Losing The Plot - Oppenheimer's Disastrous Storytelling

[@peaklife8047]

Thank you so much for your boldness in sharing this! I watch a lot of writing and narrative construction videos and your account, with only two videos, has become my instant favorite! Please post more! Please post more story technique, reviews and deconstructions. Your other video is so good, and not just because I agree that Ocean’s 11 is brilliant storytelling.

[@The-Second-Story]

Thank you! I really appreciate the support. I do intend to post more videos! In fact I just finished recording one today, though editing takes me a little time. Thank you so much for watching!

[@Steven-z9s6h]

Oppenheimer was so pretentious me and my friends were all giggling within five minutes. When he smashes the glass we all lost it. The theater must have hated us, an unruly bunch

[@nemediv4086]

Thank you for putting the problems with this film so much more eloquently than I ever could. The best I could come up with was that the film's climax is halfway through and then you still need to watch over an hour of uninteresting plot resolutions. I really wish the movie was just what you called the biographical timeline, with more focus on the ramifications of the A-bombs being dropped, and with some actual emotion in the story. For such an esteemed filmmaker Nolan really doesn't seem to know how to film humans and not just plot objectives.

[@Dinamittin]

I am so glad that I've found someone that speaks every single thing in my mind about this movie that I can't tell people without them crucifying me. Amazing video, keep up!

[@AM-pleistocene]

The film was like a tiktok feed designed to disorientate you away from it's attempt at perfectionism, and it's rather blatant iniquity that could not be justified and glamorised to the audience if it was directed in a way that might give us room to actually contemplate for even a second what we were seeing. The whole film was a big wank over how glamorous and sexy and sapiosexual the man who invented the atom bomb was. I was with a bunch of pseudo intellectual 20 something's when i watched this in the cinema (something i swear not to do again) and the starry glaze slathered across their eyeballs like jam, the arrogant postures as if they'd actually just learned something other than "Oppenheimer was smart and deep and my new masculine role model", combined with the ammount of times i had to hear the word 'genius' (and the film certainly made them feel like little geniuses) made me leave early that night.

[@homealoneuniverse1221]

You are easily my favorite writing-related subscription. This is a long video but worth every moment of time invested. As for my own connection to the story, I had an uncle who was on the Manhattan project. He was rather low in the hierarchy, and he related only tiny fragments of his experience. But I had grown up with his 'framing' of that history and the movie was not in the same space at all. My uncle was a bona fide math genius. He could look at a column of 30 numbers and instantly tell you the sum. He could do simultaneous equations in his head in 100 unknowns. He would try to tell us there was a trick to it, but there was no trick. His brain just wasn't the same as ours. His role on the project was to act as a truth checker for the huge, early computer they were using. The computations for the process were more complex than anything humans had ever attempted, and we didn't have implicit trust in those early computers. So my uncle would watch for the outputs and be able to tell at a glance whether they were in the ballpark for the computation being attempted. He tells me he didn't get much sleep, during the whole thing, never more than about 4 hours at a time, at random times. It was a furious race, so far removed from the ego wars of the movie, from uncle's perspective, there was one overriding concern: They had to do anything and everything they could, fair or unfair, to beat the Germans to the solution. If the Germans figured it out first, the war would be over, and we would lose. It wasn't about being a devil or a saint. It was about being strong enough & fast enough & smart enough to not being destroyed by fascism. Now THAT'S a narrative thread that could hold a story together, and that's how I always thought about it. Like I said, the movie was coming in from such a different place I barely recognized it.

[@The-Second-Story]

Thank you very much for sharing this! Your uncle's account confirms the impression I had from all I had read from contemporary sources. I think twenty-first century historians have an unfortunate tendency to view all of history through a twenty-first century lens, imposing the world of the twenty-first century -- a thing so removed from the 1930s and 40s as to be another planet -- onto the minds, motivations, and occurrences of the past. Which, among other things, makes for very inauthentic storytelling.

