Live Poll: Favorite Cillian Murphy and Christopher Nolan Collaboration

Sometimes the address of serious, deep, philosophical subjects is best suited with a clinical (or dispassionate or even tone-deaf) approach.

@jeorj_euler​ 

Indeed, sometimes it is. That is why I like Robert Bresson's films. But, I have seen all of Christopher Nolan's films, and his style does not seem right. His directing has always been pretty detached from the subject. With Dunkirk he realized that the characters were not the best aspect of his films, so he decided to remove them altogether and to focus on the action and intensity. Anyway, it is deceptive to show soldiers as the main characters. Nobody is the main character in war. I believe it is a simplification Hollywood made to make its films fit their traditional narrative format. Dunkirk goes beyond that, there is a feeling that anybody can die, and the emotion it loses through its lack of characterization, it regains by using working on its pace, intensity, and randomness. It worked prodigiously, and Dunkirk is Nolan's best film.
But, it looks like Nolan changed his characterization approach for Oppenheimer. He decided to do extra efforts. For the first, time it looks like he will do focused on a protagonist. The task he has set himself to do is not small. Oppenheimer is not fictional, the dilemma faced by Oppenheimer and his team is very serious. If he chooses the path of characterization, he will have a lot to improve from his previous films.

Now, he could do like Bresson. But, Bresson was not bad at characterization, Simply, he did not rely on the convention of theatrical acting in his films. He chose non-professional actors whom he called models. "Model" is the right word because he did not give them freedom of creation. He thought that the "character" would arise by accident when the model thinks less about the character. That is why he did not give a lot of directing to actors, he did not explain to them their character. With this method, he received some of the most truthful performances on screen. Emotions were never absent from Bresson's films, he simply acquired it differently.

Nolan is not detached from the characters in the way that Bresson was. From his films, emotions never truly emerged. And, from the trailer, Oppenheimer does not look like Un homme s'est échappé or L'argent.

Long story short, having watched all Nolan's films, I think he overestimates himself by tackling the subject of the atomic bomb. Remember that we have archive footage of Oppenheimer. Hard to imitate that speech.

That vaguely summarizes the problem I have had with Nolan brothers' work. To be fair, I've always preferred The Following, Memento and The Prestige and Inception, even Tenet, over Interstellar, Dunkirk, and the derivative material, but across all of them there are some similar problems. (Mark Rylance somewhat stole the show with Dunkirk, by the way, as he often does in movies featuring him.) So, I can definitely see how Christopher Nolan might not be the right man for the job in directing a biopic about Robert Oppenheimer.

@Jessica​ 

done.

Perhaps you could change it to

In Oppenheimer (2023), Cillian Murphy plays the leading role in a Nolan feature film for the first time.

@Maxence_G​ 

Please make the edit Peter suggested.

@Pencho15​ 

edit done