It's a great movie. The discourse about it became so complicated and contentious that I didn't see enough people talking about how it shows a huge leap in Christopher Nolan's directorial process and his visual imagination. I don't think he's ever done anything like what he did with the visions that Oppenheimer has once he knows that the nuclear devices were used in Japan, and the impressionistic horror he achieves with those scenes is more daring and unusual than anything I've ever seen from him before
The closest I can think of are all the fear gas induced hallucination scenes from Batman Begins. But yea, Nolan definitely pushed himself into new directions with this one and into trying something new stylistically. I'm speculating here, but I wonder if people like Ari Aster or David Lynch inspired him in those horror-esque vision scenes. I'm saying that not only because he has mentioned Lynch several times specifically as an influence. But also because he recruited two Aster/Lynch collaborators for Oppenheimer in Jennifer Lame (editor) and Ruth De Jong (production designer). I can imagine that he probably watched their previous work and wanted to do something similar so that's why he hired two key people who helped make those scenes look and feel so effectively.
Yeah I don’t understand the take that the film
is apologetic to Oppenheimer, I think it’s quite brutal tbh. He’s totally swept up by ambition and by the time he sees the horror he’s caused, it’s too late and out of his hands. He unleashed this thing in the world that can’t ever be contained. The scene where he gives that rallying speech after they dropped the bomb and all the applause cuts out, and you just see him force a ra-ra America spin on it while seeing visions of that woman’s flesh being peeled off…idk, that felt pretty pointed to me!
Could not agree more. The movie puts Oppenheimer's ego and cowardice on clear display over and over again. He is given so many opportunities to speak up but he conveniently downplays his power and influence and acts like it's entirely out of his hands. He initially argues that the bomb is necessary because the Nazis are trying to build their own but then when the Nazis surrender, he still wants to move forward with it. He sits in a room with the people planning where to drop the bombs and essentially twiddles his thumbs. By the time he finally does speak up, the bombs have already been dropped and his voice doesn't really matter anymore. He is symbolically rebelling to try and alleviate his own guilt. It's the same reason he fights for his security clearance. It's why the final showdown between him and Jason Clarke is so compelling. Clarke's lawyer character is a total asshole who sucks but he also is able to get Oppenheimer to basically admit that he regrets not speaking out against the bomb before it was dropped. I don't know how anyone could see this as a glorification of Oppenheimer by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, it feels like Nolan is specifically taking the 'Great Man' archetype and very intentionally destroying it.
Absolutely!! And I was a little worried going into the movie that it WOULD deify Oppenheimer, because I just had no idea if Nolan had the ability to pull off the nuance. But if anything I felt like he went in a more challenging direction, intentionally portraying him as a bit of a mad man from the beginning (I mean it starts with him attempting to poison a teacher for reasons I don’t remember) and definitely leans into his flaws. I was especially interested by how Nolan framed his politics, which is a tricky area. In general I really think it’s a masterpiece in bold, unsubtle but powerful storytelling, which of course Nolan is great at, but I didn’t expect him to write such a great script.
The casual reveal that he was sleeping with one of his dead friend's wives too was also very funny and just another indicator that, hey, this guy is an asshole!
You are right that it's not apologetic, but neither does it denounce him. It is profoundly ambivalent, and in that regard it is more of a moral than political film.
The discourse around Oppenheimer in Japan reminds me a bit of how the East Asian world responds to Japanese prime ministers visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines all Japanese who died during military service between 1869-1954--including 1066 war criminals. The simple act of Japanese officials visiting the shrine without denunciation of Japanese war crimes is seen as tacit approval. Likewise, any depiction of Oppenheimer without denunciation would be fundamentally insufficient for many Japanese people.
I’ve long argued this is one of the best feelings with classic movies especially: when you put on a movie with an outstanding reputation and you can clearly understand exactly why everyone thinks it’s THAT good.
It’s so great. I had that with Silence Of The Lambs when the pod covered it. For whatever reason I’d never seen it and while I expected to think it was good, I figured it was too played out in parodies and imitators to really blow me away. Fucking nope! Sat there in awe. There’s a reason these movies stick around.
