First, I would show Mr. Nolan this:



The haunting opening text is lessened by the presentation that makes it look borderline illegible. Like, black text on a partly-black background? Really?

The pseudo-illegibility also makes the thing looks sort of amateurish, like 2003-era Microsoft Office WordArt.

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Second, I would point out to Mr. Nolan his over-reliance on the word "thing".

"Thing" is a filler word that belongs in daily conversations, news articles, and first drafts.

I firmly believe that any and all writing can instantly be improved by removing all instances of the word "thing" and replacing it with another, more appropriate word.

That is especially true in the case of screenplays, which are written and re-written and re-written in advance, and especially truer in Oppenheimer's case, which is in serious contention for best screenplay of the year.

I really do feel that Mr. Nolan himself isn't even aware of just how much he over-relies on the word as a crutch. The word appears frequently in all of his (recent) films and once you notice it, it's impossible to ignore. It's like a "You are now breathing manually" type of thing.

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Third, yes, the Trinity explosion.

I defended the Trinity explosion scene when the film first came out, but the more time goes on, the harder it is to defend how inaccurate it is.

The problem isn't really, "It was underwhelming, it needed more spectacle, it need to be bigger." Instead, I think that the problem with the Trinity explosion scene is two-fold:

1. None of the shots really, genuinely, convincingly look like an atomic/nuclear explosion. The worst offender of course is that pillar of fire shot, you all know which, the one in the top-right of this thumbnail:



2. Second, it's not bright enough. When we see the actors' reactions, their acting says "Goddamn this is bright AF" but the only thing that's lit up is their faces, and only mildly at that. Meanwhile, the background behind them remains completely dark.

In the same way that Mr. Nolan is always insisting that 'whether the audience realizes it or not their brains can subconsciously tell the difference between practical and CGI', people's brains are telling them that something is wrong in this scene because the expressions on the actors' faces just doesn't line up with the rest of the scene.

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Fourth, trim the scene where Kitty goes into a lengthy backstory about her previous husband. It feels like extraneous detail that should have been cut along with the other stuff that got cut when the original four-hour screenplay was trimmed down to three hours.

No matter how 'important' it is, if it's not directly relevant to the main objective (in this case, telling the story of Oppenheimer), then kill your darlings.

Ooh, this is something I could say quite a lot about! But at least for now, I'll just mention a few items that immediately come to mind.

First, I'll say that a lot of the problems I have with Oppenheimer could have been easily fixed if the film were nine hours long. The story of early nuclear weapons development and Oppenheimer's role in it is so sweeping in scope, massive in scale, and complex in plot that anything less than a nine hour film would mean introducing oversimplifications or misconceptions somewhere (the nine-hour runtime isn't entirely arbitrary: many years ago, I daydreamed about how I thought the nuclear saga would best be dramatized, and concluded that the way to go would be a trilogy of three-hour films). After all, it's certainly the case that Oppenheimer, being "merely" three hours long, doesn't cover many important parts of Oppenheimer's story, and a common criticism I hear from friends is that it doesn't give any of its scenes room to breathe. The film essentially entirely glosses over the period between 1946 and 1953, which in my opinion contains some of the most interesting parts of his life, including his support for the hydrogen bomb and his report arguing that tactical nuclear weapons should be used against the Soviets should they invade Western Europe, among so much else; it's hard to get an idea of why exactly Oppenheimer was so controversial in Washington with what's in the finished film, and it comes dangerously close to suggesting Oppenheimer was an anti-nuclear activist. Now, would the film have been an impressively successful critical and commercial hit, grossing nearly a billion dollars, were Nolan to have made a nine hour film? Of course not, so on those grounds Nolan was justified - and I'm being a bit facetious when I say this - but still...

On the other hand, there are a few bits of dialogue in the screenplay that I'm a bit saddened didn't make it into the final cut of the film. Two of Oppenheimer's most famous and haunting speeches - "the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima" and the "two scorpions in a bottle" speech - are truncated down to a couple sentences in the film. But, surprisingly, the speeches are extended a bit in the screenplay; personally, I think these speeches are powerfully disturbing and cutting them down was a mistake, and I would've loved to see them extended in the film. Einstein also had a few (historical!) lines unfortunately cut out. One has him telling Oppenheimer, in the context of the security hearings, that he "loves a woman who doesn't love him—the United States government"; I think this would have been a very interesting way to deliberately connect the hearings to Oppenheimer's womanizing. The other line has Einstein comparing McCarthyism to fascism: "The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil." It's important to note that Einstein was a very active and politically astute social activist, fighting back against McCarthyism (among many other things) and publicly encouraging civil disobedience in the face of anti-communist witch hunts; I would've liked to see that Einstein represented more in the film, and this line would have been something of that. Finally, David Hill's testimony against Strauss was longer in the screenplay. I've seen so many people online asking how Hill knew about Strauss masterminding the Oppenheimer hearings, but in the cut lines of dialogue, Hill answers that very question: "In my ten years observation of Mr. Strauss I have seen his incapacity to change a position, the subordination of his integrity to the attainment of political goals and an obsessive quest for popular and professional approval... I think when all of the evidence is viewed, it becomes highly plausible that the Oppenheimer matter was initiated and carried through largely through the animus of Lewis Strauss" (emphasis mine).

