(Another) Nolan's Magnum Opus OPPENHEIMER and How We (Must) Praise Every His Masterpiece

Los Alamos 1.01pm / Reno Nevada 12.01pm / London 8.01pm

Christopher Edward Nolan’s elegant, majestic “Oppenheimer” is three hours long, and you feel every minute of that running time even as it flies by. What Nolan’s after here isn’t just to thrill us — though he does that, with parts of the film tick-tocking like a great heist sequence — but to immerse us in the life, work and troubling legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), a slight, pale-eyed man who held the future of the earth in his hands. So far, OPPENHEIMER is Christopher Nolan’s highest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes with 96%. Nolan’s most personal film yet. AMC, biggest theatee chain on earth, will stop charging more for movie seats depending on their location. But the company plans to start a new trial involving front-row seats, saying it would replace them with “lounge-style seating areas that will allow guests to lay all the way back.” Cillian Murphy is one of our best modern actors filling the void left by Daniel Day Lewis. Emily Blunt dominated the screen every time she came on.

15 years ago, Nolan's "The Dark Knight" and "Mamma Mia!" opened together. One Los Angeles moviegoer "missed out on the phenomenon" in 2008, but made sure to get Barbie and Oppenheimer tickets this year: "It’s a rare cinematic moment." Dark Knight get US$1.3 billion when Mamma Mia get around US$650 million. Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” opened against “Lake Placid” on July 16th in 1999.

Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was a theoretical physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb. During World War II, he led a team at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico tasked with creating the first nuclear weapons; after the bomb was successfully tested in July 1945, it was deployed a month later on Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing a staggering number of citizens. (Estimates vary; some give the toll as 200,000 or more.) Nolan’s film moves us back and forth in time, from Oppenheimer’s early days in academia to the breathless work at Los Alamos to a later series of hearings, held in a cramped conference room, in which Oppenheimer’s past associations with Communists threatened his security clearance and his future.

According to Clara Iwasaki, Professor University of Alberta (Edmonton Canada, around 2,800 km from Los Alamos): “Oppenheimer built the bomb that killed my great-grandmother while her grandsons were drafted into the US army and the govt imprisoned her kids. If you're into moody great man biopics, I guess that's cool, but I personally really don't care how he felt while he was doing it.”

Los Alamos was inhabited by Hispanos. They were given less than 24 hours to leave. Their farms bulldozed.

Loyda Martinez’s dad was driven off their family's land when Oppenheimer and the US government seized it to make the labs. They then hired him, made him work with berrylium without protective gear (his white bosses got PPE) and he died of berryliosis, like many did. The radioactive fallout from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s nuclear bomb reached 46 states, Canada and Mexico within 10 days, a new study found.

Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli on Oppenheimer said “I just saw the movie and I’m still under the spell. I think everybody should see this movie not only because it’s fantastic, but because the kind of questions that it raises are not just about the ’40s and general issues about morality of science. These are burning questions today. The doomsday clock that is supposed to estimate the risk of nuclear catastrophe has never been closer to midnight. We are in a situation where the kind of concerns that Oppenheimer was expressing, in his confused way, are our concerns today. I think this is what the movie brings out so strongly.”

To Nolan about nuclear dillemma, J. Robert Oppenheimer was both the most important person who ever lived and hopelessly naïve.

It’s an ambitious setting for a film — particularly one aimed at nonscientists who may not be entirely clear on the finer points of quantum mechanics — but that’s standard for Nolan, that rare big-studio filmmaker who wants us thinking even as we munch our popcorn. In “Oppenheimer,” he presents us with a complicated hero, a brilliant man who seems to turn into a ghost before our eyes, whittled down by years and by qualms (“terrible ones,” he says) about what he has unleashed. And he gives the storytelling a twist, letting the story unfold both in quietly restrained color (the sequences featuring Oppenheimer), and in stark black-and-white, the latter featuring Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission whose relationship with Oppenheimer grew complex.

Huge claim from “Taxi Driver” writer and “The Card Counter” director Paul Joseph Schrader. The Oscar nominee attended the New York premiere of Nolan’s atom bomb epic and took to social media afterwards to hail it as “the best, most important film of this century.”

“If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be ‘Oppenheimer,'” Schrader added in a Facebook post shared widely across social media. “I’m not a Nolan groupie but this one blows the door off the hinges.”