[@homealoneuniverse1221]

@@The-Second-Story It's a common problem in historical analysis. Anachronistic misunderstanding of the past. It's actually the original basis of my story, only the anachronism I wanted to address was modern readers misinterpreting 2nd Century texts because they were seeing them through modern filters. My thought experiment was to bring someone from the 2nd Century forward in time and have them sit down with a modern professor and work through all sorts of anachronisms and come to a better understanding of each other. But then one night my granddaughter wanted me to tell her a fun story and I had to ditch the long boring academic conversation and give her a rousing sci fi romance/adventure complete with my time traveler flying around in a Christmas walnut lol.

[@The-Second-Story]

Oh, once you finish with your time traveler and his Christmas walnut you should continue with that other story. Historical fiction or fiction having to do with history that actually manages to capture the mindset of that world and its occupants is so rare and wonderful. One of my favorite examples is the Russian novel Laurus by Vodolazhkin, which felt so true to its times that it might as well have been written by a humble fifteenth-century Rus scribe.

[@SpringNotes]

Your uncle's story sounds far more interesting than this movie. And perhaps, his account would've made a far more interesting movie. I hope your uncle had a good life.

[@johnstjohn4705]

I'm a history buff, but I was unable to follow a lot of the movie. In the end, I wasn't sure what Nolan's message was. If it was a character study of Oppenheimer, it failed. I would have voted for Barbie. It had a story to tell, and it nailed it.

[@joncarroll2040]

Nolan not knowing what he is trying to say is not a new problem. Dark Knight has this problem in spades.

[@SpringNotes]

​@@joncarroll2040what about his other films? I've only seen Memento, because it was highly praised. Personally, I wasn't very much impressed.

[@EzekielOwino]

​@@SpringNotes me too

[@migmit]

Barbie is terribly told too. Maybe not that terrible, but still.

[@HBlankenship-wi8qr]

Finally, thank you for making this. Very thorough and so many good points. After the film ending I kept thinking "thats it?"...for a three hour movie. None of the emotionality landed for me and I couldn't figure out why. Thank you for all of your research, when you said you were still annoyed at having to do that, coffee almost came out of my nose. I was fighting the urge to do the same so I could grasp the whole story that was supposed to be there but really didn't want to just to know how to feel about the movie lol. What a great video! I think for a video this long, some chapters or an overview at the beginning about each topic you'll touch on would be very helpful! I saw that you're a newer channel, so I thought you might appreciate some feedback (apologies if im mistaken cause you seem very professional). Your vocal quality and pacing is wonderful. Your ideas and explanations are excellent. Also i adore your subtle sense of humor. Subscribed!

[@The-Second-Story]

Thank you very much! I truly appreciate your comments. Your ideas about chapters or overviews are good ones. I'd already been considering chapters for my next video. Thank you so much for watching (and subscribing)!

[@67LMcC]

Thank you for this! I HATED Oppenheimer with the intensity of a thousand white hot suns. I was so bored and so confused. I knew nothing about the man except that he was involved in the creation of the atomic bomb, and when I left the theater, I still knew nothing about the man. I was so looking forward to learning about how everything happened, and then the bomb part took all of 5 minutes of the movie. I still do not understand why it has gotten all the love and positive hype because it is a textbook example of bad storytelling. You've done such a great job explaining why!

[@The-Second-Story]

A thousand white hot suns! That made me laugh! After all the research I did, I learned that he's actually a fascinating man and that everything going on at the time was very intricate and nuanced, politically and historically. So it really is remarkable that the movie was so boring. Quite an accomplishment. Thank you for watching!

[@chaithanyadass8742]

If it wasn't for Leonardo DiCaprio's insistence on rewriting "Inception", Christopher Nolan would have messed up its storytelling like Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.

[@ruthielalastor2209]

Good share. I found this by accident and as an avid movie watcher, I appreciated hearing your opinion and suggestion. 1. I agree that this is the kind of film that needs a lot of historical context already to understand properly. It feels like there's a lot of befores and afters but the actual climax moments between them aren't clear. 2. The storytelling showed Jean's death twice, the second time as if a reveal, and that seemed particularly sloppy compared to the rest of the presentation.

