Something to watch tonight: Monday 25 March

Oppenheimer (Nolan, 2023)

Today’s sug­ges­tion might not be the most sur­pris­ing or nov­el one, but the fact that the recent win­ner of sev­en Oscars has now hit the stream­ing ser­vices seems worthy of note.

I recently re-watched Oppenheimer at home (my first view­ing was in an IMAX cinema) to see wheth­er it held up and my con­clu­sion is that, like a lot of Nolan’s films, it’s bet­ter second time around. I spent less time try­ing to work out what was going on and more time appre­ci­at­ing it.

My ori­gin­al response was writ­ten quickly for RNZ and I said this:

And, Nolan being Nolan, there is also a bit of a puzzle to be solved as a key piece of inform­a­tion is with­held from us until the end, a piece of inform­a­tion that unlocks all of the giant themes the film has been wrest­ling with and provides an unset­tling but dra­mat­ic­ally sat­is­fy­ing con­clu­sion. Satisfying but manip­u­lat­ive all the same.

The second (in grainy black and white) is about one of those politi­cians, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), attempt­ing to win a cab­in­et pos­i­tion in 1959 and finally hav­ing to deal with the fal­lout from his own battles with Oppenheimer.

This might seem like an odd place to put your atten­tion: a rel­at­ively minor contretemps between two proud and head­strong men over the future of atom­ic energy and plan­et killing weapons but Nolan – and the book American Prometheus upon which the film is based – sees this battle as the first skir­mish in an ideo­lo­gic­al anti-science move­ment which has reached a point where evid­ence and facts are now under­dogs in almost every debate.

Nolan brings all his skills to play in this film which is com­posed largely of men in suits and ties debat­ing and it is quite thrill­ing to see a big screen epic take those things ser­i­ously. There is spec­tacle – of course – but the giant clos­eups of the con­tra­dict­ory geni­us’s monu­ment­al cheekbones are the great spe­cial effect here.

Where to watch Oppenheimer

Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on Netflix (in 4K no less)

Canada: Streaming on Prime Video

USA: Streaming on Peacock

UK: Digital rent­al from the usu­al outlets

Further reading

You might recall that a month ago we had a guest post from sub­scriber JJW with high­lights of an epic art­icle he had writ­ten about watch­ing the exten­ded ver­sions of The Lord of the Rings tri­logy in a Melbourne cinema.

The exten­ded ver­sion of his art­icle was due to be pos­ted on David Farrier’s Webworm news­let­ter but has taken an exten­ded amount of time to actu­ally appear.

Jackson’s art­icle is only for paid sub­scribers to Webworm and, while I would obvi­ously recom­mend you go ahead and become one, my pref­er­ence is that you pay for a sub­scrip­tion here first. That would make me very happy.