I also have a few other changes that immediately come to mind I'd have liked to have seen made that I'll just list below.
- I think it's no surprise that I think the first sex scene, where Oppenheimer reads the line from the Bhagavad Gita, is pretty lousy. But, when first watching the film, I gave this scene a pass because I thought it was setting up a later scene where Tatlock introduces him to John Donne's poetry, including the line - "Batter my heart, three person'd God" - that Oppenheimer uses as inspiration for the name Trinity. There's some speculation that Oppenheimer deliberately chose the name Trinity as a tribute to Tatlock, who had committed suicide just a year prior, and that would have been an emotionally powerful connection to have made in the film. But alas... (also, Tatlock in the film is basically a one-dimensional character, but that's been pointed out numerous times already).
- Given that the term "black hole" wasn't used to describe those objects until the 1960's, I wish the term hadn't been used in the film. Serber says it one time to Oppenheimer when the latter's paper with Snyder on the topic is published, but there's really nothing to be gained by including the term, since the audience would have already gathered that they're talking about black holes.
- What happened to Niels Bohr? He was absolutely critical for how Oppenheimer formulated his ideas of how the atomic bomb would change warfare and civilization, and is crucial to understanding Oppenheimer's campaigns for international control of nuclear weapons and candor during the Cold War. When he's brought up a couple times in the film, before he shows up at Los Alamos, I thought Nolan was deliberately keeping him fresh in the audience's mind so that he'd play that important role. But then, when Bohr does arrive at Los Alamos, he talks for maybe a minute at most in very vague terms and then is interrupted by the news of Tatlock's death (a month early, I'll add). It's extremely disappointing, given Bohr's importance, just how underutilized he is in the film.
- The whole scene where Oppenheimer meets with Stimson and others in Washington deciding on how to use the bomb against Japan is just awful. So many myths about the bomb's use are packed into such a short scene that it's almost comical (Stimson didn't honeymoon in Kyoto and didn't remove it from the list of targets on a whim; it was never thought that two and only two bombs would be needed and in fact Groves thought many more would be required; the decision to use the bomb was never framed as "either bomb or we invade" and that's a myth that only gets put into circulation in 1947; nobody knew for a fact that the bomb would end the war definitively, and so on and so on). It's even more bizarre considering the fact that American Prometheus goes to great lengths to dispel many of those myths (and perhaps swings the pendulum of the argument a little too far in the other direction, but I digress), so it's almost as if Nolan was completely uninterested in this part of the history, and the fact is that these myths could have been avoided by just a few changes in dialogue.
- There are a couple moments during the Trinity test that I'm slightly disappointed weren't included, just because they're so famous. First, as the shock wave rolled by, Fermi tossed some bits of paper into the air and measured how far they traveled; with just that information, he did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for the bomb's yield, and was fairly close given the rudimentary technique (he figured 10 kilotons vs. the actual 25 kilotons). In the film, he's just there in the background getting surprised by the shock wave before cheering. Second, although perhaps not as famous as "I am become death," a comment made by Ken Bainbridge (Josh Peck's character) to Oppenheimer right after the test is, in my opinion, less erudite and more evocative: "Now we're all sons of bitches." In the film, I don't think Bainbridge says anything after the explosion.

I have a few other changes in mind, but I think those are the main ones (and any others can be lumped into "if only the film was nine hours long...").

Honestly, I wouldn't really change much. I liked the story as it was.
There is just one thing that was bugging me in 1.43:1 Dual Laser and 70 mm IMAX and that now also carried over to the BluRay.