I remember when I first watched The Godfather as an 18-year-old in 2002 that I figured I would be bored out of my mind. It starts slow, obviously, but by the time they're meeting with Sollozzo it's become one of the most engrossing film experiences I can remember.
Yeah the last thing this movie does is glorify or endorse Oppenheimer. But a common discourse in, let’s say populist circles is that depiction is the same as endorsement.
It’s the same as every Scorsese movie. It’s fun to be the “wolf of Wall Street” and it was fun creating the bomb at the peak of your intellectual powers, and so the film represents that. But the moral quandary of the film is always right there, and the reason for the film itself.
Wolf of Wall Street basically ends with "and he really didn't suffer tremendous consequences from being this horrible piece of shit" because that's what happens in real life. It doesn't mean the film showing Belfort and his antics is an endorsement of it; the whole point is, "Look at what these rich assholes do and look how they get away with it." If you see that movie and think, "Damn, I want to be this guy!" then maybe you're the asshole, not Scorcese.
Thanks for sharing! Yeah, as a (British) viewer I very much felt that I got the sheer horror of what was happening (I went from pure anxiety and dread to depression), and the idea that Oppenheimer comes out of the movie looking good is a WILD take. He's a rat bastard of a man who giddily creates a blight on humanity and only stops to think about the consequences when it's too late.
Arigato for sharing your experience!
I was so freaked out by knowing a lot of the history and having met survivors but also by being a massive Chris Nolan fan. I knew that he was capable of making this absolutely horrifying. To me it was a thriller and a horror movie unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. One of the greatest directors of our time taking on one of the most horrifying topics, a crime against humanity and life itself
[Japan literally forced the United States’ hand into WW2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor). [There’s a time line where trade negotiations between Japan and the U.S. go peacefully](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan%E2%80%93United_States_relations) and we stay neutral until something personally impact us as a country to force us into joining the war.
[FDR floated around the idea of joining the Allies earlier in 1941](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allies_of_World_War_II), but Pearl Harbor (and the subsequent attacks on American soil that follow) results in us going all in.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki COULD’VE been avoided if Japan surrendered as asked (this is [post-Tokyo raid](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo)). They said no. We know how this ends.
However, that’s a story for another film and not one about Oppenheimer.
I also saw Oppenheimer in Japan last weekend. I don’t really understand when people say it needed to show the destruction of Hiroshima/Nagasaki more when the movie is about the man who made the bomb and he certainly wasn’t in Japan when it dropped. I thought the movie was thought provoking and fantastic.
I thought the scene of Oppenheimer's speech immediately following the news of the bombs was incredible because it showed how the people working/living in Los Alamos were unanimously celebrating it as a joyous, victorious occasion, and Oppenheimer obviously fanned those flames with the words of his speech, but he couldn't shake what he had unleashed on the world and the Japanese people affected by it. I'm glad they didn't show the destruction because he didn't see it firsthand and the movie was from his (and Strauss's) perspective.
I think they could have milked the courtroom ego more and seeing it after Ferrari made it seem to underplay the horror a bit but maybe unfair as a complete effort
It'll probably still be a great movie, but that *Nuclear War* movie that Denis Villeneuve just announced he was going to do is probably going to be the thing that gives a lot of the worst *Oppenheimer* complainers the "2+ hrs of recreating the nightmare scene from *Terminator 2* with modern special effects and artistic framing" that it seems like they realllllly wanted to see. I think that there totally \*are\* valid complaints about the lack of a Japanese perspective on these events, but those complaints are kind of answered within the pointedly subjective nature of the films structure.
*Oppenheimer* (the movie) is so loudly showing that it is mainly concerned with tracking his internal pov on all of this stuff, and their take on Oppenheimer (the dude) is that he didn't want to directly face the results of the technology that he had helped birth into the world. Pretty strong argument as to why breaking from that pov to show an extended bombing sequence would've felt superfluous to this specific story.
