“Oppenheimer”: When the blockbuster bombshell fails

Simon Meier

What do “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” have in common? For example the same start date. For example, a “modest” budget of $100 million for “Oppenheimer” and $145 million for “Barbie”. Modest compared to the budgets of the other summer hits “Mission Impossible” and “Indiana Jones” with $290 million each. “Indiana Jones” is already considered a flop. The next flop will probably be called “Oppenheimer”. Too long, too melancholy, too tough, too little Nolan. Actually a tragedy. Rarely have so many brilliant performances been seen in the cinema. For that, it should hail Oscar nominations.

Basically, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” tell similar stories, about creators and their creatures and how the creators are stunned by the consequences of what they brought into the world. In “Barbie” the ghost of Barbie inventor Ruth Handler has two small appearances, in “Oppenheimer” it is always about Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb.

Of course, compared to the atomic bomb, Barbie is nothing but a pink gum stain on the world map of inventions. As is known, dolls are deadly only in horror movies. The danger of nuclear catastrophe, on the other hand, is more real today than it has been since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For Christopher Nolan, Robert Oppenheimer is the most influential person and his invention the most important in human history, as he has often said in interviews. So Oppenheimer is more important to Nolan than, say, Jesus. This is of course an institution. Who submits completely to Nolan. He makes himself the servant of his idol. What emerges is a beautifully acted, meticulously filmed yet conventional biopic that lacks everything that makes Nolan so compelling and thrilling, so mind-blowing, so sublime.

With Nolan, space and time are usually suspended and crazy loops form, insane visions open up that you barely understand anymore, but that are extraordinary and unforgettable as a cinematic experience. And when he just makes an ‘ordinary’ historical film like ‘Dunkirk’, you almost bite your seat with sheer excitement. Not with « Oppenheimer ». Then drowsiness seizes you with immovable fingers.

It’s not about the content, the content is – in the genre of ‘male genius makes groundbreaking scientific discovery’ movies – pure, epic gold. In 1942, Jewish quantum physicist Robert Oppenheimer was appointed head of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret mission in the hastily built test-tube city of Los Alamos in the middle of the New Mexico desert. The Americans would build a nuclear bomb there faster than the Germans.

After three years with 4000 employees and costs of $ 2 billion, the time has come on July 16, 1945, the successful test is called Trinity, after which the world enters the atomic age. But Germany has already been defeated. And America decides to attack Japan with Oppenheimer’s bomb. Just three weeks after Trinity, first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki are bombed. We know the consequences. An inferno without parallel. More than 200,000 people die.

In the post-war period, Robert Oppenheimer increasingly developed into a critic of nuclear warfare. He finds a bitter enemy in the head of the Atomic Energy Agency, Lewis Strauss, who brings him all the intimidation of the McCarthy era.

The Manhattan Project alone, with the odd improvised Western of Los Alamos, would have been incredibly exciting material for a typical Nolan movie, oppressive, bleak, clandestine, artificial, dangerous, grandiosely megalomaniac. And anyway the question of the bomb and its consequences. But the movie is not called “The Children of Los Alamos” or “The Day After”, but “Oppenheimer”. And Nolan stands by his man. Always. Faithfully follows his life story. Blast back and forth between three time levels (before Los Alamos, in Los Alamos, after Los Alamos) in a somewhat unmotivated manner, so that the audience experiences at least a hint of Nolan’s confusion.

The level of time closest to ours, the disillusioned time of the Axis after Hiroshima as it were, is filmed in black and white. Wow. Crazy, this reversal! And sometimes stars and strange current waves haunt Oppenheimer’s head and insanely loud music indicates that he is now thinking about something important. Probably 100 million just didn’t have any more special effects.

Nolan doesn’t give secondary strands a chance. Or women. Oppenheimer’s path in the film consists of two lines, his wife Kitty (who fills Emily Blunt with brutal explosive power in her rare scenes) and his lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, a marvel as ever), an interesting communist psychoanalyst who commits suicide. committed. because she couldn’t deal with her sexual identity. They possess the tiniest bit of screen presence in the three hours of hardcore male film, but that’s what Nolan is used to.

For his men, on the other hand, he gives everything, you only have to think back to Heath Ledger in «The Dark Knight». Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer also gets a career opportunity here and he grabs it like a drowning man: it’s as if the man has breathed in every possibility, every fatality and diabolical nature of the story that Nolan doesn’t show, as if it’s underneath. the woodcut-like surface his unusual face trembles as if the man himself were an unsecured bomb. This is the performance of the year. That’s charismatic, that has power yet subtlety, and so is Robert Downey Jr. like Strauss. And for Matt Damon as Oppenheimer’s military superintendent.

Kenneth Brannagh, in turn, turns out to be Nolan’s universal weapon, he was a worthy commander in “Dunkirk”, a Russian oligarch in “Tenet”, now he plays the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Casting Gary Oldman for President Truman is kind of genius. And then there’s 81-year-old Scotsman Tom Conti, not a big name, but he’s been in the Hollywood business since the late 1950s and now plays for Nolan Albert Einstein: plays with tremendously impressive casualness and modesty, plays a very approachable, normal person. A gift from an actor.

Perhaps Nolan just wanted to show that he can also do the opposite of monumental trick architecture and ingenious fantasy. That he can take all that back in favor of faces, minute movements, and non-stop talking. Talk about men, guns, war, loyalty and guilt. heroic speeches. And in the last third of the movie, just that talking is worse for the protagonists than the bomb itself, and then I honestly fell asleep. Others will love that and call it “radical,” their favorite euphemism for boring.

A woman made a movie about a doll. A man made a film about the inventor of the atomic bomb. From tomorrow they face each other. It’s a good thing the woman’s movie hasn’t become as cliche as it sounds. And it could very well be that it looks a bit like a horror movie at the box office in the coming weeks: the doll kills its opponent.

Oppenheimer will hit theaters July 20.