I'm really wondering if I watched a different movie than everybody else. that shit was one of the most retarded, ridiculous, incoherent, boring, and pretentious shitpiles I've ever seen. one of the top 10 worst movies I've ever seen easily. the "nonlinear storytelling" editing is disjointed to the point of incoherency. I wasn't totally lost but it sure felt like a nonstop montage of 5-10 second clips of people talking in rooms. there was no flow at all, none of the major characters were ever formally introduced, people just kept getting dumped into scenes and then somebody name checks them at some point to establish their presence. the characterization of Oppenheimer himself was ridiculous, in every scene he's shown to be a purely sympathetic and soulful character, and any personal flaws he might demonstrate are only ever mentioned by other characters in a matter-of-fact way like it happened offscreen. not to mention the whole first part of the movie where they're trying to depict how he has some kind of genius-level conception of physical reality, by showing him staring through space and seeing fucking particles or some shit, it's not clear, it's literally just random special effects like lasers in midair and explosions and shit, like how a Hollywood moron would imagine the internal experience of being an Important Science Man. two scenes had me trying really hard to not burst out laughing in the middle of the theater:
1) at the beginning, when he's talking about his academic history, the movie keeps flashing back to the scene of him laying in his bed seeing lasers or whatever, and as the scene develops every time they come back to it, because it's cut into about 200 pieces due to the terrible editing, it finally reaches its climax when he sees the lasers start to rotate, and the music swells dramatically, as they rotate into the shape of the fucking atom symbol lmfao, like a redditor's conception of a particle physicist's epiphany
2) there's a scene where he's at a party chatting up some bitch, and there's one token line establishing her as a fellow academic, like "Oh so you study biology?" or something, before they smash cut to them fucking. but Oppenheimer goes soft mid-fuck, so she crawls over to his bookshelf, and starts making smarmy comments about the books there because she's Smart Academia Girl, then she pulls out a copy of the Bhagavad Gita with this ridiculous exasperation like "what even IS this????" there's a short exchange: "it's sanskrit" "can you read it?" "*bashfully, because he's a mega supergenius but not conceited about his amazing intelligence* ... some of it" and then she points to a specific paragraph and asks him to read it. he starts explaining it, and she interrupts him and says NO READ IT TO ME! and it's the fucking "I am become death" line, the thing he's famous for quoting, that's how they reference drop it, and while he's reading it, he gets hard again lmao, and they resume fucking. this is doubly hilarious if you consider the bomb test scene, where he recites the line in internal monologue while watching the explosion, but the only other time they mention it is when he's fucking? if Oppenheimer was a character that did not exist externally to this movie, that scene might read a bit differently
there are other scenes that stand out in my mind as well, like Truman physically recoiling in shock and disgust when Oppenheimer says he feels he has blood on his hands, and then yelling "don't let that CRYBABY back in here!!!" to the guy in the room with him, loud enough for Oppenheimer to hear it outside in the hall; the scenes where the physicists are shoving papers in front of each others' faces that supposedly contain proofs, but are only a couple pages long and take them about two seconds to read before they start soyfacing; or the part where his alcoholic wife girlbosses the evil security hearing attorney into submission. I don't know how anybody wrote or acted those scenes with a straight face. but after the credits started rolling, I heard people in the theater near me actually saying shit like "wow" "amazing" "that was so well done" out loud, so maybe I'm the one with the brain problems. but those people were also laughing and reacting on cue to every retarded moment in the movie trailers like a fucking studio audience
