Oppenheimer is superb
And Cillian Murphy is excellent in the main role
I went to see Oppenheimer yesterday with my 15-year-old son. He’s really interested in World War II history and was really keen to see the film.
We weren’t disappointed.
It’s a superb film told in a series of flashbacks. Cillian Murphy is excellent in the role of J Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb. He’s an amazing actor anyway, but he was really good in this role and if he doesn’t get an Oscar for this, it’ll be a travesty.
There are some phenomenal actors in it as well, with Emily Blunt playing his wife Kitty, Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, Robert Downey Jnr as Lewis Strauss, Matt Damon as Leslie Groves… in fact, the talent in this film is amazing.
Other actors in the film include Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Conti, Rami Malik, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Matthias Schweighöfer… and the list goes on and on and on.
It’s like a who’s who of the best actors from across the world, not just Hollywood.
Anyway, the film tells the story of Oppenheimer’s rise from a chemistry student at Harvard and to becoming the Head of the Manhatten Project’s secret weapons laboratory that went on to create the atomic bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It talks about his left-wing politics (he was suspected of being a Communist Party member), his womanising, his overwhelming guilt about his role in creating nuclear weapons, his worry about the future of a world with nuclear weapons and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb.
The story didn’t stop at the end of the Second World War for this flawed genius, there was more controversy to come and he was treated really poorly by the US government in 1954.
However, I’ll not spoil the film for you by telling you what happened, but will just recommend that you go and see it.
Be warned, this is a bit of a bum numb-er… it’s three hours long, so make sure you choose a comfortable cinema with plenty of leg room. It is worth it. I barely noticed the time go by, I was enjoying it that much!
By the way, I did not do Barbenheimer for this simple reason: I don’t think the Barbie film will be that good. I’ve seen a trailer for it and I was like: nope, not for me. Don’t get me wrong, if it’s shown on tv and I don’t have to pay to view it, I might give it a chance. There were a few people obviously doing Barbenheimer when we were in the cinema yesterday. How could I tell? Hmm, could it be the bright pink dresses, dangerously high bright pink boots and long blonde hair?