“Oppenheimer,” based on the 2005 book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Bird previously raved about Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” adaptation during a conversation at the Institute for Advanced Study last month.

“I am, at the moment, stunned and emotionally recovering from having seen it,” Bird said. “I think it is going to be a stunning artistic achievement, and I have hopes it will actually stimulate a national, even global conversation about the issues that Oppenheimer was desperate to speak out about — about how to live in the atomic age, how to live with the bomb and about McCarthyism — what it means to be a patriot, and what is the role for a scientist in a society drenched with technology and science, to speak out about public issues.”

As always with a Nolan movie, the look of the film is impeccable. Filmed (on large-format film stock) by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and designed by Ruth de Jong (production) and Ellen Mirojnick (costumes), “Oppenheimer” is crisply beautiful, blooming with unexpected moments of color like the green of an apple, the red of a woman’s lipstick, the orange of a sudden pillar of fire. You don’t expect this kind of elegance in a film that’s mostly about men in ties gathering in rooms to discuss calculations, but that’s what Nolan gives us; one shot, with Oppenheimer in his straight-brimmed hat standing on the newly built main street of Los Alamos (a remote town created for the sole purpose of housing research), seems like it’s from a great Western, with a hero uncomfortably aware that high noon is coming too soon.

Murphy’s eerily handsome face, made up of angles and shadows and eyes that always seem to be telling a story that’s different from the one he’s speaking, is the film’s foundation, and his layered performance is its anchor.

Cillian Murphy was in the running to play Batman in the Dark Knight Trilogy and even auditioned in the batsuit. Christopher Nolan thought he wasn’t quite right for the role and cast him as Scarecrow instead. Nolan was always very focused on set. During filming of the Scarecrow/Chechen scene (filmed at a parking garage off Randolph and Wells), he would joke around with Wally Pfister and Cillian Murphy between takes. It was surreal The Tumbler race through Lower Wacker or seeing a semi-truck flip on LaSalle (I did not take the pic of the truck).

An unrecognizable Downey brings his trademark naturalness to Strauss’s struggles, and Matt Damon clicks beautifully with Murphy as no-nonsense general Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. Emily Blunt, with little screen time, brings intriguing complexity to the role of Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty. (This is a familiar pitfall with Great Man movies: You either make the wife a sweetly uncomplicated helpmate, or you make her a person and shortchange her story. I’d watch an entire movie about the ups and downs of the Oppenheimer marriage, most of which is just hinted at here — and Blunt, to her great credit, occasionally makes us regret that this isn’t that movie.)

“Oppenheimer” is hard to watch, just as that life was surely hard to live; it’s a careful, deliberate stepping toward something unspeakable. Oppenheimer, a chain smoker (the smoke’s a perpetual presence on screen, creating curling punctuation), died of cancer at the age of 62, presumably haunted to the end. In the film, we see him at a celebration shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; crowds cheer him, but he looks unsure, and gazing at the crowds he sees them suddenly caught in the white flash, searing in the fire. Somewhere in the applause, a scream rings out — the kind you hear in nightmares.  

Nolan says he will 'absolutely' not start developing another film until the Hollywood strikes are resolved "it is a very key moment in the relationship between working people and Hollywood. This is not about me, this is not about the stars of my film. This is about jobbing actors, this is about staff writers on television shows trying to raise a family, trying to keep food on the table"

With Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Matthew “Matt” Damon, Emily Laura Blunt, Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. 180 minutes. Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language. Opens July 19 at multiple theaters in Indonesia, several Europe countries. July 21 in North America.

DUNKIRK was released 6 years ago today. Christopher Nolan’s first war film, and acclaimed as one of the great World War II movies this century, the story of how it came to be is as epic as the film. In 1992, student filmmaker Christopher Nolan and girlfriend Emma Thomas took a trip across the English Channel – a recreation of the Dunkirk evacuation route. Nolan said it took 19 hours, freezing cold, and very tough, but it did give him an idea. Nolan’s first idea was for the film to be mostly improvised by actors. Emma Thomas (Producer and by now Nolan’s wife) told him that wasn’t going to work so Nolan wrote a script. Even then, it was only 76 pages long – less than half the length of any other Nolan screenplay.