[@The-Second-Story]

There was a lot of sloppy repetition in this film. But I think with Jean's the second was a possible alternative in which she was murdered. I had to watch it multiple times to catch that so who knows. Very sloppy. Thank you for watching!

[@silas1414]

While I disagree with opinions being expressed in the video as “should’s” and “need to’s”, I really appreciate you putting forward your honest views and taking the time to deconstruct the issues of the film as you see them, many of which I agree with you on. I think the dazzling trailer like editing of the film does obscure its clarity issues.

[@epiphoney]

"In medias res necessitates flashbacks, which strike me as boring and sort of corny. They always make me think of those movies from the forties and fifties where the picture gets all swimmy, the voices get all echoey, and suddenly it's sixteen months ago... but I like to start at square one... I'm an A-to-Z man; serve me the appetizer first and give me dessert if I eat my veggies." -- Stephen King, On Writing

[@AndrewFrancisIlyrian]

Stephen King is a moron and a pedophile.

[@quesoconbumblebee857]

I feel as though the movie was easy to follow without any previous historical knowledge, i think alot of the movie is supposed to explore character from an objective lens with emotion and judgement creeping up only to be shoved away like the development process of the bomb itself. As the character is flip flopped you surely lose a clear sense of character development but that begins to make you question to core of the man. Our first real introduction to him is an attempt to assassinate his proffessor, but he goes back on it. It paints a picture of a complex man who needs to face judgement and through the rest of the movie your judgement of him wavers back and forth. I believe that for the non-historian the story functions just fine as a character piece set in the tension on WWII. A critical eye is never harmful to a good movie, great video

[@The-Second-Story]

Thank you. And thank you very much for watching!

[@youtubeviolatedme7123]

If Nolan was using an objective lens to explore Oppenheimer's character, he wouldn't have used tracking shots, handheld cameras, or blaring music. Oppenheimer's character development is confusing because a three hour movie can't afford one scene to explain the sudden internal change which caused Oppenheimer to go from having no apprehensions about the bomb to feeling guilty about the death of thousands. In other words, why did he take back the poisoned apple?

[@danielx555]

I watched Oppenheimer without hearing it (on an airplane, the person next to me was watching it) and I found myself fascinated by the way that it was put together. It is 90% one shots (a camera photographs just one face in a close-up) and they stitched together one shots of actor a and one shots of actor b and volleyed back and forth between them for every scene. They would put in an establishing shot just because that's what you do, but then they switched immediately to television editing. It made me not want to actually see the film.

[@artinastudio]

Thank you for accurately describing what the storytelling issues were with this movie . I didn't like it when I saw it in the theatre and I didn't like it when I saw it at home. I didn't connect emotionally with any character and I didn't know much about the history of the atom bomb beforehand. Great video.

[@3dchick]

After Dunkirk, I couldn't bring myself to watch Oppenheimer. If Nolan would quit messing around with time and POV and just tell the d**n story, it would be one thing. But, clearly he can't.

[@youtubeviolatedme7123]

Shoot. Now I wanna rewatch Darkest Hour.

[@fragilehandlewithcare3967]

New fan and subscriber here. I'm glad this video was recommended to me, great work, I look forward to more videos whenever they come out.

[@The-Second-Story]

Thank you very much, I really appreciate the support!

[@geo665]

Arthur Penn's 1970 film Little Big Man sprang to mind when you mentioned an old dying man telling his story to a visitor (which is the sold ground, or 'present'' of that classic film). I actually hated Oppenheimer (and also Tenet) because of every detail you discussed. At best, I could say it was about 3 hours long; or as Roger Ebert once said about Michael Bay's 'Pearl Harbor' a 2-hour film crammed into 3 hours.' Love your content!

[@silas1414]

For better or worse it’s a cinematic approach that is occupied with creating a feeling rather than understanding. His previous film TENET was similar and even included a piece of dialogue instructing such.

[@quixotiq]

Tenet was fucking annoying! !

