, to the exclusion of smart, white women even, and that felt depressing as hell.

Oppenheimer was an oops for me.

Sorry, not sorry for saying so.

Thank you for reading my take on a movie that’s filled with every kind of positive buzz imaginable, and while I’m not surprised, I’m dreadfully disappointed.

I love you already.

-Bloom