Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has snagged sterling reviews wherever it goes, with many of those reviews drawing comparisons to Oliver Stone’s acclaimed 1991 feature “JFK”.
Stone himself is a well-known history buff and cinema lover and has now weighed in on Nolan’s film with a lengthy post on social media.
In his post, the “Platoon” and “Wall Street” director revealed that he himself had once considered making his own biopic film about theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his impact on the world.
So his standards going into Nolan’s film were high, and it seems they were exceeded as he shared high praise for the film:
“I sat through 3 hours of #Oppenheimer, gripped by Chris Nolan’s narrative. His screenplay is layered & fascinating. Familiar with the book by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin, I once turned the project down because I couldn’t find my way to its essence. Nolan has found it.
His direction is mind-boggling & eye-popping as he takes reams of incident and cycles it into an exciting torrent of action inside all the talk. Each actor is a surprise to me, especially Cillian Murphy, whose exaggerated eyes here feel normal playing a genius like #Oppenheimer.
#Oppenheimer is a classic, which I never believed could be made in this climate. Bravo… the movie packs in the essence of the tragedy of #Oppenheimer, a man historically in the middle of an impossible situation, though one, as Nolan shows, partly of his own making.”
Stone had only two small factual criticisms that tied his research alongside historian Peter Kuznick whilst developing Stone’s acclaimed “Untold History of the United States” docuseries a few years back.
Those criticisms were mostly about the film’s portrayal of the impact the bomb had on Japan and how Western studies of the war often ignored the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (aka. Operation August Storm) a few days later, which led to the greatest defeat in Japanese military history with more than one million Japanese soldiers killed or captured. That defeat is said to have ensured the end of World War II as much as the dropping of the atomic bombs.
“Oppenheimer” is still playing in cinemas everywhere worldwide with its IMAX run being extended.
