@jordyep Great review, I loved the acting, the photography and overall premise of this movie. But the quick fire scene presentations just made it feel rather soulless and made me feel like I had just watched a large amount of tiktok, instagram like content at times. But I was kinder with my rating (7) because of the things (above) I loved about the movie.
@jordyep Memento came out when I was a junior or senior in high school, and we ended up seeing it in the theater seven times. I miss that Chris Nolan. He's entirely wasted on mainstream blockbusters.
@jonlevity Yeah, I wish he’d make a small comedy or something completely out of his wheelhouse. His films haven’t evolved for the better since Inception.
You‘ve said it perfectly. It was intense at times, but despite Murphy‘s great acting it was impossible to really feel empathy or anger or awe for any of the characters. Because there’s also just so many of them.
@jordyep I agree with you with almost everything. I totally disagree about the sound mix. I loved the sound design and it was not a problem at my movie theater. I do think Tenet is a really good movie, better than Oppenheimer.
@jordyep I agree that without actually understanding the politics at the time, this film will not hit the right notes to most audience. But if you do understand history, this film is an impeccable montage of what led up to Cuban Missile Crisis - and the ending perfectly encapsulates that. As the film says, they're not ending World War, they're opening Cold War. Despite the title, this isn't a film about Oppenheimer. It's about the politics that surrounded him. Think of it like Fargo.
@rodrigokiller yeah Tenet was fantastic. It was the culmination of Nolan's technical feat hitherto.
did you watch oppenheimer on a bad day or something?!
@elvisvan no, it's his style to talk shit about good movies. If this is a Wikipedia entry, then what would that make those generic Oscar-bait biopics.
You articulated the things I didn't like about it perfectly, however I got over them and still enjoyed it
@jordyep I agree with most of this (except I thought the sfx was some of the best I've heard in a while from a blockbuster) but they are just mostly positive points in my opinion. Fantasitic review, very well written.
@jordyep This review captures my first impression of Oppenheimer. :raised_hands_tone2:
@jordyep One of the problems with Nolan's sound mixing is that he compresses the mix. That means the difference between the loudest sound in the movie and the quietest sound isn't as high as your average film. You can measure this digitally and Oppenheimer has a really poor dynamic range. Nolan seems to like everything loud constantly. Rather than quiet passages and then loud when it needs to be.
The second is that because the mixing is so bad and audio muffled if you don't have a full seperate home cinema where everything is calibrated well and speakers have good technical design it becomes even harder on something like TV speakers where the majority listen
Ironically I find this approach and his confusing timeline/scene cuts and lack of dialogue intelligibility mean the rewatch value of his movies is very high - cause you typically don't get to understand or see everything first time. Your mind then doesn't bother remembering the plot and just remembers "the experience".
@jordyep Although I don't agree with most of what you've written, those are your opinions and it's ok. But the part where you mention the lecture in Dutch is actually spoken in Deutsch (German) is just not true. It's just random words in Dutch that doesn't make sense and this is acknowledge by Nolan himself in a interview to a Dutch tv show reporter. He said that he wanted the scene to be really short and didn't give much importance to what was being said because quantum physics would be hard to be translated and memorized by Cillian Murphy.
Review by JordyVIP 8BlockedParent2023-07-20T13:51:33Z— updated 2023-12-04T22:45:13Z
Barbenheimer: Part 1 of 2
This is the kind of film I really don’t want to criticize, because we don’t get nearly enough other stuff like it. However, mr. Nolan has been in need of an intervention for a while now, and unfortunately all of the issues that have been plaguing his films since The Dark Knight Rises show up to some degree here. Visually it might just be his best film, and there’s some tremendous acting in here, particularly by Murphy and RDJ. However, it makes the common biopic mistake of treating its subject matter like a Wikipedia entry, thereby not focussing enough on character and perspective. As a whole, the film feels more like a long extended montage, I don’t think there are many scenes that go on for longer than 60 seconds. There’s a strong ‘and then this happened, and then this happened’ feel to it, which definitely keeps up the pace, but it refuses to stop and let an emotion or idea simmer for a while. There are moments where you get a look into Oppenheimer’s mind, but because the film wants to cover too much ground, it’s (like everything else) reduced to quick snippets. It’s the kind of approach that’d work for a 6 hour long miniseries where you can spend more time with the characters, not for a 3 hour film. I can already tell that I won’t retain much from this, in fact a lot of it is starting to blur together in my mind. There are also issues with some of the dialogue and exposition, such as moments where characters who are experts in their field talk in a way that feels dumbed down for the audience, or just straight up inauthentic. Einstein is given a couple of cheesy lines, college professors and students interact in a way that would never happen, Oppenheimer gives a lecture in what’s (according to the movie) supposed to be Dutch when it’s really German; you have to be way more careful with that when you’re making a serious drama. Finally, there are once again major issues with the sound mixing. I actually really loved the score, but occasionally it’s blaring at such a volume where it drowns out important dialogue in the mix. I’m lucky enough to have subtitles, but Nolan desperately needs to get his ears checked, or maybe he should’ve asked some advice from Benny Safdie since he’s pretty great with experimental sound mixing. My overall feelings are almost identical to the ones I had regarding Tenet; Nolan needs to rethink his approach to writing, editing and mixing. This film as a whole doesn’t work, but there are still more than a few admirable qualities to it.
Edit: I rewatched this at home to see whether my feeling would change. I still stand by what I wrote in July, though the sound mix seems to have been improved for the home media release. It sounds more balanced and I didn’t miss one line of dialogue this time around. I’m slightly raising my score because of that, but besides that I still think it’s unfocused, overedited, awkwardly staged and scripted etc.
5.5/10