Daniel and Jack discuss Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer. Exclusive for Patreon subscribers. Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
As far as Oppenheimer goes I've got the Wikipedia page for the movie open so I have like at least a kind of a list of characters and such.
I haven't done a ton of like prep.
I mean I watched the movie like I watched the full movie and then I kind of watched I skipped around in it to sort of like.
Key scenes again.
I'm probably not as negative on it as you are as you are, but I would agree with most of your criticisms.
I think I think I just kind of like the stuffy scientists.
I kind of like the story more than I still have like took some pleasure from that.
The what, sorry?
Did you say the story?
Did you say the story?
The thing that I'm going to complain about more than anything is that none of this makes any fucking sense.
But, you know, we can get to that as well.
Because it's really like five movies wrapped in one.
And one of them vaguely interested me.
One of them being one that I would want to watch.
Right.
I already know how this is going to go.
I'm going to complain about the politics of it and you're going to say, yes, but all films are like that.
And I'm going to say, yes, I know.
Well, I'm not going to I'm not going to go there.
I'm just I'm going to agree with you and say yes.
And this is a pretty glaring example, particularly after the two hour mark.
I think it gets really insufferable after like after the it's after the bomb explodes.
I think after the Trinity test, the thing just gets like I was it was tolerable to me until that point, in which case it just becomes like sickening.
But we're technically I mean we're recording but where we should like actually intro this and do it did this properly so Well, this can be pre credits so to speak sure And now I've said that on mic.
So it's so it's meta.
It's meta And cue the credit music this is I don't speak German Here, we talk about the Far Right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
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What the fuck am I talking about?
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So it's a movie episode.
It's Oppenheimer.
We're talking about Oppenheimer.
Daniel, what did you think of the movie Oppenheimer then?
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer.
Tell me, opinions.
It is a disaster.
It's just a disaster, start to finish.
People really love to be going through all the nitty gritty Details of how the Dark Knight made no sense.
That's a movie I've seen four or five times and like sat down with a notebook to like take notes on this one I've seen kind of one and a half times so I'm not gonna be able to get that granular but My this is this is an offense to filmmaking on Every like structural level like once you get to the end of the film and you realize what movie Nolan thought you were watching Um, there's just no way of reconstructing that from the beginning, in my opinion.
Like, it's just... And it's not because I don't understand non-linear editing.
Many of my favorite films have, like, much more impressive non-linear editing than this one does.
It's because there's not a narrative here.
There's not a story.
What there is is, like, hints at a more interesting story.
Hints at about five more interesting stories that the movie could be telling.
Um... Yeah, it's... it's just a mess.
But it's a pretty mess, so it's gonna win a bunch of awards.
Yeah, to me this is, I mean, on the subject of the structure of it, this is like the ultimate illustration of what you could call the Netflixification of cinema.
Where, you know, because it's a two-way circular process.
Television via, you know, we can use the word Netflix here as a synecdoche for what is called quality television or status television or novelistic television or whatever you want to call it, you know, the Sopranos onwards, you know what I'm talking about.
And It's kind of, by nature, it's sort of aimless and meandering.
What it is, actually, loads of it, is soap.
It's soap dressed up as something more dignified and prestigious than that, where the story just keeps going and going and going and going and going.
And it's not really a plot.
It's a series of events.
It's a narrative, but it's not a plot.
You know what I mean.
And what's happened here, that's happening to television at the same time, that it's looking more and more like cinema.
I mean, it just looks like cinema now.
Cinema and television are basically indistinguishable now, at certain levels of budget anyway.
And the feedback effect, it seems to me that a lot of films have taken on, just as television has taken on the aesthetics, the visual aesthetics of cinema, cinema has taken on the narrative aesthetics of television.
Specifically, that sort of endless, soapy, just...
complication upon complication upon turn of event upon turn of event just to keep the endless the narrative just endlessly churning forward and that's what this film was to me I mean it's weird because it's based on but then what could be more like that than life just aimless and aimless series of events that never that don't have a point that don't have a narrative conclusion that don't lead anywhere coherent that's what life's like and the film has taken a life and it's found in that life
The raw material from which it's formed this sort of Netflix-ified soapish narrative and then it's made into a film and somehow I think in order to make it seem prestigious what the film has done is it's done that non-linear narrative thing where it's just mixed it all up together.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't think about the Netflix effect when I was watching this.
I was thinking more in terms of other biopics that are kind of similar.
On another project, you and I did A Beautiful Mind and The Imitation Game.
And if you think about A Beautiful Mind, and that's a film that is You know, just deeply stupid to its core, right?
You know, just the entire narrative just hinges around this like, you know, that Russell Crowe is like seeing people who aren't there.
And so we get this switch.
What if a guy's life was an M. Night Shyamalan narrative?
Right, right.
And this was made right at the height of, right, I mean, God, the sixth sense was... And I'm afraid that's all you're getting of that, at least for the time being.
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