A very good movie

Of course, any new directing effort from Christopher Nolan is always a huge event so this movie was definitely one of my top priorities for 2023. Well, to be honest, I’m afraid it won’t belong to his best movies (the guy has an insane track record though) but it was still pretty damned good and a nice rebound from the disappointing ‘Tenet’. To be honest, I didn’t see it in IMAX but the screen was big enough and I don’t think I missed much. Anyway, it was visually pretty neat though and the directing was top-notch. Above all, Oppenheimer was such a fascinating character, easily one of the best characters Nolan as ever worked with. His quest to create the first atomic bomb was also so interesting because it would change our world forever and its impact is still topical nowadays. Indeed, right now, we are at a tipping point where our worldwide climate is getting completely out of control and you could say that it has been the consequence of our obsession with progress and innovation. So, the story was great but I’m not sure Nolan’s approach completely worked. Indeed, at times, it felt as if you either needed to have read the book or have Wikipedia at all times open or that you had to be a massive history buff to keep track of everything and above all everybody involved. Concerning the cast, well, Cillian Murphy was rightfully praised, the guy was amazing and easily delivered one of the best performances of his career. I wish I could say the same about the rest of the cast though. It’s not that anyone was bad, I was more bothered by the fact that so many showed up for barely nothing. Seriously, it felt as if they all showed up with a tattoo on their forehead saying ‘Nolan is a God and I would do anything for him, even if I get only 2 lines of dialogues’. It was especially frustrating with Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh who all seemed to have some more substantial characters and, yet, they were given so little to do after all. Even Robert Downey Jr., after getting stuck playing Tony Stark for so many years, who was finally given the opportunity to do something else, didn’t really impress me because the focus on this conflict with Lewis Strauss was, in my opinion, a rather poor idea. Anyway, to conclude, even though my review might seem harsh, the damned thing was still really good though and, with Quentin Tarantino soon retiring, Nolan will be the only director left who can make such ambitious really expensive movies and above all based on something original instead of being linked to some famous IP so we should all support him.