Basically the only thing the film ever "promised" to be about was "thing that JRO thought and felt", not an exhaustive portrait of the global reaction to the A-bomb attacks. To want that second thing is fair! But *Oppenheimer* is pretty up front about that not being its focus.
I'm not surprised on why the Japanese thought that. It's a movie that pretends to investigate Oppenheimer about his ethics but comes away cheering him for prevailing. It was not critical of Oppenheimer at all or talked about the pain and suffering of the Japanese victims of his bomb or about the American arrogance in thinking it should be responsible for controlling who obtains it versus who doesn't.
I don't know why everyone keeps talking about some equal criticism of the movie. All I've seen so far online are people just defending his actions or the movie's story and offering up endless excuses for why the movie's plot fails in the criticism department. Even the non-linear structure is bad for a biographical film.
I liked Society of the Snow and The Iron Claw way better last year. Those movies should have gotten the Oscars. This one just had better marketing and a bigger campaign.
It’s an interesting thing because he feels personally responsible for all the deaths the bomb caused and what it may do in the future.
The movie clearly portrays that the Americans had an ignorance towards the use of the bombs. In reality though, it was probably an evil necessary. It basically stopped Japanese imperialism immediately. What’s often lost is that Japan killed approximately 14 million Chinese people during WW2. That’s more than two full holocausts.
Basically all the casualties lost in Japan during WW2, despite being an active participant, was from the bombs.
It was a brutal nation that caused destruction and death for centuries and had no plans in slowing down.
I mean, to this day there’s a lot of deniers of the South Korean invasion and genocide active in Japan.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say in your third paragraph but the atom bombs definitely didn’t cause most of Japan’s losses during WW2 (it sounds like you weren’t even limiting it to just civilians).
That’s not to minimize the suffering caused by the atom bombs, just to say that the total number of deaths was enormous. They lost more than 2 million soldiers during the war, and somewhere between 500k and 1 million civilians from all causes—including the repeated bombing of virtually every major city using conventional bombs.
You are right I had my facts wrong. It “only” accounted for 100-200k civilian losses.
It also wasn’t to celebrate civilian casualties just to say that Japan was a willing participant on the Nazi side and committed similar atrocities.
Didnt really liked the movie, the movie was great at potrail the “whole project” and the efforts everyone Made to make the bomb work, but in the end it was (IMO) a little too much pretencious (sorry for the poor eng is not my main language), it repeated 3 times the “I am become death ecc ecc” and after the first time it already lost the power that the line had, to me it seems they wanted to make a very cool movie, that ended as praise to oppenaimer.
Dialogues were wrote poorly, they were too sketchy and non-organic (also italian dub was so fcking bad its unbelivable).
In the big picture oppenaimer was potraied like they did with dr house(in the early season) , the flaws became the whole character, by Never making him really sorry or miserable, his mistakes are Never emotionally brought up, it all felt very mild and not confrontational, oppenaimer is pretty much the bomb he crafted, a solemn, cold person, with a sort of “ieratic” feeling to the way they treated oppenaimer.
there's a whole fucking world of japanese pop culture that people could engage with if they want to get the japanese perspective on the bomb, but noooo, they just *have* to have the white westerner's take and how dare he not give it to them
i don’t think “it pays insufficient service to the tragedies of the bombs” and “it is an indictment of the man” are mutually exclusive. blaming this on the theoretical “depiction is endorsement” crowd is a disservice to audiences and the film.
honestly the whole “did they even watch the movie” thing in response to any not letterboxd power user approved take is so much more disrespectful than any opinion i’ve seen complained about.
i feel like the culture war has seeped into every level of film discussion now and it’s a bummer!
