I finally got around to watching this movie.\u00a0 This won\u2019t be a full review because I don\u2019t think I can be completely fair to the movie.\u00a0 Christopher Nolan has been a big-time director for a good long while.\u00a0 His Batman trilogy earned gazillions of dollars and was actually very good.\u00a0 Now this movie is a very different animal.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think it is supposed to be entertainment in the same way.\u00a0 It\u2019s a biopic and a historical recreation of a very important event, the Manhattan Project; the invention of the atomic bomb.<\/p>\n
As the story of the Manhattan Project, it is fascinating and compelling.\u00a0 The biopic is a combination of experiences.\u00a0 Oppenheimer himself is very odd duck.\u00a0 From his own admission he was not a great physicist like Fermi, Einstein or Bohr.\u00a0 He was a dilettante who found himself surrounded by the generation that invented quantum mechanics and became their interpreter and project manager in shepherding all the pieces needed to allow the US military to get the a-bomb in 1945.<\/p>\n
And we hear his history as a retrospective because the movie is really the story of how Oppenheimer; this critical individual in the ushering in of the nuclear era, loses his US government security clearance due to his former association with communists and other less reputable individuals in his circle of friends.\u00a0 We are also led through the less than honorable path of his love life.\u00a0 And we see how his concerns about the dangers of nuclear weapons seem somewhat inconsistent depending upon where his role in producing the bomb stands.\u00a0 While ensconced in the project he seems not at all conflicted.\u00a0 But once he and his colleagues have handed over the bombs to the Army and the spotlight is no longer on him, his qualms grow exponentially.\u00a0 As a viewer of the story, this seems clear.<\/p>\n
The movie is populated with famous names and faces, some of them very hard to recognize.\u00a0 Robert Downey Jr. is Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer\u2019s implacable foe who hounds him out of the government circle of influence.\u00a0 Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer, his wife.\u00a0 Matt Damon is Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project.\u00a0 Josh Hartnett is Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel-winning nuclear physicist.\u00a0 Kenneth Branagh is the brilliant physicist Niels Bohr.\u00a0 Tom Conti is Albert Einstein and weirdest of all Gary Oldman is Harry S. Truman.<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s all kinds of good acting.\u00a0 I especially enjoyed the \u201cphysicists seemingly engrossed in the endless details of making a weapon out of their incomprehensible mathematical equations.\u00a0 There is a critical scene where Edward Teller, the father of the H-Bomb stops the project when his calculations seem to indicate that there is a very high probability that setting off a fission bomb could ignite the whole atmosphere of Earth and end all life on the planet.\u00a0 That is a pivotal scene where eventually even Einstein is consulted.<\/p>\n
And the climactic Trinity test scene in the desert is very effective.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s a three-hour movie and that means we see quite a bit of J. Robert Oppenheimer and I have to admit I didn\u2019t find him the most sympathetic character to follow for that three-hours.\u00a0 It\u2019s a good movie.\u00a0 But I ended it wishing it had been more about Matt Damon\u2019s character and that\u2019s an odd feeling for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I finally got around to watching this movie.\u00a0 This won\u2019t be a full review because I don\u2019t think I can be completely fair to the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237,3545],"tags":[4536,829,4535,509,3405],"class_list":["post-28750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-science","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-gary-oldman","tag-j-robert-oppenheimer","tag-matt-damon","tag-robert-downey-jr"],"yoast_head":"\n