[DouglasKC]

Did anyone watch Barbie?? The opening scene is absolutely horrific and terrifying. It's patterned after the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey only in this case it's little girls playing with baby dolls...pretending to mother them and baby them. The narrator talks about how the only dolls that existed were babies and the only things that little girls could do is pretend to be mothers. The narrator says that even that gets old...just ask your moms. And then a giant Barbie appears, the little girls touch her and then they start destroying their baby dolls. The message is clear: If you kill your babies you can be and do anything you want to do. It's horrifying. I couldn't watch anymore after that.

[Dave Wright]

Oppenheimer is a great movie because its story was well crafted from the book, “American Prometheus”. Nolan had a great and complex character to work with, a perfect goal (build the bomb to end the war), and a tragic aftermath when Oppie’s leftist sympathies opposing racism and fascism in the ‘30s, became grist for his political enemies in the McCarthy era.

It wasn’t brought out in the film, but he realized he had been a useful idiot regarding the Russians when they totally dismissed his efforts to negotiate nuclear arms controls after the war.

What I didn’t see was the purpose of using 70mm. It was interesting for some of the bomb test scenes, but superfluous for most of the lab dialog and the clearance hearing scenes. It may have been something Nolan likes to work with, but it didn’t add to the great story enough to justify its expense or complexity.