The fire next time.

Oppenheimer – 3/5

Real life has too many characters!! I wanted to see a people grapple with what they are making / what they have made, men playing god and realizing the almighty burden of holding the world in the palm of your hand. Instead, I get a series of people who give me a faint note of recognition, and then shuffle off to the side. A lot of background characters with no background to ground them, to add to the overall meaning. A race to be first will always beat a race to be right. And the movie is Nolan's typical racing — all propulsive momentum, a V2 rocket heading somewhere. But man, of all the targets to hit, why aim it at Strauss? The bitter social drama doesn't match up to the scientific drama, or the moral drama, or the political drama. Why are the women there, and what do they mean to him or the story? Who gives a shit about his renewed security clearance? It's distracting. It's real life, and I want cinema. And when Nolan hits on that point, as His works tend to do, the booming sound of the IMAX speakers and the visuals of rolling fire work together to create something beautiful, and frightening, and approaching numinous. I'd like to sit with that! But the movie moves too fast to let us sit with any thought too long. As is typical in Nolan's work, his worlds of gods have no room for men.