By Steve Sailer
08/02/2023
From my movie review in Taki’s Magazine:
Thin Man
Steve SailerAugust 02, 2023
In director Christopher Nolan’s campaign to save moviegoing from technological and social obsolescence, his latest ploy is his most clever yet: to lure grown-ups with three-digit IQs to see his Oppenheimer in numbers that had no longer seemed attainable in the 2020s by making his film outstanding in quality. (Why didn’t anybody ever think of that before?)
When I started reviewing movies 22 years ago, I noticed to my surprise that much of the difference in the quality of movies is really not a matter of opinion: Some films, such as Oppenheimer, are simply much better made than most other films, and practically everybody can see it.
Nolan is an extraordinarily adept filmmaker, as everybody knows. Five of his movies — The Dark Knight and its sequel, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk — have made at least a half billion at the global box office, and Oppenheimer is over $400 million in its first two weekends.
And yet, Nolan has always pushed the envelope in how cognitively challenging a movie can be. Hence, Oppenheimer is three hours long and admirably (perhaps excessively) historically accurate. It depicts enormously complicated events using a gigantic cast. For instance, 78th in the credits list is Gary Oldman as Harry Truman. (And there’s negligible diversity casting: The vast majority of the characters are unapologetically white.)
But at least you can instantly discern Truman and Einstein (Tom Conti). Much of the rest of the dramatis personae consists of masterminds you’ve heard of — such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Lawrence, Vannevar Bush, Enrico Fermi, Kurt Gödel, Isidor Rabi, and James Conant — but feel a little guilty for not recognizing them in their reenactments.
So, what’s better: the intensity of seeing Oppenheimer now in a theater the way Nolan intends? Or waiting a year for it to be on streaming when you can watch it with the captions on and a remote in your hand to pause the movie and look up Luis Alvarez on Wikipedia? (Oh yeah, he and his son figured out what happened to the dinosaurs.)
Read the whole thing there.
Alternative titles:
Year Zero
The Man Who Would Be Philosopher-King
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