Not having seen him in any of the trailers, it took me a solid 5 minutes to realize how large of a part Robert Downey Jr was going to have in the story, and I think we’re all a little better that they didn’t lean on him in the marketing. “Oppenheimer” the film is a mostly true story of how the Manhattan project was conceived and run with a large part of the scientific and practical testing happening under J. Robert Oppenheimer’s direct watch and control. It’s also a movie by Christopher Nolan, so the story isn’t going to be linier or make sense until you have all the pieces on the board, and even then you’ll want to hit up the Wikipedia entry for Oppenheimer the man to figure out exactly what was happening in Oppenheimer the film. It’s a great film with muddled sound mixing coupled with soul wrenching acting about a man that lived his life the way he wanted to with little regard for the long term political fallout of his personal behavior.
It’s good and worthy of a movie theater experience, but it’ll be best to watch at home with subtitles on because Nolan still hasn’t figured out how to properly use that center channel.
