麻豆区
Customer Review
- Reviewed in Canada on December 9, 2023This movie has the praiseworthy ambition of bringing back to the spotlight the threat posed to humankind by nuclear weapons.
Sadly however, don鈥檛 expect anything like 芦 Apollo 13 禄 or 芦 Titanic 禄 where a dramatization gives spectators a chance to better grasp historical events. In fact, this movie deals at least as much with McCarthyism as with the development of atomic bombs.
Robert Oppenheimer comes out as mentally unstable, na茂ve, in dire need of recognition, not particularly adept at organization and manual tasks and in fact somewhat nasty. Indeed, many viewers may judge that the true father of the bombs was his boss, general Groves, masterfully played in the movie by Matt Damon. The film only faintly hints at the possibility that the military man deliberately chose to avoid the spotlight and let Oppenheimer take glory 鈥 and responsibility in the public eye.
The magnitude of resources dedicated to the movie comes out clearly, but countless shortcomings are deplorably obvious:
鈥 Perhaps because the information now lost or still classified, little detail is provided as to what precisely was done in Los Alamos, how many people were involved, how the bombs were transported safely to Japan, whether other bombs were in production elsewhere, etc.
鈥 Many elements are depicted unrealistically, including the physicists鈥 work sessions 鈥 in classroom settings and the encounters with a rather cartoonish Albert Einstein.
鈥 The apparent absence on the Alamos team of any medical doctors or biologists to study the effects on human beings of radiation produced by the atomic bombs is not underscored or even alluded to.
鈥 The fact that the technology was strenuously devised without computers or even electronic calculators is not in any way hinted at.
鈥 The director鈥檚 artistic choice not to present events chronologically but rather to interweave from beginning to end three narratives taking place some years apart makes things harder to follow for spectators.
鈥 This is compounded by the fact that multiple secondary tidbits are included and that, contrary to convention, the most recent narrative is in black and white and the earlier ones in colour.
鈥 Strangely (or hubristically), the director claims to have refrained from computer effects 鈥 but yet used Imax technology for most of his shoots, and even had Kodak develop a black and white adaptation since none existed.
The DVD offers a variety of bonuses. As often happens, the 芦 making-of 禄 is more promotional than informational: most interviews were clearly conducted during the shooting 鈥 at a time when nobody had yet seen the finished work! In contrast, the 87-minute documentary on Robert Oppenheimer鈥檚 life produced by NBC is very enlightening. It includes many period clips, very often colourized, and none of the fluff present in the movie. In fact, many may find it more compelling than the feature film!