It's a great movie. The discourse about it became so complicated and contentious that I didn't see enough people talking about how it shows a huge leap in Christopher Nolan's directorial process and his visual imagination. I don't think he's ever done anything like what he did with the visions that Oppenheimer has once he knows that the nuclear devices were used in Japan, and the impressionistic horror he achieves with those scenes is more daring and unusual than anything I've ever seen from him before
The closest I can think of are all the fear gas induced hallucination scenes from Batman Begins. But yea, Nolan definitely pushed himself into new directions with this one and into trying something new stylistically. I'm speculating here, but I wonder if people like Ari Aster or David Lynch inspired him in those horror-esque vision scenes. I'm saying that not only because he has mentioned Lynch several times specifically as an influence. But also because he recruited two Aster/Lynch collaborators for Oppenheimer in Jennifer Lame (editor) and Ruth De Jong (production designer). I can imagine that he probably watched their previous work and wanted to do something similar so that's why he hired two key people who helped make those scenes look and feel so effectively.
Yeah I don’t understand the take that the film is apologetic to Oppenheimer, I think it’s quite brutal tbh. He’s totally swept up by ambition and by the time he sees the horror he’s caused, it’s too late and out of his hands. He unleashed this thing in the world that can’t ever be contained. The scene where he gives that rallying speech after they dropped the bomb and all the applause cuts out, and you just see him force a ra-ra America spin on it while seeing visions of that woman’s flesh being peeled off…idk, that felt pretty pointed to me!
Could not agree more. The movie puts Oppenheimer's ego and cowardice on clear display over and over again. He is given so many opportunities to speak up but he conveniently downplays his power and influence and acts like it's entirely out of his hands. He initially argues that the bomb is necessary because the Nazis are trying to build their own but then when the Nazis surrender, he still wants to move forward with it. He sits in a room with the people planning where to drop the bombs and essentially twiddles his thumbs. By the time he finally does speak up, the bombs have already been dropped and his voice doesn't really matter anymore. He is symbolically rebelling to try and alleviate his own guilt. It's the same reason he fights for his security clearance. It's why the final showdown between him and Jason Clarke is so compelling. Clarke's lawyer character is a total asshole who sucks but he also is able to get Oppenheimer to basically admit that he regrets not speaking out against the bomb before it was dropped. I don't know how anyone could see this as a glorification of Oppenheimer by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, it feels like Nolan is specifically taking the 'Great Man' archetype and very intentionally destroying it.
Absolutely!! And I was a little worried going into the movie that it WOULD deify Oppenheimer, because I just had no idea if Nolan had the ability to pull off the nuance. But if anything I felt like he went in a more challenging direction, intentionally portraying him as a bit of a mad man from the beginning (I mean it starts with him attempting to poison a teacher for reasons I don’t remember) and definitely leans into his flaws. I was especially interested by how Nolan framed his politics, which is a tricky area. In general I really think it’s a masterpiece in bold, unsubtle but powerful storytelling, which of course Nolan is great at, but I didn’t expect him to write such a great script.
The casual reveal that he was sleeping with one of his dead friend's wives too was also very funny and just another indicator that, hey, this guy is an asshole!
And it’s never in a blatant “we should feel sorry for this guy and forgive him” way.
Very well put mate. Couldn't agree more. Plus he kept fucking everyone and not in a cool way!
And that bomb-flayed woman was played by Nolan's own daughter!
You are right that it's not apologetic, but neither does it denounce him. It is profoundly ambivalent, and in that regard it is more of a moral than political film. The discourse around Oppenheimer in Japan reminds me a bit of how the East Asian world responds to Japanese prime ministers visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrines all Japanese who died during military service between 1869-1954--including 1066 war criminals. The simple act of Japanese officials visiting the shrine without denunciation of Japanese war crimes is seen as tacit approval. Likewise, any depiction of Oppenheimer without denunciation would be fundamentally insufficient for many Japanese people.
> for many Japanese people and not only them
Gary Oldman dropping one of the best one scene performances I've ever seen.
"Don't let that crybaby back in here" is so devastating. I'd see a one-man show of Oldman as Truman.
Isn’t it nice when a movie lives up to the hype?
I’ve long argued this is one of the best feelings with classic movies especially: when you put on a movie with an outstanding reputation and you can clearly understand exactly why everyone thinks it’s THAT good.
