Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer - As always, my notes are more than a bit late. Anyway.... Loved it. Epic, energetic, grandest scale, overflowing riches, multiple viewings required. That said, some of this reaction is just the gratitude in not seeing another superhero movie, though at times the characters do seem to each have their own super-powers.

As Christopher Nolan must do, the plot, taken from the book American Prometheus, is told as three stories, intertwingled: the Manhattan Project from inception through August 1945,  Oppenheimer's degrading security clearance denial, and Lewis Strauss' cabinet confirmation hearing. As it goes, the interest level in each succeeding plotline is diminished by about half.

The reason for making the film is, of course, to tell the story of the Bomb. That part of the film has all the conflicting personalities, expositional debates, and real world science drama anyone can ask.  Once the (implosion-version) bomb is tested, in a great historical re-enactment set-piece,  we're left with medium-level politics. The bureaucratic backstabbing tries to elevate the movie to a grander level, but in retrospect, seems more a MacGuffin, a who-done-it-to-who-and-why mystery dwarfed by the main event.

Other quibbles:

• It was hard to figure out what screening to attend! Being old school, I wanted the 70mm film print, but didn't realize that the showing I attended wasn't IMAX, which disappointed, as I was looking for the biggest screen. In the end, not a big deal. But it was a little surprising that even in the first two weeks of release, this 70mm film print was quite scratchy - hadn't seen that from any movie screening in the past several years as various digital projector technologies have taken over.
• Great to see many of the real scientists thoughtfully represented, though of course, the actual project was far, far bigger in scale. (Much better than The Imitation Game which made the Bletchley Park complex look like a one-man show). That said, two favorites didn't show up: There's no Richard Feynman and no appearance by John Von Neumann. (Von Neumann regularly visited while engaged in other WW2 work and helped with modeling the implosion apparatus; frankly, he was just too much the polymath to be dedicated to one military project).
• Not to leak a spoiler, but the last few seconds of the film missed the mark for me. If you cut the film after Oppenheimer's portentous remark, "maybe we did set the world on fire", that would work as an open-ended question. But to follow that with a blazing global visual effect confuses the actual history. Well... so far.
• Random reminder: The Institute for Advanced Studies is "in" Princeton, NJ, not "at" Princeton University and is funded independently. Also, not sure what it says about the world, but looking at the current IAS scholars – no disrespect meant – but I vaguely recognize only 1 or 2 names; in the 50s I believe most people would have known of Oppie, Einstein, Von Neumann, Gödel at the least. Maybe the number of 'well known' scientists is bigger now? Or the well-known ones aren't actually doing top research?
• No, I haven't seen Peaky Blinders
• No, I have not seen the other film.