How I Donated Three Hours of My Life to Christopher Nolan’s Biggest Wank And Came Away Feeling Like an Old Gym Sock

Monday is movies. Today, I finally got to see Oppenheimer. And now my life is...shorter.

“I won’t see Oppenheimer”, I crowed just a few weeks ago. I also said, “I probably will see Barbie one day – but I won’t tell you about it”. And then I did tell you about it. I saw Barbie and I liked it. No shame. And only some mild surprise, because I tend to react pretty strongly to ‘hyped’ things. If everyone is going, then it’s probably not much chop. That’s my default setting, my vibe. It’s either how I’m wired, or how two decades of writing about things has rewired me. And either way, I’m okay with it. Happy to be told I’m wrong. Happy, also, to try point out why I think other people might be wrong too – though it’s not even that, it’s just saying what you think of course. (I just recognise it’s interpreted that way. The big clue is the hands-on-hips cry of “in your opinion!” Said by people that have just read or heard your opinion. People are fascinating, eh).

So, I saw Oppenheimer this weekend. It had gnawed at me, I guess. Specifically, everyone asking me for my thoughts on it; telling me I had to see it on the big screen. Etc.

So, I went. And I wish I had been profoundly moved – up and out of my chair and away from the theatre perhaps. I wanted to like it in the end, because why else leave the house. But, Holy Hipkins, it was dull. First clue: Biopics that just carry the subject’s surname as a one-word-title are joyless. And so very serious man because they’re, like, super profound and shit. The clue is in the title.

The second red flag, and readers of my ramblings will find this an odd complaint perhaps but will know it comes with some consideration, the musical score was cloying and over the top and manipulative and relentless. And it is one of the tools in Christopher Nolan’s kit to get you to think exactly about the scene how he wants you too. There’s pathos here – with strings attached!

Now, composer Ludwig Göransson offered up some pretty fine work actually. (As he has done on the Creed and Black Panther movies, and Turning Red and a few others). But it’s the way that Nolan chose to blanket the film in this score. I look forward to listening to it divorced from the images it was made to accompany. I’m sure I can appreciate it as a piece of music on its own – but in the cinema, and almost instantly, I resented its placement as music aiming to tell me how to think.

Then I had 95 minutes of Cillian Murphy’s blue eyes wordlessly telling me of the horror. The Horror! He sells moral quandary like a detached student after an all-nighter to still get a B+ on the last-minute assignment. But, silly me, he was in Peaky Blinders so he’s obviously brilliant.

Florence Pugh has carried a handful of movies over the last decade. She’s been beyond brilliant. She has been in borderline duds (The Falling, Fighting With My Family, Don’t Worry Darling) and still given you every reason to watch not just for her performance, but to try to invest in the film. That’s the sign of a truly great actor I reckon. (And something I praised Margot Robbie for ahead of and after seeing Barbie). But when Pugh is brilliant and beyond (I think of the way she carries Midsommar first of all) there really is no one better.

Nolan decides he just needs one of the best actors of the last decade to strip, and perform in clumsy, pointless sex-scenes. He needs her for just a few lines of dialogue. And he needs her to be weak and dependent on Robert Oppenheimer as the sole basis for her life; that the real-life character Pugh is playing as line drawing was a psychiatrist and academic and battled clinical depression throughout her life is, well, mere details. This movie is called Oppenheimer goddamnit! Not Oppenheimer & Friends!

Nolan does no better with Emily Blunt. Because Nolan can’t write women well, or simply, he chooses not to. He makes movies about men. Brilliant men. Flawed, busy, important men. Then hits you over the head with the score and timeline jump-cuts and changes in film stock and colour codes the film to show different points of view leading the narrative and a whole host of clever-clogs film school shit.

Oppenheimer crawls to its point. And obviously has some good things about it (Robert Downey Jr is superb and back to being something beyond the Iron Man comic role that rehabilitated him). And as Nolan rolls out some impressive names in tiny cameos you can remind yourself to not blink and then you won’t miss Gary Oldman being brilliant for one scene as President Harry S. Truman, and Matthew Modine filling in time between Stranger Things seasons.

But I struggled with any real engagement here. Especially because Nolan loves to let things linger without proper explanation. Early in the film our anti-hero poisons the apple of one of his lecturers. For no real reason other than to tell us that Oppenheimer could just as easily be a total cunt.  But then he ignores the full repercussions of that – which are easy enough to find and know – and instead lets his lead toss in some line about being in therapy later in the movie. It’s not quite as bad as when the Freddie Mercury of Bohemian Rhapsody somehow got AIDS a half decade before he actually did so that the movie-audience version of Queen fans could really celebrate the majesty of the group’s Live Aid performance. But it’s along the same lines. It’s deliberately withholding/manipulating actual facts in a film that purports to educate, and tell some sort of truth. A half-baked truth, most often.

One critic on Rotten Tomatoes gleefully wrote, “Rarely have I left a movie feeling smarter than when I went in, but Oppenheimer is just such a film and it elevated my thinking, especially in regards to the science of politics and the politics of science”.

Vom.

I laughed. And imagined Christopher Nolan leaning heavily over on his editor Jennifer Lame, he puffs a mushroom cloud of imaginary smoke from his pretend cigar, pauses, and says, “linger…linger on Cillian’s eyes a bit longer here. I want them to have elevated thinking especially in regards to both the science of politics and also the politics of science. Yes. Yes. That’s it. That’s it. And with the other 165 minutes we’ll just generally be brilliant and if we had a bit longer than three hours I’d flesh out Emily Blunt’s role and give Florence Pugh a bit more to do. But no need. This is a movie about a brilliant man. Because sometimes good people do bad things. And sometimes bad people do good things. Because human behaviour is flawed and interesting. And I’m going to see if I can repeatedly hammer that home. And then in the final frames I’ll have a tweet-worthy bit of pithy whimsy. Just when you think this has all been a big plug for America thinking it solved a war we’ll point out that they just started many more, yo! What will really sell the shame of it all will be one more shot of Cillian Murphy’s eyes, yay, or nay? I say yay! They eyes have it!”

I also wrote a poem called Floppenheimer about my experience sitting through this 2-star film. Because I’m mature-af.