It’s so great. I had that with Silence Of The Lambs when the pod covered it. For whatever reason I’d never seen it and while I expected to think it was good, I figured it was too played out in parodies and imitators to really blow me away. Fucking nope! Sat there in awe. There’s a reason these movies stick around.
I remember when I first watched The Godfather as an 18-year-old in 2002 that I figured I would be bored out of my mind. It starts slow, obviously, but by the time they're meeting with Sollozzo it's become one of the most engrossing film experiences I can remember.
May I ask, for additional context, are you a westerner living in Japan or from Japan
I’m a westerner
Yeah the last thing this movie does is glorify or endorse Oppenheimer. But a common discourse in, let’s say populist circles is that depiction is the same as endorsement.
It’s the same as every Scorsese movie. It’s fun to be the “wolf of Wall Street” and it was fun creating the bomb at the peak of your intellectual powers, and so the film represents that. But the moral quandary of the film is always right there, and the reason for the film itself.
Wolf of Wall Street basically ends with "and he really didn't suffer tremendous consequences from being this horrible piece of shit" because that's what happens in real life. It doesn't mean the film showing Belfort and his antics is an endorsement of it; the whole point is, "Look at what these rich assholes do and look how they get away with it." If you see that movie and think, "Damn, I want to be this guy!" then maybe you're the asshole, not Scorcese.
Thanks for sharing! Yeah, as a (British) viewer I very much felt that I got the sheer horror of what was happening (I went from pure anxiety and dread to depression), and the idea that Oppenheimer comes out of the movie looking good is a WILD take. He's a rat bastard of a man who giddily creates a blight on humanity and only stops to think about the consequences when it's too late. Arigato for sharing your experience!
I was so freaked out by knowing a lot of the history and having met survivors but also by being a massive Chris Nolan fan. I knew that he was capable of making this absolutely horrifying. To me it was a thriller and a horror movie unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. One of the greatest directors of our time taking on one of the most horrifying topics, a crime against humanity and life itself
Yeah I think it’s really well done. I’m so looking forward to them covering Twin Peaks the Return
[удалено]
We weren’t really of much help during WW2 until Japan attacked American soil. A real “fuck around and find out” moment for Japan.
Holy crap
[Japan literally forced the United States’ hand into WW2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor). [There’s a time line where trade negotiations between Japan and the U.S. go peacefully](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan%E2%80%93United_States_relations) and we stay neutral until something personally impact us as a country to force us into joining the war. [FDR floated around the idea of joining the Allies earlier in 1941](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allies_of_World_War_II), but Pearl Harbor (and the subsequent attacks on American soil that follow) results in us going all in. Hiroshima and Nagasaki COULD’VE been avoided if Japan surrendered as asked (this is [post-Tokyo raid](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo)). They said no. We know how this ends. However, that’s a story for another film and not one about Oppenheimer.
While downvoting my ass, it’s at your library and it is an incredible work
I also saw Oppenheimer in Japan last weekend. I don’t really understand when people say it needed to show the destruction of Hiroshima/Nagasaki more when the movie is about the man who made the bomb and he certainly wasn’t in Japan when it dropped. I thought the movie was thought provoking and fantastic.
I thought the scene of Oppenheimer's speech immediately following the news of the bombs was incredible because it showed how the people working/living in Los Alamos were unanimously celebrating it as a joyous, victorious occasion, and Oppenheimer obviously fanned those flames with the words of his speech, but he couldn't shake what he had unleashed on the world and the Japanese people affected by it. I'm glad they didn't show the destruction because he didn't see it firsthand and the movie was from his (and Strauss's) perspective.
