Courtesy of Forbes: A Negative Review of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

As anyone attentive to the press for the film is well aware, the critics and the entertainment press generally are in full claqueur mode where the subject of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer comes up.

This makes the more critical exceptions to the "Greatest Thing Ever!" adulation the more interesting--and surprisingly it is Forbes that brings us such an exception, by way of critic Mark Hughes.

While Hughes accounts himself a "huge fan" of Nolan's prior work, and (significant given its parallel with this film) specifically cites Dunkirk as "the filmmaker's greatest achievement to date," such that he expected to join the chorus singing its praises, he was not impressed with this film--and makes a formidable case for his position.

Basically what it comes to is the three-hour Oppenheimer, in spite of some great acting and some well-directed bits, being a pretentious, overstylized piece of postmodernist arthouse fare--fragmented, nonlinear, willfully dissonant and incoherent, and in its irony and superficiality, and the evasions and nihilism ultimately underlying them, taking up a weighty subject and then taking a very long time to say nothing about it at all. Indeed, Hughes likens what Oppenheimer offers to Nolan shooting three different movies about different parts of its protagonist's life at different stages of that life (Nolan's personal involvements with women, the work on the Manhattan Project, his later political troubles), each in a different tone and style and even political sensibility (!) and none of them adding up to much more than a "collage" of scenes that happened, and then chopping them up and mixing the bits together all out of order and connecting them with "clipped and jarring" editing "jumping . . . unequally and unpredictably" from one bit to another that has Hughes waxing poetic about the film perhaps being an artistic "distill[ation]" of quantum physics' conception of reality. Admittedly one might still hope to create something of interest through the juxtapositions such an approach can allow, but this is very, very difficult, and does not seem the case here, the assembly striking Hughes as random, while there is little sense of anything as more important than anything else (as seen in the "excessive" attention to Oppenheimer's romantic life that distracts from rather than complementing or cohering with his scientific work), and the "political sensibilities" are "all over the map," the film "represent[ing] one perspective only to shrug it off in favor of something else . . . while" denying it has any "perspective at all." The result is that in the end it does indeed seem a movie that "says very little, and means none of it" as it ultimately "abandon[s] any visionary search for higher meaning behind the processes of science or politics."

It made for what Hughes thought not only a "disappointing" and "underwhelming" film, but one that he "would have a tough time" just "sitting through . . . again."

Going by Hughes' assessment the film would seem to be all too consistent with earlier readings of the filmmaking of one who, as David Walsh put it, gave us a movie about "the outbreak of World War II without history or politics"; and confirmation of all my skepticism about the movie, and the critics, who even when they are not doing "Job One" by earning their pay as claqueurs, so often show themselves to be Midcult-consuming middlebrows.

Of course, the claqueurs/middlebrows of the entertainment media are one thing, the general public another. As we saw in their failing to excite the general public about The Flash (at this point, an indisputable, catastrophic flop) their applause does not always infect the wider audience as hoped, which is now having its say. Will Nolan's postmodernist three hour art movie that takes up the life of Robert Oppenheimer and the events in which he was involved and turns it into "a movie about nothing" really please the crowds, and they tell all their friends to see it too? Or will those who are not hardcore middlebrows who say they like what cultural Authorities tell them they are supposed to like but just drawn in by vague notions of something special and fondness for Nolan's more popular projects walk away disgusted? We will see this weekend--and of course, the next weekend too, the first-to-second weekend hold more than usually interesting this time around.