I still have not seen “Killers of the Flower Moon” since it is well over three hours long without an intermission, but somehow I sat through “Oppenheimer” and it is nearly as long.

However, I am still surprised that people in Depends did not protest outside of the Oscars since neither of these long movies has an intermission. (“Killers” clocks in at a bladder bursting 3 hours and 26 minutes, but “Oppenheimer “isn’t far behind at a full 3 hours.)
Incontinent, unite!

It is no surprise that “Oppenheimer” swept the Oscars in 2024 with seven wins, including, Best Picture and Best Director, since it was hyped to the hilt even before the nominations were announced – and it had already won Best Picture and Best Director at the Golden Globes.

Despite all that, I still predict it will eventually be forgotten.

A movie critic on NPR noted the Wikipedia entry about Oppenheimer the man is more interesting than the actual movie about said man. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know a lot more about Oppenheimer than I ever learned from watching a supposed biopic about this complicated, impactful human.

Oppenheimer was apparently deeply into mysticism, but the movie does not explore that brazen fact or that he read the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit.

It would have been very intriguing to juxtapose Oppenheimer’s science mind versus his mystical mind, yet director Christopher Nolan, who is known for infusing his prior films with a metaphysical outlook, sidesteps this dichotomy entirely.

After the bomb is dropped, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) declared, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” This sentence paraphrased from the Bhagavad Gita landed on me like a bomb right there in the dark movie theatre because it came from out of nowhere and blew me away.

Why would Oppenheimer suddenly say this? Nothing was previously shown in his character that would lead up to such a declaration.

Oppenheimer was rightfully portrayed as a victim of McCarthyism, and his time creating this new destroyer of worlds was shown as a flashback from the 1950s McCarthy era. Nolan truly seemed more interested in exploring how unfairly Oppenheimer was treated during the Red Scare than exploring the ethical minefields involved in the creation of the bomb, yet he felt obligated to flash back to the facts of the Manhattan project since that is why we all know who Oppenheimer is in the first place. It is awful that Oppenheimer had to fight to keep his security clearance, but guess what? Dropping the bomb was even worse.

And those aren’t the only weird things about this movie. In fact, I could be giving some of it short shrift simply because I could not hear all of it. I missed approximately ten percent of the dialogue because it is drowned out by the overpowering score. The fact that “Oppenheimer” was nominated for Best Sound is truly laughable, unbelievable really. I was relieved that it did not actually win that one since the nomination itself was so absurd. Call me kooky, but I thought that being able to hear the dialog clearly without loud music blaring over entire sentences would be a given. And I am not the only one who has complained that a lot of the dialogue was unintelligible.

According to reelworld.com, Nolan supposedly got calls from other filmmakers because they could not hear a lot of the dialogue. An article from Variety this past summer explains that Nolan defends this as an artistic choice, yet this is not the first time that people have complained that the music in his movies is just too loud. Why does he continue to do this? Is this a strange gimmick that sets him apart as a director?

“Oppenheimer” won Best Score for jarring music that just seem to blare from out of nowhere at times. It was just too damn loud in places. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I thought the music was there to enhance the underlying emotional tones of the movie, not to dominate it.

Nolan made a choice not to get inside the mind and motivations of his subject, but the best biopics do just that, and this, dear reader, is not one of them. Or maybe Nolan did do those things, but I just couldn’t hear.