Good Morning Friends, Jerry here just in case you forgot. Happy to say I’ve been enjoying my summer vacation away from sports gearing up for the most wonderful time of the year. And of course, we’re talking football, not the gut wrenching heart stopping hockey season we’re waiting for. Looking very much forward to covering Gang Green for y’all, this is most excited I’ve been for a season since the first time we went to the AFC Championship with Sanchez.

Anyways, today we’re not here for sports no, we’re once again here because I’m self-righteous enough to write a movie review and think people care what I have to say.

Much like the rest of the world, this past weekend I saw Oppenheimer in Imax. I was a huge fan of the Barbieheimer discourse (don’t think that’s the right word but whatever) and really wanted to partake in the double feature, but after sitting through a 3 hour movie (solo cause I’m an adult) I went to buy my Barbie ticket and noticed an overwhelming amount of young girls all dressed in pink ready to see their favorite doll on the big screen. I decided to have a moment of self awareness and realized that maybe it wouldn’t be the best look for a solo mustached man going to see a movie targeted towards women with a ton of younger girls present, probably just me over thinking it but I’m waiting until Big L and I can get out there together so it’s more socially acceptable. Anyways, not the point.

Before I dive into the masterpiece of a movie I saw, there is something I want to address. Not here, but within my friend group, I have recently been vocal of my hatred towards Christopher Nolan. Now Oppenheimer aside because I was always pretty excited for this movie after the cast was announced and I saw the trailer, I personally believe he is the most overrated director out there, he is artsy and weird for the sake of being artsy and weird. I think that anyone who pretends to think they know something about cinema (I am in that group but of course have to be different so here we are) suck him off to no end and think he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

It was a scorching hot take that got a ton of looks, but I was adamant that he made shitty overrated movies. Tennant, Interstellar, Inception, Memento, all movies that people will sit here and say are thought provoking and ambiguous. That’s speak for I’m pretending to be smart but don’t want to say I didn’t understand the movie I just watched. The Prestige was good, I don’t care for war movies so Dunkirk was whatever for me, and The Dark Knight trilogy is obviously some of the best movies ever made (another scorcher but personally DK Rises > DK). Interstellar is the biggest piece of shit movie I’ve ever seen and I am so sick of people saying how I just didn’t understand it. I was in college when I saw it with a large group and everyone walked out with their minds blown and I just said why, that was so bad. I got a ton of shit for it as you can imagine, but I have a blog now and they don’t so I’m right and they’re wrong. Alright, that’s enough time to get back on track.

I owe Christopher Nolan an apology. I don’t know if he wanted to change up his style and get away from the (imo) flaws he typically has in his movies, but god damn it Oppenheimer was probably one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Visually, dramatically, thematically, all of it. That’s not to say his next movie will probably revert back to his old ways, but for now I’m sitting with my tail in between my legs. Before I dive in to the movie, I just want to point out, spoiler alert obviously if you haven’t seen it (spoiler alert we bombed Japan in 1945, read a book), I’m not gonna go line by line since it was a 3 hour epic just gonna highlight some of the stuff I loved but just a friendly warning as usual.

The way you can look at this movie is in three parts, the making of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the making of the Atomic Bomb, and the communist witch hunt. In my opinion, it went good, great, amazing. The first hour or so we got to watch a young “Oppie” go through his learnings at school and there’s a lot of science speak that can get fairly boring but it was very well depicted. He meets a lot of people and learns a ton along the way. We also get to watch him battle with his anxiety any higher education student develops which I thought was definitely interesting. There was one part I thought was pretty cool, subtle, but cool. A Jewish scientist from New York, his name escapes me but I found out yesterday he was Bernard in the Santa Clause, comes to meet him in Germany in the late 20s. They were on a train and they were talking and it comes up, “Do you get the feeling we aren’t welcome here?” alluding to the events to follow in the 30s and 40s with Oppie being a Jewish man himself. It wasn’t much but it was subtly heavy, as are a few other awesome moments in the movie.

And that’s the thing I really enjoyed about this movie. It’s not a war movie, it’s a movie about a man doing something during the time of war. Not about the atomic bomb itself, but rather about the man who built it and all he endured, which ended up being a ton.

