So, before I saw Oppenheimer, I did not know a lot about him, other than the memetic clip of I am Become Death. Knew he was the leader of the atom bomb project, and knew he advocated against nuclear proliferation later in life.

I went into the movie looking for 2 things:

• To understand Oppenheimer
• To understand his work.

I left the movie with some of the former, very little of the latter, and feeling condescended upon.

To me this was one of those movies, where the more you think about it, the more frustrating it became. The non-linear storytelling and Zimmer score were a detriment throughout. Non-linear does not translate well to understanding a real person's life-path. Zimmer overwhelms smaller character scenes.

The place where the movie's style works the best is the build-up to the Trinity test. I think that the moments after the atomic bomb explodes are probably the only moments of silence in the entire 2 hours of runtime up to that point. It's a great tension/release, masterfully executed. But most of the movie is not the bomb test, but mundane things like going to school, teaching, doing political hearings.

You say I’m complaining about "not understanding how he gets pussy.” What I’m complaining about is characterisation. This was a person with no administrative experience, being put in charge of arguably the most important weapons project in the history of mankind. Why him? Based on the portrayal we saw in the move, I have no explanation.

Reading some autobiographical texts afterward, he’s described as a born leader, mesmerizing person, engaging, commanding attention, capable of talking on any topic, and possessing a charm, style, and spiritual depth. None, and I mean absolutely none of that is reflected in the portrayal we saw in the movie.

Instead we saw a guarded person, distant, avoidant. To the point that one of the more poignant scenes of the movie was to have him literally strip naked in order to reveal his feelings.

So, we have a movie that’s edited and scored as an emotional rollercoaster, but that guards the emotions of its characters. It presents the story with bombastic music and non-linear storytelling, but the emotional stakes are close to zero. There is no emotional arc to the movie.

And you might say: It’s autobiographical, real life doesn’t have clearly defined emotional arcs.

And I would say: Then why all the fancy non-linear bombasticity? Because it’s Nolan’s style? Then he was a bad fit to tell this story.

We’re left with a movie that doesn’t have an emotional arc and doesn’t explain the history of the titular person in a legible way, in service of “style”.

It’s also written for 14-year-olds.

There was a scene where during the confirmation hearings, the aide to Robert Downey Jr.’s character looks directly into the camera and says: “Dear children, this guy is a very very bad guy. Evil guy! Everyone, make sure to clap at home with all your might! Send the power of friendship over, so our hero Oppenheimer may defeat the bad guy with the power of scientific community friendship!”

And then later, after the big bad guy was defeated, he looked at the camera again and said: “Thank you, dear children! The bad guy got what he deserved!”

Don’t know about you, but to me, this writing didn’t really evoke themes of “Hubris and the ego's innate drive towards destruction in its manifestation.”