Oppenheimer starts off so boring and cliched that I almost turned it off within the first 45 minutes. In this time we learn nothing of value about the man. He is told repeatedly that he is a "genius" without any story development as to why they should bestow him this title. Instead we see him do such "genius" things like attempt to murder a professor he disagrees with, sympathize and mingle with communists, cheat on his wife and then abandon his child.
This film is all about politics and like a young mind freshly indoctrinated out of college we are supposed to feel sympathy for Oppenheimer's failure to understand economics. Real world examples of the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela are apparently not enough reason to believe communism is a bad idea. Naive scientists who have no concept of the real world supporting a "cause" apparently should be enough.
Thankfully the movie takes off some after the first hour and moves at a quicker pace. Disappointingly though much of the science and engineering is avoided for the politics of communism in America. I was hoping to see in detail how everything was developed but this never happened. Instead you get fragments of the development that fails to tell the full story.
An attempt is even made to white-wash the Soviet Union during WWII as anything but an ally of necessity or as they say "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". No mention is ever made that the Soviet Union invaded and occupied unprovoked both Finland and Poland, while also annexing the independent Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and part of Romania (Bessarabia) in a manner no different than Putin is trying to do today in Ukraine.
We do finally learn that Oppenheimer was apparently a good manager of scientists but it does not save the film. The politics play out but not in the way Nolan wished because it was obvious to me Oppenheimer had no business having a security clearance holding the sympathetic communist associations and views he clearly believed in. So Nolan leaves us with the left's tired political messiah "JFK" to bail out his film because there was no way to twist the narrative away from the fact that Oppenheimer was a communist sympathizer.
This film is all about politics and like a young mind freshly indoctrinated out of college we are supposed to feel sympathy for Oppenheimer's failure to understand economics. Real world examples of the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela are apparently not enough reason to believe communism is a bad idea. Naive scientists who have no concept of the real world supporting a "cause" apparently should be enough.
Thankfully the movie takes off some after the first hour and moves at a quicker pace. Disappointingly though much of the science and engineering is avoided for the politics of communism in America. I was hoping to see in detail how everything was developed but this never happened. Instead you get fragments of the development that fails to tell the full story.
An attempt is even made to white-wash the Soviet Union during WWII as anything but an ally of necessity or as they say "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". No mention is ever made that the Soviet Union invaded and occupied unprovoked both Finland and Poland, while also annexing the independent Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and part of Romania (Bessarabia) in a manner no different than Putin is trying to do today in Ukraine.
We do finally learn that Oppenheimer was apparently a good manager of scientists but it does not save the film. The politics play out but not in the way Nolan wished because it was obvious to me Oppenheimer had no business having a security clearance holding the sympathetic communist associations and views he clearly believed in. So Nolan leaves us with the left's tired political messiah "JFK" to bail out his film because there was no way to twist the narrative away from the fact that Oppenheimer was a communist sympathizer.
