....
But in short, it’s basically just Nolan’s flaws as a filmmaker that made me not wholly enjoy this film. Don’t get me wrong there’s great stuff in here, but it was more or less exactly as I expected a modern-era-Nolan would direct a three hour character-piece. And his flaws are just more obvious when he can’t hide every scene in grandiose big-scale spectacle (even though he attacks almost every scene like that, which is kind of the ironic part)…
I think Nolan’s obsession with the IMAX camera has actually become his Achilles heel. He sacrifices good storytelling and intimacy for the sake of being able to capture it with the big and clunky IMAX cameras. He has truly gone lost in the big format frame. ...
I gave it
for now and will rewatch it once it’s available at home. Who knows, maybe I’ll like it more then.
Interesting comment, because my reaction was nearly opposite. In my other life, when I'm not at the movies, I'm a history geek. One of my favorite topics of one year was the Bomb project. It's the historic intersection of several major threads in history...evolving science, politics, war and evil dictatorships. Robert Oppenheimer sat in the middle of that intersection, in between war, science, nazis, American antisemitism, the Holocaust, Stalin, and right wing American paranoia about home grown communism. It's such a big GD story that a 3 hour movie can't be any other than a quick, selective view. Getting there first (before not just before the nazis, but before the USSR too), was a white-heat panic carried on in total secrecy. None of "our guys" had any idea whether the Germans were making progress on what turned out to be a minimal, misconceived bomb project and, it turned out that the USSR had embedded spies in our project, hence their project.
Focusing on Oppenheimer just gives you a snapshot, but there was a lot going on in that time. It over-showed Einstein who really had little to do with the project, while minimizing an obscure guy named Leo Szilard (he's in some establishing shots), who conceptually figured out how a bomb would work several years earlier. It missed the part about Uranium enrichment, an essential but boring component of the story and reduced the importance of Colonel/General Leslie Groves (Damon's character). By focusing on Oppenheimer himself, it ended up being a small movie about big events, a 3 hour movie that needed to be about 12 hours long in order to tell the story.
If anything, the "big" Nolan style of movie was not nearly big enough, although I admit that audiences probably could not sit for a 12 hour movie.
I guess I'll need to go back and re-read one of those long books on the project.