We don’t go to the movies for a dose of reality – we go to escape. Yet in the darkness of the theater, as the laws of nature are suspended, and our pulse quickens with the shadows flickering on screen, we hope to experience truth. Truth, not imagination, is what makes a film a revelation, and separates the merely entertaining from the great. But the truth only appears when the filmmaker has first faced it himself.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a great film that will likely stand for decades as a monument to one of the most decisive chapters in modern history. Nolan treats the audience to a sensory feast while unraveling a complex story about a complicated man. But Nolan‘s deference to liberal pieties ultimately does the audience, and himself, a great disservice. He hurries us right to the edge, inviting us to peer into the murky origins of this strange world we have inherited, only to suddenly pull back. And with that, the truth is lost.
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