Oppenheimer. The friends I went to the movies with said it was really good, but to me it was just watchable, and I think could have been better. I think I might have been happier in Barbie.
To start with something good, I think Cillian Murphy played the role very well, as he always does, and there were some good supporting performances too, notably by Robert Downey Jr and Matt Damon. But the first half of for movie in my opinion was a pretty run-of-the-mill biopic showing Oppenheimer's days as a student, his personality, love life and family, about like The Theory of Everything or A Beautiful Mind, but with both a longer run time and more graphic sex scenes than necessary. I got tired of all the cute dialogue, it wasn't what I came for, and the pacing didn't pick up for me until the Manhattan project advanced, then I did get some of the feeling of suspense of having been there on the research team in the final days.
My biggest criticism of the film is that it's just too sanitized. Hollywood omitted the Native American and Latino people living in Los Alamos, who were forced off their land overnight so the government could build the test site, and how they were then exploited for cheap labor handling the deadly radioactive substances. We also never see any civilians burned and atomized in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the radiation victims in the aftermath. We just hear numbers and see abstract images of the sky. The film has more than enough slick style, but I think some brutal reality would have done a greater service to the people who suffered, and to Oppenheimer by accurately portraying what he felt responsible for.
Now while the first storyline of the movie was not as impressive to me as it was to a lot of people, I actually enjoyed the second half of the movie much better that focused on the way Oppenheimer tried to use his voice to oppose the nuclear arms race between the U.S and the USSR, and was targeted for this during the McCarthy Era. I'm probably the odd one out in thinking that the senate hearings were done better than the explosions, but I appreciated how authentic it was to the historical record and highlighted some details that aren't as commonly known. I didn't know who Lewis Strauss was for instance before seeing this film, and liked hearing a true story that I had not heard told before. I also think that the later part of the movie is where the film's greatest strength, the acting, shines the most.
So all in all, I thought it was okay, the last part being the saving grace for me, but think more detail of war itself would have made it truly special.