The film was released to public acclaim. It became, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the second highest-grossing R-rated film of all time (only behind the 2019 film Joker) with a world-wide gross revenue of almost a billion dollars. It received universal acclaim both from critics and from the public, and a big bunch of accolades, including seven Oscars (including the most prestigious award of Best Picture), five Golden Globe Awards, and many others.
I didn't see it in the movie theater, but because of the enormously positive reception (and especially because of no negative politically charged criticism), I went and purchased it on Blu-Ray, expecting to have an enjoyable and didactic viewing experience.
I deeply regret this purchase decision. The movie is utterly, utterly boring. Not only is it boring, it's confusing, incoherent and a real pain to try to watch through. I honestly cannot understand how it got such exalting reviews.
In fact, by the 1-hour mark (the movie is 3 hours long) I just couldn't continue watching because I was bored out of my skull. And this even though this is the part where it kind of starts becoming interesting (because it's the part where it recounts Oppenheimer and his colleagues going to and designing the at-the-time super-secret Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bomb was developed.) It still couldn't hold my interest to continue watching, though.
And if you think that I got bored because I got some ADHD or the like and I can't sit still for more then 10 minutes, that's not it. I have watched the entire Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is something like 11 and half hours, in one sitting, several times. I have watched similar biographical "historical dramas" like for example the 2019 TV series Chernobyl (five episodes of over an hour each) in two sittings.
In fact, I think the comparison to the Chernobyl TV series is quite apt, as both are similar historical drama movies, even dealing with somewhat related subjects. Also because the contrast between the enjoyability between the two is enormous.
The main problem with Oppenheimer is that it uses this sometimes-used filming/editing style of extremely condensed storytelling, where extremely short scenes are densely packed one after another, where the narrative (by a rather loose definition of "narrative") rapidly jumps in quick succession from one scene to the next, often between scenes that have very little to do with each other, oftentimes jumping back and forth in time (as some of these short scenes are from decades later, some from decades earlier, and some from the time of the development of the nuclear bombs), with very little coherent flow.
The duration of each of these scenes is rarely over a minute, sometimes as short as just 10-15 seconds, before jumping to a completely different scene (eg. after a significant time skip). Almost every single one of these hundreds and hundreds of densely-packed short scenes are nothing but people talking, also in a very condensed manner. No pauses, no reactions, no lead-up to the scene, nothing.
In other words, the entirety of the movie (well, at least the first hour of it, and I would guess the remaining two hours as well) is nothing but eg. a 30-second scene of some people talking very fast, a jump to the next day, showing another 30-second scene of people talking very fast, a jump to 40 years in the past, showing a 10-second scene of people talking very fast, and so on and so forth.
It's a constant bombardment of extremely short scenes of mostly people just talking very fast, with the scenes jumping in time, sometimes by hours, sometimes by days, sometimes by entire decades, sometimes forward, sometimes backward. In fact, I think that at some level even the director/editors realized how incoherent this entire mess is because they used the technique where scenes from the latest part of the timeline (decades after the primary events) are shown in black&white, while the scenes from the past are shown in color, most probably to help the viewer know which scenes are from the past and which are from the "present" (of sorts).
The usual narrative devices used in movies, theater etc. are not used, such as establishing shots (that set up the next scene so that the viewer can understand the "context" in which the scene or its events happen in ), dramatic pauses, cutaways, etc.
Contrast this with the scenes from Chernobyl. Let's take for example the trial that's held in the fifth and last episode of the series, where Valery Legasov explains to the court why the nuclear reactor exploded. This entire scene is something like 10 minutes long, and he goes through the explanation and the description of the events at a moderate and clear pace. He explains the technicalities and the events in a clear and understandable manner, both for the in-movie court and for the out-movie viewers. There are dramatic pauses, there are cutaways (to eg. show the reactions of people sitting in the benches, or the judges), he even at one point accidentally drops one of the plaques he was using to visualize, causing a small disruption in the explanation, and so on and so forth.
If this scene had been in the movie Oppenheimer it would have probably been less than 1 minute long. And this without making the overall runtime of the movie/episode any shorter. Meaning that there would have been like 10 times more scenes, each one extremely short and condensed, packed one immediately after the other, jumping all over the place. And this for the entirety of 3 hours.
And, overall, the pacing, editing and narrative of Chernobyl is much more reasonable, understandable and enjoyable to watch. Scenes are of reasonable length and contain a reasonable amount of information and talking, and there's a reasonable amount of them, and they don't make constant jumps in time between the scenes, making the entire thing confusing.
I know that the type of writing/editing used in Oppenheimer is not unique to it. It is sometimes used in such movies (ie. especially the "historical narrative" kind), and I have seen other similarly edited movies before. However, that doesn't mean it's good.
The editing style in itself wouldn't be so bad if it didn't cause the narrative to be so extremely condensed and packed, and jumped around the timeline so wildly. Scenes change too fast, and jump in time too fast, and last for too little, and it's constant fast talking, talking, talking, and more talking. There's very little room for anything else. Even the one sex scene that there is comes completely suddenly out of nowhere, has too much talking, and then quickly just jumps to something else entirely. There's no point to it. In fact, there's no point to 90% of the scenes in the movie. They just feel like padding, like thrown in there to extend the length of the movie.
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