Oppenheimer: A Few Thoughts

As the situation stands we know very little about Christopher Nolan's upcoming film Oppenheimer, while what we are told is confusing. It is supposed to be a period piece about the actual Robert Oppenheimer--but apparently a thriller as well that will somehow benefit from being presented on colossal I-MAX screens.

One can't but suspect some stretching of historical fact here.

I also have to admit that, in taking up this highly complex and political subject I suspect Christopher Nolan is "in over his head." After all, watching the Batman films, watching Inception, it was clear Nolan loved psycho-babble, and while sometimes his playing with it fell flat (as in Inception), there were times when it worked well (The Dark Knight seeming to me at its most compelling when the Batman-Joker duel was a Jungian psychodrama).

However, when he was trying to "say something" about society and its current problems I found myself not taking the results seriously--until the absolutely appalling The Dark Knight Rises left me with no choice. Subsequently Dunkirk was, especially coming in a moment when Britain's relationship to the world was so contentious, a historical, political film "without history or politics"--the fall of France was just an occasion for giant-screen spectacle held together by postmodernist blatherings.

But of course the claqueurs of the media, who loved that movie the same way they love everything Nolan does (arguably because of its weaknesses rather than in spite of them, with all that says about them), are clapping already for Oppenheimer, and saying the word "Oscar."

It's always possible that Nolan might surprise us--to use an admittedly tired phrase, "subvert our expectations" by actually "making it good." But I see no reason to expect that from someone who has enjoyed such fulsome praise so consistently for so long, and over the past two decades shown not the slightest indication of a capacity for seriously assessing his own work, let alone questioning anything outside of that--such that my expectations are not high for this one.