This scene where Kitty and Oppenheimer meet for the first time at Los Alamos and they ride on top of that hill before she explains how she left all of her husbands. The scene where they arrive is in 1.43:1 and then cuts to 2.20:1. But it cuts right in the action where she dismounts the horse. Like, they could have waited until her feet hit the ground. Audio and visual jumps are great for cutting but they cut right in the motion and not only that, the camera quality and exposure of both shots are different. So suddenly you have to find Kitty again this frame. And it irritated me for every screening of Oppenheimer although I knew it was coming.

And perhaps, to really sell the point they could have used a slightly different size ratio for the earth at the very end. Like when they were shooting the scene, they should have had in mind that on BluRay, anyone will be able to experience the the 1.90:1 frame and thus they could have just zoomed out a little bit more to cotain the entire earth. Because visually, it's a huge statement and I feel like it gets lost a bit when you don't see it in its entire size. Or they could have filmed it longer so those flames consuming the earth would have been more obvious to anyone not watching it in 1.43:1.

Oku wrote: ↑

November 15th, 2023, 10:26 pm

Fourth, trim the scene where Kitty goes into a lengthy backstory about her previous husband. It feels like extraneous detail that should have been cut along with the other stuff that got cut when the original four-hour screenplay was trimmed down to three hours.

No matter how 'important' it is, if it's not directly relevant to the main objective (in this case, telling the story of Oppenheimer), then kill your darlings.

Interestingly, I was just reminded that this problem is worse in the screenplay. In there, Kitty's talking about Joe Dallet's death and suddenly the conversation shifts to talking about Steve Nelson, a leader in the American Communist Party, before jumping back to talking about Dallet's death (in between the lines "Joe got himself killed first time he popped out of his trench" and "ideology got Joe killed, for nothing"). Given how Nelson doesn't appear anywhere else in the film (even if he's important to Oppenheimer's overall story), and given how so very awkward the conversation is with that dialogue, those lines were thankfully cut.

That scene with Kitty about her first three marriages was absolutely essential for when she comes to testify during the security hearing.

the whole judging a film by what id doesnt do or what its not seems like a deeply futile enterprise for me, i care little about he trinity explosion not looking exactly like the real one, not having the same shape, i do care that it feels tactile and that it will remain tactile in 50 years, instead of being a pretty looking CGI shot that will look dated in 10 years, for the same reason that i dont care that the ships in Dunkirk are not 100% accurate to how the real ones that where there looked, i care that they look real because they are, patina is more important in a live action film for me than pedantic details, particularly so in a film so heavy on texture and the little details as this one, so what would i change ? nothing, i dont really consume art to then ponder about my version of the vision the artist gave me id rather want, at least not mostly and not with auteurs.

Nicolaslabra wrote: ↑

November 16th, 2023, 6:41 pm

the whole judging a film by what id doesnt do or what its not seems like a deeply futile enterprise for me, i care little about he trinity explosion not looking exactly like the real one, not having the same shape, i do care that it feels tactile and that it will remain tactile in 50 years, instead of being a pretty looking CGI shot that will look dated in 10 years, for the same reason that i dont care that the ships in Dunkirk are not 100% accurate to how the real ones that where there looked, i care that they look real because they are, patina is more important in a live action film for me than pedantic details, particularly so in a film so heavy on texture and the little details as this one, so what would i change ? nothing, i dont really consume art to then ponder about my version of the vision the artist gave me id rather want, at least not mostly and not with auteurs.

This 100%. Even when the image of San Martin in the Oval Office turns out to be inaccurate

And... oh, I got to tell you, it was perfect. Perfect. Everything, down to the last minute details.

Trinity is underwhelming and the explosion looks small, but other than that the movie is perfect to me

Nicolaslabra wrote: ↑

November 16th, 2023, 6:41 pm

the whole judging a film by what id doesnt do or what its not seems like a deeply futile enterprise for me, i care little about he trinity explosion not looking exactly like the real one, not having the same shape, i do care that it feels tactile and that it will remain tactile in 50 years, instead of being a pretty looking CGI shot that will look dated in 10 years, for the same reason that i dont care that the ships in Dunkirk are not 100% accurate to how the real ones that where there looked, i care that they look real because they are, patina is more important in a live action film for me than pedantic details, particularly so in a film so heavy on texture and the little details as this one, so what would i change ? nothing, i dont really consume art to then ponder about my version of the vision the artist gave me id rather want, at least not mostly and not with auteurs.

That's a very valid perspective, which is why I tried to not critique it as art (as much, haha) and focus instead on how it functioned as historical adaptation. Obviously there's still an element of subjectivity to that, given differing opinions on what one thinks is important to dramatize from history, but it's personally something I find interesting.