This essay makes me not want to see Oppenheimer that much more.
Saw it last week. Very disappointed. I’ve done extensive reading on the Manhattan Project and the people who made it happen. The movie tried to assume that Oppenheimer was brilliant without any supporting narrative beyond a short bit about his work on black holes. Total waste of three hours.
So what? Even if they only wanted to steal power using legal electoral means, it's still a great theft of individual freedom and an exultation of the state over the person. They're still communists. It's the actual goal that's repugnant regardless of what their chosen means may be.
It went on and on and on. So dull. Endless hearings about Strauss, for no apparent reason but to Garner Downey Jr. A supporting Oscar nom.
Even the nuke blast test was anticlimactic. Would have made a better mini series or something on the history channel.
I saw the movie a few days ago and I thought it was ok. I agree it soft pedals communism as all the movies I’ve seen about the Manhattan Project seem to do. It was no surprise. I’m sure it will get some kind of Oscar. Hollywood loves its commie martyrs.
The story of Oppenheimer’s rise, fall, and resurrection is, like the man, extremely complex. The film compresses the voluminous American Prometheus book reasonably well, but Nolan had to jam a lot of short dialog lines over Goransson’s score and it would have helped to have closed captions.
The use of IMAX and the use of black and white for the Strauss storyline didn’t really add much to the film and seemed to be superfluous.
It is clear from the book that American Communism was a naive club for useful idiots including Oppenheimer until he tried to negotiate with Stalin’s reps on a nuclear treaty and they gave him the finger.
Communism was a proxy for liberal causes like civil rights, labor rights, and the anti-Fascist Spanish Republic. Russia was viewed as our ally against Hitler in WWII rather than the murderous gulag that Stalin was actually running.
Most, but not all, of the true believers realized how stupid they had been to join the party, but when the Cold War started, they were caught on the wrong side of history and paid a terrible price.
Despite the fact that the movie takes place after the Soviet Union’s testing of an atomic bomb, not a single word is mentioned about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and her brother David Greenglas all of whom were communists.
A true movie about this subject would expose how the arch- Traitor fdr had red spies crawling all throuought the Government, and then call Joe McCarthy a hero.
I don’t understand all the ha-bub about this Oppenheimer movie. I saw the trailer when I saw “Sound of Freedom.” I felt like I pretty much saw the movie after seeing the trailer. I hate artsy-fartsy movies.
Giving a dead man a security clearance is nothing new for the far left freak show. There are a lot of jugheads working for FJB who could never have passed a security clearance 20 years ago. Does anyone really think the loony Sammy Brinson could have ever passed a real security clearance. I don’t think so.
I’m a big Nolan fan, so I did see it. It’s excellent technically and the performances are excellent. Frankly I’m surprised that Nolan treated communism with kid gloves. He’s supposed to be a conservative, and his past projects didn’t reveal any left wing biases. If anything, his Batman movies had conservative ideas. Bane and his movement represent a leftist mob similar to Antifa.
Is ANYBODY surprised by any of this? As soon as I heard of the making of this film I shook my head and wrote it off.
The purpose of this movie is to re-familiarize us about nuclear war. Just in time for the CIA to release a nuke in Ukraine and make it look like Putin did it.
Sen McCarthy was right...
...don’t make it harder than it is.
ps and that’s why they, the MSM, persecuted Pres Nixon.
Very true but also very accurate of the time.
Unlike what MSM has told us, the Communist Party was very active in USA State Dept at that time.
McCarthy was correct and the Communists needed to destroy him
.