Matt Damon revealed that Nolan found his way into one of the actor’s couples therapy sessions. While avoiding marital specifics, Damon said that he told his wife he would take an acting break on only one condition: If Christopher Nolan called, the break could go on hold. His wife agreed to the terms.

As fate would have it, Nolan did call with an offer for Damon to star in “Oppenheimer.”

“This is going to sound made up, but it’s actually true,” Damon said. “I had — not to get too personal — negotiated extensively with my wife that I was taking time off. I had been in ‘Interstellar’ and then Chris put me on ice for a couple of movies, so I wasn’t in the rotation, but I actually negotiated in couples therapy ­— this is a true story — the one caveat to my taking time off was if Chris Nolan called. This is without knowing whether or not he was working on anything, because he never tells you. He just calls you out of the blue. And so, it was a moment in my household.”

Nolan called Damon to offer him the role of Leslie Groves, who was the director of the Manhattan Project. Groves chose Los Alamos, N.M. as one of several testing sites for the development of the atomic bomb. He also personally recruited J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) to lead the charge at Los Alamos — a divisive choice at the time as Oppenheimer lacked a Nobel Prize and administrative leadership experience. Damon was work with Nolan on “Interstellar.”

Christian Charles Philip Bale is probably not going to play Batman again after “Batman Begins,” “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises.” The Oscar-winning actor told last summer that he would only play Batman for a fourth time if Christopher Nolan was directing, but Nolan doesn’t appear to be interested in returning to the comic book genre. YouTuber HugoDécrypte asked Nolan point blank if he would make “another superhero movie.” Nolan bluntly answered, “No.”

The question came during a speed round in which HugoDécrypte also asked the “Oppenheimer” filmmaker if he “could make a TV show one day.” Nolan also answered “no.” The director wasn’t as definitive when asked if he would want to direct a “Star Wars” movie. Nolan passed on giving an answer.

Bale said in June 2022 when asked about reprising his role as Batman, “No one’s ever mentioned it to me. No one’s brought it up. Occasionally people say to me, ‘Oh, I hear you were approached and offered all this.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s news to me. No one’s ever said that.’”

“I had a pact with Chris Nolan,” Bale added at the time. “We said, ‘Hey, look. Let’s make three films, if we’re lucky enough to get to do that. And then let’s walk away. Let’s not linger too long.’ In my mind, it would be something if Chris Nolan ever said to himself, ‘You know what, I’ve got another story to tell.’ And if he wished to tell that story with me, I’d be in.”

Making another Batman movie would require Nolan to jump back to Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the DC superhero. Warner Bros. was Nolan’s studio home for more than a decade until he left following its controversial release of “Tenet” during the COVID pandemic and its decision to debut all of its 2021 movies in theaters and on HBO Max on the same day. Nolan jumped to Universal for his upcoming atomic bomb drama, “Oppenheimer.”

Nolan lamented over Hollywood studios missing the point when it comes to cinema’s essence. In his eyes, the studios mistake cinema for plot and not its audiovisual elements.

“Whether for budgetary reasons or reasons of control, studios now look at a screenplay as a series of events and say, ‘This is the essence of what the film is.’ And that’s completely at odds with how cinema developed, right from the Lumière brothers’ train pulling into the station, as a pure audiovisual experience,” Nolan said. “But it’s a very popular fallacy — sometimes with critics as well, quite frankly — that all that matters is the scale of the story being told.”

“People will tell you that the success of ‘Star Wars’ had nothing to do with its visual effects, and it was all down to its great story,” Nolan continued. “But, I mean, clearly that’s not the case. It is indeed a great story, but it’s also an incredible visual and aural experience. So this willful denial of what movies actually are has set in. People will say, ‘Why would you have to see something like “Aftersun” on the big screen?’ But of course you have to. It also plays wonderfully on TV, but that’s not the point.”

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-prada- Adi Mulia Pradana is a Helper. Former adviser (President Indonesia) Jokowi for mapping 2-times election. I used to get paid to catch all these blunders—now I do it for free. Trying to work out what's going on, what happens next. Arch enemies of the tobacco industry, (still) survive after getting doxed. Now figure out, or, prevent catastrophic situations in the Indonesian administration from outside the government. After his mom was nearly killed by a syndicate, now I do it (catch all these blunders, especially blunders by an asshole syndicates) for free.

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