As a counterpoint I found Oppenheimer straightforwardly enjoyable and I’m not sure what you’re getting at when you say otherwise. I would have a preferred a little more science and a little less legal drama, but the latter was still interesting and (more importantly) well presented.
I don’t even know where to begin with the list, but here are the main reasons I suspect people, including myself, did not find Oppenheimer straightforwardly enjoyable.
I knew what was going to happen in advance because it’s historically accurate. That was probably the biggest one for me. Yes, the Bomb is going to work, it’s going to be dropped, Oppenheimer will survive, etc.
It’s three hours of mostly people talking inside rooms, mostly about things I already knew about.
The Scenes depicting his unhappy love-life, especially those including his wife, weren’t interesting to me.
It could have been more about the difficulty of making important moral judgements, but instead focused on political aspects of the project.
My watch group agreed that it was pleasant, but ungodly long, and both the first and last third were different movies than the one most people would think they were seeing.
Why was there an entire extra movie on the back half of my movie? If I had known it would be so and was with a group who felt similarly, I would have left after they dropped the bombs in Japan (basically entirely offscreen)
Again, it was a nice movie. I entertained myself at points (and my group did too) noting how many of the lines COULD NOT have been delivered by a physicist. (There were 2 classes of these: regular movie hyper-grandness and also “this physicist just used a world model physicists wouldn’t ever use”)
I liked the fact the enjoyment wasn’t straightforward, in that it was somewhat challenging to watch in terms of keeping up with it and it posed moral questions mostly as opposed to telling you what to think. I liked not being certain where Nolan stood. It wasn’t too obvious who to root for unlike with most more “straightforward to watch” Hollywood films.
As a counterpoint I found Oppenheimer straightforwardly enjoyable and I’m not sure what you’re getting at when you say otherwise. I would have a preferred a little more science and a little less legal drama, but the latter was still interesting and (more importantly) well presented.
I don’t even know where to begin with the list, but here are the main reasons I suspect people, including myself, did not find Oppenheimer straightforwardly enjoyable.
I knew what was going to happen in advance because it’s historically accurate. That was probably the biggest one for me. Yes, the Bomb is going to work, it’s going to be dropped, Oppenheimer will survive, etc.
It’s three hours of mostly people talking inside rooms, mostly about things I already knew about.
The Scenes depicting his unhappy love-life, especially those including his wife, weren’t interesting to me.
It could have been more about the difficulty of making important moral judgements, but instead focused on political aspects of the project.
My watch group agreed that it was pleasant, but ungodly long, and both the first and last third were different movies than the one most people would think they were seeing.
Why was there an entire extra movie on the back half of my movie? If I had known it would be so and was with a group who felt similarly, I would have left after they dropped the bombs in Japan (basically entirely offscreen)
Again, it was a nice movie. I entertained myself at points (and my group did too) noting how many of the lines COULD NOT have been delivered by a physicist. (There were 2 classes of these: regular movie hyper-grandness and also “this physicist just used a world model physicists wouldn’t ever use”)
I liked the fact the enjoyment wasn’t straightforward, in that it was somewhat challenging to watch in terms of keeping up with it and it posed moral questions mostly as opposed to telling you what to think. I liked not being certain where Nolan stood. It wasn’t too obvious who to root for unlike with most more “straightforward to watch” Hollywood films.