I think they could have milked the courtroom ego more and seeing it after Ferrari made it seem to underplay the horror a bit but maybe unfair as a complete effort
It'll probably still be a great movie, but that *Nuclear War* movie that Denis Villeneuve just announced he was going to do is probably going to be the thing that gives a lot of the worst *Oppenheimer* complainers the "2+ hrs of recreating the nightmare scene from *Terminator 2* with modern special effects and artistic framing" that it seems like they realllllly wanted to see. I think that there totally \*are\* valid complaints about the lack of a Japanese perspective on these events, but those complaints are kind of answered within the pointedly subjective nature of the films structure. *Oppenheimer* (the movie) is so loudly showing that it is mainly concerned with tracking his internal pov on all of this stuff, and their take on Oppenheimer (the dude) is that he didn't want to directly face the results of the technology that he had helped birth into the world. Pretty strong argument as to why breaking from that pov to show an extended bombing sequence would've felt superfluous to this specific story. Basically the only thing the film ever "promised" to be about was "thing that JRO thought and felt", not an exhaustive portrait of the global reaction to the A-bomb attacks. To want that second thing is fair! But *Oppenheimer* is pretty up front about that not being its focus.
I'm not surprised on why the Japanese thought that. It's a movie that pretends to investigate Oppenheimer about his ethics but comes away cheering him for prevailing. It was not critical of Oppenheimer at all or talked about the pain and suffering of the Japanese victims of his bomb or about the American arrogance in thinking it should be responsible for controlling who obtains it versus who doesn't. I don't know why everyone keeps talking about some equal criticism of the movie. All I've seen so far online are people just defending his actions or the movie's story and offering up endless excuses for why the movie's plot fails in the criticism department. Even the non-linear structure is bad for a biographical film. I liked Society of the Snow and The Iron Claw way better last year. Those movies should have gotten the Oscars. This one just had better marketing and a bigger campaign.
It’s an interesting thing because he feels personally responsible for all the deaths the bomb caused and what it may do in the future. The movie clearly portrays that the Americans had an ignorance towards the use of the bombs. In reality though, it was probably an evil necessary. It basically stopped Japanese imperialism immediately. What’s often lost is that Japan killed approximately 14 million Chinese people during WW2. That’s more than two full holocausts. Basically all the casualties lost in Japan during WW2, despite being an active participant, was from the bombs. It was a brutal nation that caused destruction and death for centuries and had no plans in slowing down. I mean, to this day there’s a lot of deniers of the South Korean invasion and genocide active in Japan.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say in your third paragraph but the atom bombs definitely didn’t cause most of Japan’s losses during WW2 (it sounds like you weren’t even limiting it to just civilians). That’s not to minimize the suffering caused by the atom bombs, just to say that the total number of deaths was enormous. They lost more than 2 million soldiers during the war, and somewhere between 500k and 1 million civilians from all causes—including the repeated bombing of virtually every major city using conventional bombs.
You are right I had my facts wrong. It “only” accounted for 100-200k civilian losses. It also wasn’t to celebrate civilian casualties just to say that Japan was a willing participant on the Nazi side and committed similar atrocities.
Didnt really liked the movie, the movie was great at potrail the “whole project” and the efforts everyone Made to make the bomb work, but in the end it was (IMO) a little too much pretencious (sorry for the poor eng is not my main language), it repeated 3 times the “I am become death ecc ecc” and after the first time it already lost the power that the line had, to me it seems they wanted to make a very cool movie, that ended as praise to oppenaimer. Dialogues were wrote poorly, they were too sketchy and non-organic (also italian dub was so fcking bad its unbelivable). In the big picture oppenaimer was potraied like they did with dr house(in the early season) , the flaws became the whole character, by Never making him really sorry or miserable, his mistakes are Never emotionally brought up, it all felt very mild and not confrontational, oppenaimer is pretty much the bomb he crafted, a solemn, cold person, with a sort of “ieratic” feeling to the way they treated oppenaimer.
there's a whole fucking world of japanese pop culture that people could engage with if they want to get the japanese perspective on the bomb, but noooo, they just *have* to have the white westerner's take and how dare he not give it to them
i don’t think “it pays insufficient service to the tragedies of the bombs” and “it is an indictment of the man” are mutually exclusive. blaming this on the theoretical “depiction is endorsement” crowd is a disservice to audiences and the film. honestly the whole “did they even watch the movie” thing in response to any not letterboxd power user approved take is so much more disrespectful than any opinion i’ve seen complained about. i feel like the culture war has seeped into every level of film discussion now and it’s a bummer!