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Oppenheimer was bad (hexbear.net)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/movies@hexbear.net
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One part Great Man Theory with tons of navel gazing and genuflecting to a handful of star figures. One part Sorkin-esque courtroom drama.

Zero parts fun.

Three fucking hours long.

Don't waste your money on this shit bag, folks.

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[–] 5 points 3 years ago (3 children)

I liked it but it was such a Nolan movie. Every physicist is introduced like they're a superhero. JFK gets namedropped at the end like he's a minor Marvel character being set up for a future movie

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    They had an hour's worth of political ahem thriller around whether a guy gets a Senate appointment to the Eisenhower cabinet.

    They completely ignored so much of the crazy shit that went down during the actual project.

    • The Baker & Williams warehouses, where they accidentally started a nuclear fire with stacked uranium
    • The Philadelphia Incident, when three scientists trying to fix a pipe full of uranium hexafluoride accidentally detonated it.
    • The Demon Core experiments
    • Site W, where the first Plutonium was developed, and the army would disect dead coyotes to measure the impacts produced by all their nuclear waste
    • Bikini Atoll & Operation Plumbbob, two major sites of nuclear testing
    • Eisenhower's Atoms For Peace speech and the development of nuclear energy, both for civilian use and military locomotion

    All this shit was breezed over so they could make a movie about Oppenheimer not being a Communist.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    This is the only actual good critique in the thread. However I'd add that they make clear that he was a communist-sympathizer. He betrays them however, morally speaking.

    It also seems a bit reductive. These are legit points to make but they do strike me (and forgive me if this is not the case) as a very American thing were people judge a film based on whether particular 'cool' or 'important' things happened, whereas movies as an art-form and not just entertainment, and beyond highlighting everything political which we would like them to, can also use formal visual and musical language to convey other themes and ideas. I'd say the film has some clear strenghts in terms of the latter while agreeing with you that it has some clear weaknesses in terms of the former.

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