Oppenheimer

“I was uncomfortable watching yet another film about tortured white male genius when the victims of the atrocities glossed over by Oppenheimer had no voice.”

Title: Oppenheimer (2023)
Director: Christopher Nolan 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: Christopher Nolan 👨🏼🇺🇸 based on the book by Kai Bird 👨🏼🇺🇸 and Martin Sherwin 👨🏼🇺🇸

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 2.5/5

In typical Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk, Inception) style, Oppenheimer fizzes with quick cuts, multiple timelines, and aesthetic flourishes accompanied by immersive sound effects. But just because there’s a lot happening on screen, with a tense soundtrack playing for three hours straight, it doesn’t mean a movie will be interesting.

The film suffers from a lack of editing, and the topic about the excesses of hubris feels like deeply trodden territory. Aside from an impressive showcase for Cillian Murphy as the titular physicist and “father of the atom bomb,” Oppenheimer amounts to more the same navel-gazing found in Nolan’s previous film, Tenet (2020)—more flash than substance.

Gender: 1/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Nolan does women dirty in Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh plays Oppenheimer’s mistress, Jean Tatlock, and spends much of her screen time naked and hypersexualized before she kills herself so that the narrative can give the physicist a scene where he gets to feel bad. Emily Blunt gets shoved into a tokenized box as a shrew-like wife, shown mostly crying, yelling, throwing things, and/or all of the above. Although she gets a single “grrl power” scene, dressing down a table full of men, it’s overall a demeaning role for an actor who’s so much more than this script allows her to be.

Race: 1/5

I was uncomfortable watching yet another film about tortured white male genius when the victims of the atrocities—Japanese people and Native Americans—were glossed over by the script and had no voice. At most, white characters quip about the “Indians” on whose burial grounds the Manhattan Project blithely bombs to all hell; in other scenes, discussions about Japanese casualties are purposefully cold, taking place behind closed doors in rooms full of white men who discuss the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians like they’re talking about the weather.

On the one hand, it’s effectively chilling; on the other, the film completely ignores those victimized by the very same bomb the movie spends hours grappling with the ethics of. Unlike Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), another cautionary tale on the destructiveness of white men in power, Oppenheimer does absolutely no work in collaborating with the victims of its main characters, either onscreen or off. As a result, the approach just doesn’t sit right, people of color reduced to dehumanizing afterthoughts. It’s an approach that stirred plenty of conversation this summer when the film first released in North American theaters, with folks like director Spike Lee weighing in, “If it’s three hours, I would like to add some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people.”

Bonus for Religion: +0.00

The film has Jewish main characters, Robert J. Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), but the story is told by non-Jewish filmmaker Nolan and based on a book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin—neither of whom are Jewish (though Bird is married to a Jewish woman).

Among lead actors, Downey Jr. has Jewish heritage but Murphy, and the actor who plays iconic Jewish physicist Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) are not. At most, Jewish actors like Alden Ehrenreich, David Krumholtz, Benny Safdie, and others appear in the film, but they play supporting and minor roles in a very large cast.

All this to say, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with actors playing roles outside of their own faiths; it just doesn’t make this film a positive example of “Jewish representation,” simply because there isn’t much to speak of.

Mediaversity Grade: F 1.50/5

Oppenheimer impresses on a production level, but its storytelling and inclusiveness leave a lot to be desired.

Like Oppenheimer? Try these WWII-era titles told through the perspectives of its victims.

Grade: FLiDecember 3, 2023