I saw the movie Oppenheimer last weekend. I’d really been looking forward to it because

–All the hype.

–I know a lot about the story because of my previous incarnation as an editor and administrator of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in the 1980s and 90s. I knew people who knew J. Robert Oppenheimer as Oppy.

–plus I’ve been to Hiroshima three times.

–plus last week I read Kai Bird and the late Martin Sherwin’s 900-page book, American Prometheus, on which the movie is based.

–I was glad to see nuclear weapons getting the attention they deserve once again. (Can we please now just get rid of them.)

So maybe it’s to be expected that I was disappointed by the movie. I found it boring and confusing, a deadly combination.

I can address the confusing part here so when you see it you will not be wondering, in the first half hour, who’s who and what’s the story here.

As far as I can tell by seeing the movie once, there are two main story lines. One is told in color and one is in black-and-white.

The color story line focuses on Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy). The black-and-white story focuses on Lewis Strauss (“Straws”—Robert Downey Jr.), Oppenheimer’s enemy and nemesis, who destroys Oppy’s reputation and career pretty much until his death in 1967.

The stories are parallel, in that they are both about the rise and fall of each of these men. But both of them move back and forth in time. Hence a lot of confusion, especially in the first part of the movie—I don’t know how long but it seemed really long—before the Manhattan Project actually begins in the movie. You’ll know when that is by when General Groves (Matt Damon) comes into the picture. Things get somewhat clearer after that.

But you should be aware that Lewis Strauss did not have anything to do with Oppy until after the war.

The movie starts with Strauss (black-and-white) and Oppenheimer (color) both facing career-destroying inquisitions.

Throughout the movie, Oppenheimer’s story is pegged to the statement he reads during that 1954 inquisition by a panel of judges assembled to determine whether his security clearance should be renewed. (Strauss is not in the room but we learned much later that he engineered the hearing out of personal spite against Oppy.)

The Strauss flashbacks are pegged to the leadup to congressional hearings on Eisenhower’s nomination of Strauss as Secretary of Commerce in 1959. The flashbacks are supposed to show why he had it in for Oppy and how he engineered Oppy’s downfall, though he was largely responsible for Oppenheimer’s appointment as director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton after the war.

Both men flunked these hearings. As you can see from the dates, Strauss got his comeuppance five years after he destroyed Oppenheimer’s career. Got that?

The movie is really about politics. Personal politics, power politics, and the changing political climate in the US before, during, and after World War II, and then after the McCarthy Era. Just to keep you confused, Oppenheimer was interrogated during the McCarthy Era but not by McCarthy. Strauss just exploited the political climate to destroy Oppenheimer for highly personal reasons.

With all this going on Christopher Nolan hardly has time, even in a 3-hour movie, to focus on the development and use of those atomic bombs and the fallout (literal and figurative) from that. There’s a lot of flash-bang. Some of it, however, represents Oppenheimer’s mental breakdowns.

Oppenheimer was a complicated, flawed, and in some ways tragic figure. This comes through in the movie. He was also brilliant, so charismatic that his students worshiped the ground he walked on, and almost universally respected by his fellow scientists not only for his brilliance but also for his integrity. We are told this in the movie but not really shown. It’s a very talky movie.

The nude scenes that give this movie an R rating are gratuitous IMHO.

The acting is good to great. I wish Murphy had been given a broader range so we don’t just see Oppenheimer as a nervous sadsack. Same for Emily Blunt, playing a socially acceptable version of Kitty Oppenheimer, who was quite the harridan. Downey is unrecognizable as Strauss, that good. I absolutely adored Damon as General Groves. Who knew General Groves would end up being my favorite character in this story?

You really should see this movie but maybe wait for the streaming version so you can pause for snacks and rewind as necessary.