Op Pop Fizz Fizz

I saw Oppenheimer just now at an IMAX theater because everyone I read said that was how it simply had to be done. It was kinda cool at first but once the movie settled down I forgot all about it and might as well have been watching it in my living room. I am one of those people that think theaters are pretty much dead businesses walking, the equivalent of horseshoe factories at the dawn of the automobile industry, or newspapers when HTML was first getting some traction, or film in the age of digital. They won’t completely vanish, but their niche will be very small. The Apple headset and its inevitable competition is going to be the fork in their ass that tells you they’re done. Oh, it’s so expensive, you say. Yea, well, I’ve got a 55” flat screen tv I got for under $300. How much did one of those cost when it first came to market?

Anyhow, back to the film, It was, of course, technically very well done, the acting was incredible, and the editing was impressive. Cillian Murphy was great as the lead, Robert Downy Jr.’s performance showed he still had it, and made me really sad for all the years he wasted at Marvel, and Emily Blunt was excellent in what little screen time she was given. There were somewhere just south of 100 other A-listers who were unrecognizable, at least to a brain damaged person like myself. I spent about half the time trying to figure out who those people were. Gary Oldman as Harry Truman? Never would have noticed that in a thousand viewings.

Not that I will every view it a thousand times, or even twice. Although it was well-paced and mostly compelling, it left me cold. I realized that I really didn’t care about Oppenheimer, the man, or any of the other characters and the movie didn’t manage to make me care about any of the larger issues regarding nuclear bombs, war crimes, or government suppression of free thought, much less free speech. All things I know quite a bit about and the film didn’t provide any insights I hadn’t gleaned when I was in college.

I was very much disappointed in the visual handling of the atomic blast, especially considering I paid the premium for IMAX. David Lynch did it infinitely better in Episode 8 of Twin Peaks Season 3. And now that I think about it, Lynch’s allegorical take on how the atom bomb changed, and endangered the world, was far more powerful than Oppenheimer’s straight up telling of the tale. In that sense, comparing the two is yet another example of how much more profound the lessons from great fiction can be than those we can get from political opinion posing as art.

Maybe I’ll see Barbie tomorrow?