Once he get’s back to the states he starts teaching at I believe UCLA. He has some run ins with the early oughts of the Communist party and meets a dashing Florence Pugh and share some steamy scenes together. Now, twitter is going to tell you that “He fumbled a baddie”. He did not, Florence Pugh’s character was bat shit crazy and he made the right movie going steady with Emily Blunt (more there in a bit). It was pretty cool to see his political ambiguity and its something I personally relate to not being affiliated with any sort of political party seeing things from all sides and considering many different ways of going about things. He got mistaken for a commie around the work place and it didn’t go well, his coworker Josh Hartnett would give him shit and tell him to cut it out and just science which I imagine was the theme of the time. All Oppie wanted was a union to make sure the science folk were treated well and taken care of but I guess by the social norms of the 30s that makes you a commie.

Once Hartnett got him to cut the shit and affiliation he got him basically into the Manhattan project. I didn’t realize it was all done at Oppenheimer’s family ranch. This is where things pick up a bit. It was really cool to see the recruitment of the team and all the faces that came along with it. Josh Peck, Jack Quaid, Rami Malek (kind of since he wasn’t at Los Alamos), Benny Safdie who played a great cry baby Russian scientist who fathered the Hydrogen bomb and more. Science ensues and the race against the clock starts all while Matt Damon’s General Groves looks over and pressures the team. Damon to no surprise was great, he was the perfect ass hole but also team guy in the end who just wants to help. Dane Dehan is back, I haven’t seen him in a hot second, and plays a fantastic piece of shit Army General that ends up stabbing Oppie in the back.

Once things start moving and shaking things start getting blown up. I don’t know if it was the IMAX or what, but my theater was literally shaking and it was incredible. This entire movie is practical which is something we haven’t seen in a long long time and is quite frankly something that needs to be done a lot more. I have no idea how he did it since there is a solid amount of “animations” with atoms and protons and shit but it all looked fantastic. Once it comes time for what we’ve all been waiting for I was not disappointed. We get a quick, poorly acted cameo from our favorite New York Rangers enforcer and close personal friend of Christopher Nolan Sean Avery advising against the testing due to weather. I’m not sure if he did a bad job, or if the movie was just so well acted he paled in comparison to the other performances. I’m gonna go with the latter to give my guy Avery the benefit of the doubt. Fucking Josh Peck presses the button that drops the bomb and boom.

Now, was the explosion talked up a bit, yes it was. I read on twitter that the theater literally shakes. And it did, but at least for me not during the main explosion. The prior explosive testings I thought were a lot more powerful as far as the sound and shakes go. But holy shit was this a moment. It got really bright and dead quiet for a solid minute and a half. I’m not sure if any of you have seen First Man staring Ryan Gosling (shout out Barbieheimer) but it reminded me a lot of the scene when his Neil Armstrong first climbs out of the spaceship and onto the moon. This movie and First Man had a ton of similarities and if you haven’t seen First Man I highly recommend. Again the sheer fact that the bomb was 100% practical blows my mind, job well done Mr. Nolan, I’m eating crow as we speak.

Now for the fun part, my personal favorite part of the movie. After the bomb goes off and the tests are successful they obviously use it on Japan. This is where the subtle themes come into play. We see celebration while Oppie sits in disbelief knowing what he just did to humanity. We see everyone celebrating waiving American flags happy for the victory of the war while we see Oppie knowing he just murdered 200+ thousand innocent Japanese folk in cold blood, and it was powerful. Then, the witch hunt begins.

I haven’t mentioned him yet, but Robert Downey Junior did a number on this movie and made the world remember he can act. He came up here and there as the first two parts of the movie were going, but he really came into play towards the end. RDJ played a political figurehead who was trying to get into the presidential cabinet and worked closely with Oppie on other atomic projects. Oppie, being as smart as he was, went against him on a few things thinking that it wasn’t fit but RDJ being an American political figure had nothing but the Military Industrial complex on his mind. Because of this RDJ needed him out. He worked with Dane Dehan and the rat fuck that played the joker’s patsy at the police funeral to take down Oppie labeling him as a commie and stripping him of his security clearance and all credibility.