[@silas1414]

​@@quixotiq Agreed.

[@dessertisland2491]

I haven't even seen Oppenheimer and I couldn't stop watching your video! I think your points fill a niche in the wide sea of videos on Oppenheimer's cinematography, historical accuracy, etc. Would you consider making videos on storytelling in general? Like basics and advanced tips for storytellers?

[@The-Second-Story]

Thank you for watching! I would very much like to make videos on storytelling in general. I just need to figure out how to fit that into my channel going forward. Thanks again, glad you enjoyed it!

[@foo_tube]

You articulated perfectly the reasons why this movie was so confusing and hard to parse. Though for me it was because I literally could not make out the dialog - it was terribly mumbly and whispery and indistinct, something probably more to do with the quality of the streaming service. One thing I did notice, perhaps part of the disjointedness was because he wanted to place all the political "fallout" after the bomb explosion scene. And there was also an underlying question of just where exactly was his loyalty. Did he have any morality at all? Or did he just shift loyalties as it suited him? Especially, was he more loyal to science than to humanity and life itself? A similar question, incidentally, one might ask of contemporary AI development

[@The-Second-Story]

I noticed the same thing. After about ten minutes I gave up and turned on subtitles. I think the film really suffered from Nolan's unwillingness to commit to a single view of his Oppenheimer, despite the fact that he built the story around his perceived morality or villainy. It was very wishy-washy, to use the technical term. Thanks for watching!

[@mrfritznyc]

Brilliant! I knew this movie didnt quite add up, but wasnt sure why. It'd be fun to hear your take the other half of the Barbenheimer phenomenom, which, I personally found even more unwatchable than this one, lol. Great videos, btw, hope they keep coming.

[@The-Second-Story]

Thank you! It really doesn't feel like a whole story, does it? I haven't watched Barbie. I'm not sure I'd be able to sit through it... Thank you for watching!

[@NineVoltDigitalCinema]

Thank you for this! I would agree with you on every point, except visuals. This was also Nolan's visual laziest film as well.

[@FILM_SYNC]

If you rewatch Oppenheimer you'll notice where the progress starts to feel Byzantine is immediately when the flashbacks begin. In the script there's a piece of dialogue that's not in the film. Something to the tune of "...this answer is a summary of relevant aspects of my life in more or less chronological order..." (First page check it out!) This alludes to an epistolary frame that the editor maybe felt was egregiously on the nose and cut it out. Nolan operates on a pure literature plane but you critics and analysts always want other creatives to fit into these boxes that make you feel empowered. You ignore the simple problem and intellectualize your own limitations.

[@miguelsanchez1111]

De verdad que tu punto de vista me ha estado encantando. No he visto tu tercer video pero me gusta mucho tu manera de presentar las cosas. Considero que, aunque tu propuesta tiene más sentido en cuestión de narrativa, la estética se habría visto completamente comprometida. El ritmo con el que se presentan escenas tremendamente fascinantes tiene que ver con el orden de las escenas que propuso Nolan.

[@The-Second-Story]

(I had to translate your comment, so I apologize if I misunderstood anything) It is true that the aesthetics were very particular. And I've seen films in which the plot was subordinate to the aesthetics in a way that actually worked. However, it's my belief that such a choice wasn't the right one for an historical biopic in which most of the tremendously fascinating scenes fall needlessly flat without solid facts to give them context. Perhaps Nolan should have sacrificed a little of his artistic vision to tell the story with more clarity. I believe he has enough skill that if he had taken more time with it, he could have found a way to serve both the story and the aesthetics equally. Thank you for watching!

[@SanDiegoSouth]

The biggest dislike I took away from the one and only time I watched Oppenheimer in the theater was that I felt absolutely nothing for the characters. At least with other Christopher Nolan movies I've seen, I actually cared about the characters and the events of the plot. I thought the cinematography in Oppenheimer was spectacular. Some of the actors did a really great job. But ultimately, the characters were all forgettable, and I didn't feel like I learned anything new or astonishing that took place in history at that time.

