Oppenheimer

What can I say about this film. Obviously it's a masterpiece. While it's not my favourite Nolan film it's technically his greatest accomplishment to date, and what an oeuvre he's building*. What I'm about to say next will render my past and future opinions null and void to a large number of film experts/fans/snobs but I don't care: I watched this in two halves and much preferred it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it needed to be shorter because I think it used its time really well and there was plenty of story to tell. Stepping away from it, however, made me enjoy the second part all the more. I'm not sure if it was just a chance for me to renew my focus or what, but hey: I'm a 40yr old toddler dad with a full time job, I really struggle to carve out three hours for anything, let alone a single movie! With that out of the way, let me just say that Oppenheimer is a capital M Movie. It reminded me why I loved cinema and especially Big Movies like this one. I love how well it did for not being a sequel or a franchise starter or a superhero movie. I loved the hype and the memes and the whole Barbenheimer zeitgeist, which was the best example in recent years of 'you just had to be there'. I'm really glad that it was part of a major cultural moment that united all different types of people and drove them back to cinema. Cillian Murphy is so brilliantly understated and says so much without saying a word. Some of my favourite members of the cast included Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt (who had criminally little to do, but stole the one major scene she was in near the end), Tom Conti, David Dastmalchian (always underrated), Jason Clarke, and Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr. The sound design and the score were absolutely stunning. So many choices were made that reinvented what you were watching on the screen, and while a lot of Nolan-directed films have great sound design, the work on Oppenheimer was another level. It's amazing to have movies like this, and for those who talk about the death of cinema need only see something like this to understand why it's more alive than ever. *I'm very aware of the great irony of discussing Nolan like he's the singular one responsible for the creation of this work when discussing a movie with the themes that Oppenheimer does, but here we are.