Big news. I saw a movie---in a theater. A long time ago that was extremely ordinary for this blog. It's what I started this blog to do, fifteen years ago. But not lately. I had to reckon back to realize it had been five years since I had since a movie in a movie theater. The last time was when I saw The Greatest Showman in Mesa with Jessica and her folks. I hated that movie. It was everything I hated about the trend of our culture--completely woke, a two hour excuse to browbeat me with a message of social justice and oppression of various identifies.
Back in 2008-2010 when I was literally going to every movie possible, I saw how much our culture had degenerated from the time of classic cinema, in which honor was the central virtue of characters. By 2008, it was apparent that Hollywood wanted us to assume that honor is an outdated concept. Everyone is dishonorable. We wallow in the gutter, the Postmodern Gutter, I called it.
But at least they weren't overboard woke yet back then. That didn't happen in our culture until about 2015. Everyone on our side seems to identify that as the epoch at which wokeness took over pop culture, such as every single movie, television show, heck even every television commercial, must strive to rectify historical injustices against oppressed identities. It made me long for the just the plain old garbage culture days of 2010.
Not only did we stop going to movies, we stopped watching all television except for College football/NFL games (during which we got our fill of social justice commercials at every break), as well as professional rodeo on The Cowboy Channel outside of football season. And of course Hallmark Christmas movies in season, since that's sort of hobby of ours, to examine the narratology of those stories (there too, one gets the awful commercials to tell us how far the culture has fallen into overt Marxist messaging).
I wondered if I'd ever see a movie again. Then came Sound of Freedom, which I haven't seen yet, but intend to see. I saw the real-life subject of that movie speak in Las Vegas, alongside the star Jim Caviezel, a couple years back, talking about how the movie was going to open people's eyes to child trafficking. Then nothing happened. The movie disappeared. I wondered about it. Did it come and go? Oh, well.
Thankfully I was very wrong. It had made well over a hundred and fifty million dollars at this point.
That's not the movie I saw. I wish I could say it was what brought me back into the theater. Instead it was a mainstream Hollywood movie, about a physicist. It was Oppenheimer.
I was determined to see it in part because I had announced on my Badlands show back in January that I would see it. That's when Patrick was still the co-host. He no longer wants to do the show with me, which is fine by me. We have completely different views of what science is. I don't think we could possibly collaborate at this point. He grew tired of my unwillingness to sake that everything is fake.
He clearly chafed at the original show I did in which I discussed the historical J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atom bomb. He believes it is all fake, that nuclear weapons never existed. I could tell he strained at having to listen to me talk about it. He has many other venues to discuss his views. I have only my one little podcast show on Wednesday afternoon.
In mid July I did a show on the adrenochrome controversy, tying it in to The Sound of Freedom, and at the end of it I announced that next week I would do a review of Oppenheimer, as I had promised in January. As I did so on the air, I yelled out to the living room through my office door, "Jessica, we're going. to a movie!"
We planned it for Saturday. Jessica did research about IMAX and we determined we wanted to see it in that format. She located a nearby theater in north Scottsdale--an AMC off I-17---and we went online to buy tickets. The last time I was going to a movie one did not do this. Buy tickets online like going to a concert! So foreign!
We got there early and found our seats. Like I always I like to see the previews. I sat through so many back in the old days.
By the time I gave my review, most of the other Badlanders, including Patrick had given their review of it on other Badlands shows. They all hated it. Not only was it boring and long, but it misrepresented history. It was fake history that glorified scientists, and therefor "The Science," to which we have become enslaved through such things as phony global warming and the COVID scam. That's their prerogative.
It took a different view. First off, I said that I wasn't bothered by the length. I get bored easily, but I made it through all three hours without flagging.
It is a Christopher Nolan movie. I am not a big Christopher Nolan fan. I find his stories lack the coherency of good motion pictures. This was true of Oppenheimer too. For example, I asked my audience on my show, for those that saw the movie, what was the most important thing that happened in the first act, according to rules of movies? The answer: the scene where Oppenheimer almost murders his tutor at Cambridge (and also almost kills Neils Bohr). By story rules this is THE most important revelation of his character. The rest of the movie should reflect this. It should prefigure the arc of the development of the main character, up to the climax. But it doesn't. Nolan doesn't use it. I don't see how it had anything to do with the rest of the story.
Also Nolan totally wastes the physics. He has Oppenheimer teaching quantum mechanics and never uses that thematically either. What a waste.
What was good about the movie? A phenomenal cast. What a delight it was to see so many familiar physicists brought to life on screen---not just the title character (brilliant performance by Cillian Murphy--totally believed him), but giants like Isador Rabi, Edward Lawrence, Edward Teller, Werner Heisenberg and Hans Bethe. I had a bit a problem seeing Kenneth Branagh as Neils Bohr. Branagh calls attention to himself so much as an actor. But it worked ok, and I'm glad they got an actor of grerat renown to play Bohr. Compare that to Gary Oldman who absolutely disappeared into being Harry Truman. Tom Conti was a great "dark Einstein". I was pleased to Emily Blunt--who was cutting her chops ferociously in supporting roles back in 2009 during my movie run--now one of the great leading ladies of Hollywood. Hard work pays off.
Every character seemed like a breath of fresh air, especially Josh Hartnett as Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron (and by extension all particle colliders), and especially Matt Damon! I cringed when I saw he was going to play Leslie Groves, but it absolutely worked. He truly is a great actor.
Back to the Nolan-ness. I cared nothing about the story about Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr. It was played well but I didn't care about that character. His downfall at the end seemed thrown in to give us a feeling of resolution and emotional satisfaction. Meh.
The "Communists are people too" bullshit was annoying but honestly it was weak sauce compared to what it could have been. Only during Emily Blunt's ranting speech at Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing did it creak heavily on my nerves. To be honest I think they probably did the right thing by stripping it from him. He should have retired from all that after the war.
That's the real tragedy of Oppenheimer, that was missing. He could have been America's greatest theoretical physicist, as he was on track to become before the war. He could have resumed that trajectory instead of becoming part of the national security apparatus. Instead he vacated that role, and in the vacuum came youngsters like Richard Feynman, who led particle physics down a completely different path, which has resulted in fifty years of stagnation. That's the movie I'd like to see made at this point. A great sequel. Feynman himself was wisely under-used by Nolan in the movie, appearing only in a view cameos, including playing the bongos after the Trinity test. Wise because Feynman is so strong a personality.
And here we come to the part where I ranted in huge dissent from my fellow Badlanders about their dislike for the fake history in the movie, of how it promotes the mainstream narrative they hate. Leaving aside the issue of fakeness, I told my audience (and them), Nolan gave you a gift. He created a narrative universe, one that can now be used to tell many stories. If you want to revise that history, it is a thousand times easier because of this movie. Don't just whine and tell me the history is wrong. Tell me the story with characters. Put them in a room and have them speak to each other. If not, you're giving me nothing.
You just need to add in the scenes that are missing to tell a completely different story. This happens all the time---Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkein. Give me a twenty-five million dollar budget and a Netflix contract and I'll assembly a team of writers (after the strike at least) and churn out a whole different take with the same characters, in the same universe.
So that's my write-up. Haven't done one of those in a long time. I'm back, baby. I'm back. Might have to see Barbie now.