(this guy)

While all this is going down we’re stuck in the middle of a court room drama, a different kind of court room since there is no like jury or anything more of a hearing. During said hearing they’re very much so out to get Oppie and we see all the characters come in and give testimonies. Some better than others, Matt Damon comes in and somewhat goes to bat the best he can for Oppie being the team player I mentioned before. Then we get that rat fuck Russian hydrogen bomb scientist throwing Oppie under the bus because he refused to help with the H Bomb. Piece of shit. Both were good, but there were two testimonies that really stood out to me.

The first being his wife played by Emily Blunt. Now personally, throughout the movie I didn’t really care for the character. I thought she was a drunk and a shitty mother who did ride or die for her husband, but after a long tyraid in the beginning of the movie about how she wanted to be more than a housewife turned into just that. Maybe that was the point and I’m an idiot, it probably was. But then during her testimony scene I got to see why her performance was being praised as much as it was. She murdered it, plain and simple. I can’t remember exact specifics but she was being the perfect amount of bitchy giving everything back to the POSs grilling her husband and even got another member of the board to agree with her though it sadly had no effect on the outcome.

The other person in the court room I want to throw some roses at was the main lawyer played by Jason Clarke. This guy played the perfect asshole lawyer and threw the book at ‘ol Oppie. One scene in particular when it was mano eh mano and Jason Clarke was just going in on him. While Clarke was berating him for lack of a better word we’re seeing flashbacks and emotions that really threw us inside the Oppenheimer character that we’ve been in the whole time which again is something I really enjoyed.

Oppie got stripped of his credentials and the witch hunt was over. We all knew it was because of RDJ, as did Emily Blunt, but everyone in the movie besides her adamantly denied it or it at least it wasn’t acknowledged. We then go over to the hearing to get RDJ in to the cabinet and he’s being screened and they bring in a scientist to reflect on the character. The scientist is none other than Freddy Mercury himself, and honestly until this point I thought Rami was getting shafted since he didn’t really speak previously. Rami delivers an incredible deposition throwing RDJ under the bus and rightfully so bringing to light that he was the one who started the investigation on Oppie, an American hero of sorts, that the board didn’t appreciate. It turns out that Han Solo (not Harrison Ford, but the one that played him in the rightfully forgotten spinoff Solo) figured out that RDJ was the reason for all of this, spoke to Rami’s character, and bang. This all ends with a hell of an exchange between RDJ and Han Solo while RDJ doesn’t get the cabinet position.

One last thing I quickly want to touch upon is the appearance of Albert Einstein. Now he doesn’t do a whole lot until the end, but his last scene was wicked powerful. He has a few appearances and is a man of few spoken words throughout the movie. It turns out early in his academics, Oppie pulled kind of a dick move and moved science past the Emc Squared legend, but then gave him an award and made everything “Ok”. In the end, Einie talks to Oppie and basically says, “Remember that time you did this to me, this is the same thing. They build you up and praise you only to break you down further then you ever were then years later give you an award because they feel guilty and everything is alright.” Now it wasn’t a malicious conversation and he wasn’t being a dick, he was trying to console and warn Oppie since this all happened before the hearings and I just really thought it was a great way to end a great film.

If you haven’t seen it, go, and make sure its in a theater. I hate the argument of “Oh I’ll just wait for it to come out and watch it at home I can pause it and go to the bathroom whenever I please” No fuck you you’re wrong. Movies like this aren’t made to be watched at home, they’re made to be watched in a packed theater with everyone on the edge of their seat regardless of the lack of action present. Mission Impossible brings it to the other end of the spectrum where you’re white knuckling the action the whole time but the theater makes it. Sure, you can do this all at home, but you don’t have a 60 foot screen with Dolby surround sound cranked up to 11 to fully immerse yourself. Long in short, go to the damn movies.

But yeah that’s all I got to say about that, I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on the movie. Shoot me a tweet (or an X, fuck you Elon) and we can chat it up. Back into the hole I go until Hard Knocks starts and we can start talking Gang Green football. Until then folks, see you at the movies.