[@The-Second-Story]

I completely agree. The characters were portrayed (mostly) with career-defining talent but faults in the writing made them little more than marginal additions to an abbreviated historical pamphlet. I suspect the core problem might be that Nolan tried to make them ambiguous, morally and ethically speaking, and so never wrote them with any solid conviction. Thus we were never permitted to know or care about them. The visual beauty of the thing made all that even more disappointing. Thank you for watching!

[@cedarledgepublishing]

Well said....I do not enjoy this scrambled egg style of story telling. Give me linear birth-adult-death. Keep it simple. Thanks for posting.

[@sukosuko1]

Oppenheimer was so highly promoted, but then everyone I know who watched it, didn't enjoy it much. Thanks for explaining what was wrong with the storytelling..

[@The-Second-Story]

I do find sometimes that looking at where a story went wrong can help me understand how to avoid those missteps. I've not encountered many people who liked Oppenheimer. Even if they liked aspects of it, most agree that the story was a mess. Thank you for watching!

[@sukosuko1]

@@The-Second-Storyyeah i write short fiction and its so hard to get everything right with plot and character

[@The-Second-Story]

No one gets everything right in everything they try to write. We just keep trying and practicing so that every new thing we write is better than the last. No writer is ever done learning. Not even Christopher Nolan.

[@LightspeedTutorials]

Agree and said the same right away, when everyone was still in the Oppenheimer praising circle jerk

[@alexanderdurig4474]

Thanks for what you said about "Alexander" - I felt it was not about Alexander, but rather it was about Stone's perception of Alexander, and the story of Alexander was in no way improved by layering it with Stone's baroque and epic, self-believing, Hollywood-meets-Shakespeare baloney.

[@The-Second-Story]

That's so often the case with biopics. The director can't help but infuse the facts with his own opinions and perceptions. I don't know much beyond what I read in history class (and philosophy class) about Alexander. But I understand that the movie went out of its way to portray the modern understanding of his life as accurately as possible. But the problem is always the modern mind. Ancient Greeks -- and Macedonians -- didn't think or interact with the world or themselves the way we do. Using a modern lens to portray historical events, especially ancient events, the way a modern person would perceive or understand them can't help but become warped by modern ideals, understandings, knowledge, perceptions, etc. And, too, anything made in Hollywood is necessarily also going to be further warped by the Lens of Hollywood.

[@GeoffreyMH]

Thank you so much for this analysis. I found the film incoherent but blamed myself for this - after all the film was so highly praised I thought I must be the only one struggling to sort it all out.

[@The-Second-Story]

Incoherent is definitely the right word! I found all the praise baffling as well. But I have come across a lot of people who agree that it was, as you put it, incoherent. Thank you for watching, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[@peterxyz3541]

I agree about historical accuracy may not lend itself to good story telling. A great example is Furiosa. A bio-pic…”require attention” from the casual movie goer. Any bio-pic can fall into this trap. I’ve not seen Oppenheimer, yet. I’m into science and stuff; but, 3h is a big ask.

[@mercurialhypersprite9556]

Such sharp grey blue eyes. Like intensely polished marble.

[@iknowbetterthanyou6260]

Interesting opinions and ideas. I especially felt the lack of thematic framing watching the movie a second time. I at least found worth in the individual character performances and the other departments' works. You could do one of these on Tenet, which I found to be one of the least entertaining movies to even sit through.

[@The-Second-Story]

I completely agree about Tenet; talk about a slog. I also really agree with you about the performances! So much of the acting in Oppenheimer was really exceptional, some of the best of the actors' careers, probably. Thank you so much for watching!

[@nightscream7135]

Timeline home base = Forrest Gump Template lol first thing that popped in my head. Very good point!

[@jonismiff]

I’m around 10 mins in and am not really liking it so I thought Id post my thoughts here to see how my views compare to afterwards. As of now it’s just claim after claim being unjustified and moving on to the next claim without elaboration. I watch a lot of video essays so this frustrates me, but it could be better so I’ll update here after I’m done to complete my thoughts. Don’t want to say the essay is bad until I finish it, but it seems that the essayist holds a very axiomatic view about how stories should be written without explaining or justifying why those axioms exist. Hope it gets better! But either way I have /thoughts/

[@patrickcoan3139]

Not really tho 30:47 , considering your proposal for the home base being told during a court hearing, it could have been simple.

