I saw Oppenheimer in the cinema last week after hearing all the hype about it. My summary of it:
The first part is the background, pretty typical stuff. They went with the establishment story that he was some sort of "genius" even though he actually wasn't. Academically he was a completely unremarkable student, the reason he got the positions he did was nepotism. Put it this way, there was a reason why he never won a Nobel prize.
The section part The Manhattan project was the best bit, they went into a reasonable amount of depth on the technical aspects of it. They did make out as if there was a "race" to the bomb with the Nazis, whereas in reality the Germans had only put a fraction of the resources towards their enrichment programme because they couldn't afford it.
The footage of the Trinity test was underwhelming. For some reason Nolan refused to CGI it, so we had a crappy explosion that looked more like shaky cam of a bonfire than an actual nuke. They also bitched out on showing the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings which would have been much more visually impressive. Pretty weak, especially given the fact the film specifically pointed out the Manhattan had two projects being developed concurrently.
The last part of the film was the all aftermath and being caught spying for the Soviets. This bit was boring and was blatant globalist propaganda. They made out like he was conflicted about bombing the Japanese when in reality he wasn't (even contrast to his peers like Einstein). About the spying, they focused on his alleged connections to communism but conveniently ignored the fact he was an ardent Zionist who probably made a deal with the Soviets for Israel. Apparently he was just an American patriot who handed over billions of dollars worth of research to the USSR....for peace.
The special council where he had security clearance reviewed was done deliberately to avoid the embarrassment. The establishment didn't want everyone knowing their "father of the atomic bomb" was actually a Soviet spy. At the time in America treason was commonly punished by the death penalty, so Oppenheimer was a very lucky man. Yet the film makes out like he was the victim in all of this, classic chutzpah.
The only other theme was all the women he was having sex with. All the women looked the same so I didn't really follow what was going on, but there was a scene where he has a naked women sitting cowboy on him titties bouncing while holding the Hindu holy book and he's reading verses from it while having sex. I bet they only put that in to piss off the Hindus....imagine doing that with the bible or koran.
The film was pretty meh overall. Better than most films that come out these days, but forgettable. Unless you have an interest in the Manhattan project I don't see what the fuss is about. I didn't know it was 3 hours long, if I did I would have waited until it was available on stream.
