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Oppenheimer review (spoilers spoilers spoilers)

The good:

Cillian Murphy is truly giving the performance of a lifetime. Christopher Nolan wanted an actor whose eyes could tell 80% of the story and by god he succeeded

The movie is gorgeous, just visually stunning and rich and immersive

It's a complicated, slippery, story that resists easy definition. It was brilliant in keeping Oppenheimer a cypher even to the audience, in refusing to resolve any side of the nuclear debate. It's a meaty, chewy philosophical web of a movie I'm going to be thinking about for awhile

The not so good:

Christopher Nolan I am begging you to talk to one (1) single woman

It is hilarious to me how Florence is being trotted out as the second female lead of this movie when she was in it for 5 minutes mainly to be naked

Emily Blunt has her one #girlboss scene but you know what would have made it land better? Literally any work done to set it up. When Oppenheimer goes "don't presume to understand relationships you're not in" that felt like the movie realizing at the last second it had done absolutely nothing to build their relationship other than some scattered discrete bits and going "well how dare you want to know" and nothing ticks me off more than a piece of media that judges you for daring to want to watch it

You could easily cut 30 minutes from this movie and lose nothing. I don't care if you're making an operatic grand masterpiece, no movie needs to be more than 2 and a half hours

I saw a review trying to claim that the masses of interchangeable white men was a choice to demonstrate the tide of history or something and I'm sorry but no, all it did was cheapen any emotional impact of anything these characters did since I had no idea what they had done before

The thing I am probably beating a dead horse about a bit:

It is deeply fucking weird to me to write a movie about the inner turmoil of a Jewish man building a weapon he thinks will end ww2 and not deal at all with the fact that he is Jewish and a lot of the people working with him are also Jewish. Sure, there are a couple of passing references, but they carry no more weight than if he had said "I'm from 86th Street" or "my mother had red hair". Oppenheimer was a secular, assimilated Jew one generation out from immigration, who had family still in Germany and who faced antisemitism at every stage of his career. You cannot tell me that this brilliant man caught up in his own brilliance, trying to build a world destroyer, would not have at least woven into his web of self deception and justification the fact that this could protect his people from an existential threat. That the many Jewish scientists working with Oppenheimer would not have had complicated feelings about working for a country that barely tolerated them, trying to create a device of mass death, wondering if this will be enough to protect their people, responding to an attempt at complete extermination with actual extermination, all wrapped up in a big package of nationalism and the war effort and, yeah, scientific progress to the point that it might as well be magic or a miracle. It is impossible to overstate the impact the Holocaust had on Judaism, and maybe if you start to explore that it becomes the entire movie, but this movie didn't even try. I just wonder why bother mentioning Oppenheimer was Jewish at all - they clearly fictionalized a lot of other elements, and Christopher Nolan certainly isn't the person to handle this issue. But to act as though being Jewish is completely disassociated from wanting to defeat the Nazis is disingenuous at best and actively intellectually lazy at worst

My favorite part of the evening:

Girl in the bathroom after the movie: "They dropped JFK's name like they were talking about fucking Bruce Wayne in the DC villain origins story"