Alternate title: Some of What I Did on My Summer Vacation. ** Note: Some real spoilers included. **

The highly anticipated film Oppenheimer attempts to tell the story of the troubled man at the top of the Manhattan Project — the man who gave birth to the Atomic Age, and to now nearly a century of nuclear-war precipices. Undoubtedly, J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and puzzling figures, and worthy of cinematic scrutiny. Cillian Murphy delivers an amazing performance in the title role. Murphy alone makes this worth seeing in the theaters, and the film has a number of excellent performances to recommend it as well. The special effects are top-notch, and the dialogue intelligent and engaging.

However, it’s not clear that Oppenheimer really succeeds in telling us much — and rather than dispel mythology, it seems rather to embrace it. It all adds up to a frustrating film experience, and at three hours, a far-too-long experience as well.

At times, one has to wonder whether Christopher Nolan intends himself to be the leading character in this film. The opening sequence drags through a kaleidoscope of sound and imagery that clearly intends to make us consider the power of the atom and of the mind of Oppenheimer, but the sound and fury delivers that with sledgehammer subtlety for several minutes. Nolan has established a pattern of using blaring soundtracks to set moods, a habit he picked up in his Batman trilogy and used in Inception and Dunkirk too. None of this adds to what follows; it’s more akin to a cacophonic overture than any other cinematic element.

Nor is the soundtrack the film’s only Grand Auteur issues. Nolan switches between color and black-and-white cinematography without much purpose. Nolan claims that the color sequences are subjective while the others are objective, but the entire film is both subjective and judgmental (about which more later). There isn’t one portentous frame that Nolan doesn’t freight with The Judgment of History — and perhaps understandably. So why bother with the distracting color/B&W switches, and the futile effort by audiences to deduce what Nolan intends with them?

The self-conscious nudity is another problem. The film has only two significant female roles, and one of the women is nude for almost all of her screen time. The first scene makes sense, as it depicts Oppenheimer’s actual affair with a Communist Party activist that lands him in trouble later in the film. However, Nolan chooses to introduce the infamous Oppenheimer quote from the Bhagavad Gita (“I am become death, destroyer of worlds”) in this scene by having Florence Pugh hold the book under her exposed breasts while she mounts Murphy, a scene which has created understandable anger among Hindus in India. The two later show up naked and have sex in the middle of a committee hearing, Nolan’s Very Artistic way of highlighting Oppenheimer’s victimization by the Atomic Energy Commission. Emily Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer’s wife, stares at the image slack-jawed; Blunt’s countenance speaks for us as well.

To some extent, these are minor issues. A bigger problem is the framing device for plot, which is … a committee hearing that ends up stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance and ending his career in government. Robert Downey, Jr stars in these sequences in an amazing performance of Lewis Strauss, or a somewhat paranoid version of Strauss. While Nolan clearly did his homework, the film slants this so far against Strauss — much of it in B&W “objective” sequences — that it overlooks the fact that Oppenheimer did in fact create some of his own problems regarding his security clearances. His affair with Jean Tatlock (Pugh) continued after he was named the head of the Los Alamos facility despite her Communist Party membership; he brought in his brother Frank despite his Communist Party membership; and the Soviets manages to penetrate Los Alamos through Klaus Fuchs.

Most absurdly, the climax of these bookends reveals that Strauss supposedly held a grudge because of something Strauss thinks Oppenheimer might have said to Albert Einstein about Strauss. It’s as dramatic a climax as one might find sitting through a subcommittee hearing. Downey gives a magnificent effort to sell this, but it’s silly and insubstantial.

And that’s a shame, because the main story line should have been enough. Nolan’s storytelling about the development of the Manhattan Project, the bombs, and even the moral questions surrounding both makes Oppenheimer still eminently watchable, although at least a half-hour too long. The bookend sequence drags, Nolan’s Auteur Moments waste time and attention, but the performances are first rate and the subject matter compelling. The special effects in the Trinity sequences really do require the scale of the cinema to fully appreciate. To give credit to Nolan, even his misses are usually better than most other hits. Too bad he seems too insecure to realize it.

On the Hot Air scale, Oppenheimer gets a 4:

• 5 – Full price ticket
• 4 – Matinee only
• 3 – Wait for Blu-Ray/DVD/PPV rental or purchase
• 2 – Watch it when it hits Netflix/cable
• 1 – Avoid at all costs

Oppenheimer gets an R rating for nudity, sex, violent imagery, and overexposure to bureaucrats — or so I imagine.

Finally, this film continues the flagellation of the American use of Oppenheimer’s bombs on Japan in August 1945. Originally, I planned to include my thoughts about that in this review, but I will write about that separately later today.

Note: Slightly edited after publication to note the value of the film in its main objective.