How to evaluate Nolan's new work Oppenheimer?

In Oppenheimer, Nolan shows his two unique skills: nonlinear narration and unstable protagonist. Compared with the more typical Nolan film, the film is very restrained in the use of these two techniques, but it still injects more rich and varied emotional and moral expressions into the traditional melodrama film.

Nolan has always been famous for his nonlinear narrative, and he still skillfully uses this narrative technique in Oppenheimer. Using complex nonlinear narrative, Oppenheimer created an overlapping and complex space-time structure, which made the film can accommodate more levels of meaning. On the whole structure, the film adopts the cross-cutting of two time clues: one is the closed-door review of Oppenheimer by the Security Committee, and the other is the public trial of Strauss by the Senate five years later. The closed-door review of Oppenheimer and the public trial of Strauss are intertwined, with one closed-door and one open, one plot and one retribution, one color and one black and white, which implies the director's strong satire and criticism. It is also intertwined with two people's stories about things that happened at different times before, which brings a lot of interweaving and interleaving at different times. Through more ingenious nonlinear cross-editing, Nolan created the climax of short plays again and again, and made them higher and more turbulent like waves.

As the highlight of melodrama, the moment of confirmation of goodness has changed from a single confirmation of traditional melodrama movies to a multiple confirmation of circular entanglement, which has a stronger emotional impact. In addition to the two "trials" at the end of the film, the film also repeatedly confirmed the goodness of science through two meetings between Oppenheimer and Bohr and three meetings with Einstein. When the audience finally heard "We really destroyed the world" when Austria and love met for the second time in the film, the film went beyond the simple praise of moral goodness in traditional sitcom movies, because the victims realized that they were not only the embodiment of goodness, but also the messenger of death, which also brought about reflection on the evil of science. This further makes up for the narrowness of the traditional sitcom and brings another sober and cold taste to the sitcom film.

In addition to nonlinear narration, creating a psychologically unstable protagonist is another major feature of Nolan's films. In Oppenheimer, the audience watched almost everything through Oppenheimer's eyes. Nolan also showed Oppenheimer's complicated personality and unstable mental state, and revealed the great paradox of the father of the atomic bomb. Pursuing the innovation of physical theory is his pursuit as a scientist, but the disaster that this innovation brings to mankind scares him. The film adheres to Oppenheimer's subjective perspective, and the paradoxes and tragedies he carries can make the audience feel the same. Moreover, because of these morbidities and madness, Oppenheimer's image has added a richer level, including the divinity of human prophets and the fatalism that Shakespeare's tragic characters bear the whole human destiny. This is the height of characters that traditional melodrama movies can't reach.

Traditional melodrama films lack augmented reality landscape and high-density information.

Deliberately creating a large number of augmented reality landscapes in movies is a response to Nolan's dominance of video games and the challenges brought to movies by the all-media era. The augmented reality landscape produced by the combination of the hardware of shooting and projection equipment and the software of shooting technology can attract the audience to enter the cinema and experience the immersive viewing experience. In terms of hardware, Oppenheimer shot most of the shots with IMAX film camera, and Nolan thinks this resolution can simulate the effect of human eyes. His previous works, such as Interstellar's Dunkirk, all used this shooting method. Only in IMAX cinemas can Nolan's films be shown with excellent audio-visual effects, thus attracting the audience into the cinema. From the shooting technique, Oppenheimer also emphasized augmented reality. Moreover, compared with Dunkirk, which only leads the audience back to the battlefield as a physical reality, Oppenheimer has two more difficult realities: one is the subjective reality of the characters, and the other is the abstract reality of quantum physics. However, through the clever use of pictures and sounds, especially in several key paragraphs, these two realities are quite successful in the film, leading the audience to fly freely in two realities that are difficult to contact in daily life.

High information density is also a consistent feature of Nolan's films. He is very good at setting up various "keyhole devices" in movies, thus attracting the audience to watch them repeatedly and throw themselves into unlocking games. In Oppenheimer, we can still feel this feature, but this time it shows more historical figures and information related to the historical development of quantum physics and Manhattan Project. The film is centered on Oppenheimer, and dozens of famous people have surnames. It is commendable that every character in the film is indispensable for shaping Oppenheimer and expressing the connotation of the film. Some are almost only a few lines, or one or two shots, but they are still very important. It is often difficult for the audience to receive all these characters and the information they carry when they watch a movie for the first time. But the more you watch this movie repeatedly, the more you can appreciate the subtlety of this movie, and really reach the script realm of "adding one point is too long and subtracting one point is too short"; And those lines with rich meanings, you can't help chewing them over and over again.

But generally speaking, despite the above innovations, the background of Oppenheimer is still an American melodrama film, and its core expression is still within the scope of melodrama films. In this sense, Oppenheimer is a Nolan film with exquisite art and relatively conservative culture. In order to win the recognition of mainstream awards, this is also the film strategy Nolan has to adopt.