Ka-BLOOIE!

Three hours and one really Big Bang

We finally gave up three hours of Sunday and drove up to the Bridgewater Cineplex to see “Oppenheimer.”

Three hours. I tend to agree that hour three was better than hours one and two, but you may disagree.

First, some praise. The few minutes that present the first successful nuclear blast at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico were brilliant. The use of sound and image at that point was dramatic, yet not cliched, and, I think, probably captured the experiences of the people on the ground when the blast was triggered.

Beyond that though, I’m still wondering how much I liked the film. I spent hours one and two trying to understand what the barrier was to just being enveloped by the story. By the end of hour three I think that I understood it.

With few exceptions a scene or sequence in “Oppenheimer” was incredibly short - usually three, possibly four short sentences then cut to something different. I found it jarring and unsatisfying.

Then it occurred to me what I was watching: a comic book.

The words being spoken in this movie weren’t dialog, they were speech bubbles, and each scene was a frame from the comic with the three or four speech bubbles that would fit into the picture.

There was simply no place where you could fit in a long exchange of ideas or dialog.*

Instead you got short statements and little more.

The problem is that without room to develop a scene, and to build one emotion or thought upon another, the characters had no opportunity to build anything beyond a flat character that talked a sentence.

The film did have good actors, many with stage experience, but there was no place for them to use their skills to build fully-rounded beings.

The exception somehow was Robert Downey Jr, who turned in what is probably the finest performance of his career, and especially in his post-jail career. Far more than Cillian Murphy he held the film together and gave it what presence and thoughtfulness it possessed.

I don’t know. It just seems that Hollywood has lost all skill at creating movies that go beyond the cartoon or the sequel. These days I look at the listings for the local theatres and invariably go “No, there’s nothing here I would bother with.”

* OK, I’ll acknowledge that there are some truly great comic artists that do in fact create long and complex dialogs within the form, but I’m thinking of the more garden variety comics.