[@matthewglenguir7204]

I love the movie but all I'll say is that it's not as much of a masterpiece as everyone heralded it as.

[@annavernick1490]

I was never attracted to watching Oppenheimer by C Nolan, and your thoughts on this matter have confirmed my bias. Thank you for your insightful review and constructive criticism. I did wonder why Strauss kept being mentioned in discussions, and i agree, its not a movie about him. I guess Nolan just loved the lens on Downey?

[@The-Second-Story]

It was almost like he decided early on that Downey's Strauss would be the main popular draw of the movie and made story choices based on that. Which is wild to think about. Thanks for watching!

[@TAHATPA]

you know ... i loved Oppenheimer movie ... but please see STAY (2005) and tell me your opinion about it

[@The-Second-Story]

I'd completely forgotten about that movie! I watched Stay hundreds of years ago when it first came out. I remember liking it quite a lot, but not loving it, story-wise. The atmosphere, however, was incredible. Maybe one of these days I'll rewatch it for analysis purposes. Thanks for watching!

[@dharmvirbharti1037]

bold take

[@2o4tom]

Please tell us how you really feel.

[@Steven-z9s6h]

Is the skull on your desk because of Mary Magdalen?

[@The-Second-Story]

I actually got Otto because of Evelyn Waugh. Or, more specifically, Charles Ryder. I've had him for awhile. Wonderful addition to my desk. You barely have to feed him anything at all.

[@RodericKnight]

25:16 goon king 😂... sorry. Great video btw, look into adding some background music 😊

[@patrickcoan3139]

Is it really such a visually beautiful flick, tho? No shade, either way.

[@The-Second-Story]

In my opinion, it is lovely. A lot of care was taken to give it beautiful visuals. The wide panoramic landscapes, especially of the desert, the unique way they showed, almost poetically, a visual manifestation of what Oppenheimer was perceiving all around him. I've always liked Nolan's signature use of layered textures. He did that a lot in the Batman films, in a way that was almost noir. There wasn't enough there to save the film, unfortunately. And the supposedly climactic shot of the Trinity test was actually quite underwhelming. Probably because there was too much startling dangerous beauty delivered up to that point as a kind of tease of the Trinity test (like all those five second trailers for two minute trailers), so it didn't deliver the blow it was supposed to. Thanks for watching!

[@simonleib1992]

Ì thought it was just me. I was so looking forward to this movie. The visuals were amazing. But it was so badly written

[@bcarefulwhatuwishfor]

This feels like a film bro who learned a method for analysing films and when encountering a film that can't be analysed using that method, gets frustrated and calls the film bad. There is more to a movie than the events that happen in it. If stories were just sequences of events, nobody would ever make a biopic when wikipedia exists. Thinking of films this way is how we end up with an infantilised movie going population and studios only producing the umpteenth superhero movie. Oppenheimer isn't without its faults (I certainly wouldn't call it a masterpiece), and I agree with some of your critiques, but I think on the whole this video is a lot of subjective "I don't like this stylistic decision and I don't have any interest in the subject matter of this film" being presented as objective failings of the film.

[@gabyocampo94]

This video is way more lazy and boring to seat through than other on the same topic. I guess you couldn't use your critiques of the movie in your own work.

[@fragilehandlewithcare3967]

Lazy and boring? Yike. I think she put so much work in it that it's giving surgical lol. Also I personally agree with her that the movie weren't great so I am biased and find her assessment entertaining after watching a lot of videos that praised it uncritically. That said it is your personal opinion and I respect that.

[@peaklife8047]

Any comment is a good comment for the algorithm, so yay to people posting trite dismissive comments. I was impressed that I could sit through an HOUR of story critique on a film! Worth it. 🎉