Positive Press

A thorough review with spoilers:

I went to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer a couple of weeks ago, and was not thrilled, given the acting, story and cinematography were outstanding.

I will spoil things right here by saying that it has two to three very graphic sex scenes. While I am not anti-sex, I don’t need to see scenes like that at the movies. Not everyone will agree with me, I guess.

The second problem I had is that the soundtrack overrode the performances. I think this mechanism worked very nicely in Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, though I was concerned about the Bane copycat killings at the theater in Colorado around 2012, and wonder if such films are worth this “inspiration”, to put it crudely.

The third problem was the thrust of the film, in context of the nudity and soundtrack, but even on it’s own, perhaps, the film’s supposes that the chain reaction Oppenheimer and Einstein feared detonation of the bomb would produce: Destroying the entire world by fire, had semantically come into fruition…

Towards the end of the film, the protagonist learns that the individual use to date did not destroy the world, but assumes that it is already in motion irrevocably, due to the proliferation of weapons by Russia and the United States.

To be sure, these are not the only two nations with nukes or nuclear weapons producing potential, and we do have the capability to destroy the world, but that does not mean that it will occur; so the film seems strongly apocalyptic, and supposes that nukes will be the means.

God said in the end times, that the earth will melt with a fervent heat, and that could be nuclear, but if you want to put your faith in Christ, in doing so, you’ll be delivered from or through that circumstance.

I did not set out to write a religious treatise, per se, but that is what all roads seem to lead to with me; so I am perhaps an inevitableist (there, I made up a word), but I believe what is inevitable is the ultimate good. I hope the same for you.

(with outstanding performances by Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh and Matt Damon, to name just the headliners)

(footnote that could be its own post: The story was extremely compelling, and it is not clear therein, if Oppenheimer was a communist, but he felt free to interact with whomever he chose. The movie seems to indicate he was not a communist nor a traitor, but the story itself was fascinating, because he was a man, opposed to the bomb, but committed to making it before Hitler did, and after that worthy goal was moot, was seriously committed to its creation. The crux of the story is that after he created the bomb, certain governmental persons, destroyed his reputation and stripped him of his power. This was tragic to me, and while he made some foolish moves, he was crushed by the burden of having created a device that could destroy humanity, and had to live fact with that for the remainder of his life…)