I really wanted to like this film. I really did. The trailer was epic and hooking and as soon as that trailer was released, I immediately made plans to watch Oppenheimer, even if I still had to wait some time to watch it.
I can't express how disappointed I was with this film. I'm not an expert on knowing about the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer but I can certainly say this film did not highlight as much as it should've of.
Another thing wrong with this movie is that this movie introduces way too many characters and that Christopher Nolan assumes everyone in the audience watching this movie is a WWII historian. So many characters are introduced that the overall story gets kind of lost. Also, the non-chronological in-and-out waving through Oppenheimer timelines does not really work for this movie. Especially in a biopic about someone as important as J. Robert Oppenheimer, alternating between the early stages, prime years, and dwindling years of his life does not flow within the movie. This movie could've probably benefited from narration for certain scenes (or even if Cilian Murphy himself was narrating because we the audience do not always understand the mind of Oppenheimer). It also doesn't provide enough influence and importance of the work of scientific masterminds such as Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein , Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and how the establishment of those calculations and discovery led to Oppenheimer, a quantum mechanics and physics professor, to apply those advancements into developing a practical and capable nuclear bomb. And in regards to that, scientists such as David Hill, Seth Neddermeyer, and Richard Feynman are hardly mentioned and barely have any on screen time in a 3 hour movie.
Lewis Strauss, Ernest Lawrence, and Leslie Groves also got reasonable screen time in showing the impact they had on Robert but there was a true lack of the advancing guilt Oppenheimer had as a result of his creation. Yes he begins to have that feeling when he is being celebrated and it was present when he met Harry Truman in the White House, but his guilt was above all else in reality and this film did not really show it all that well.
The cinematography and the Trinity Test atomic bomb detonation are the main reasons why this film gets two stars out of five. Other than that, I would argue this is Christopher Nolan's worst directed movie.