jande9

Chris Columbus is a great director but he did terribly with this movie. Plodding and unimaginative, it looked like a TV series where the director has 5 days to get the show in the can. Wide shot, single, single, OK next setup.

The actors never seemed to find the characters but I don't blame them as all the did was stand in a row delivering their lines. Even actors as skilled as these are need something to work with.

I liked the book and was looking forward to the movie but I almost bailed halfway through because I was so disappointed.

A savant on the spectrum, acting as a detective, sees the tiny details other miss and then solves the crime, all while being enmeshed in a much bigger problem.

The characters are very likable, the plots are reasonably believable, and there is a refreshing lack of phony subplots.

Each episode is a stand alone case while the big problem consumes the entire series, so there is a satisfying ending to each episode while the big puzzle has some more pieces added to it.

Agatha Christie always ended her books with Hercule Poirot gathering all the suspects together and meticulously going through the crime, finally revealing the culprit. That was always my favourite part, and this series does exactly that.

My only quibble is that the last 2 episodes are very dark exposure wise, and it is very difficult to see what is going on at times.

This is the first Nolan movie I've seen. He really has a way with actors as every performance is stellar. You aren't looking at the star, you're looking at the character. I am quite familiar with Oppenheimer's life and I'm not sure I would have emphasized the same aspects of his life but Nolan made his choices and the movie is very effective, but perhaps not very moving.

Robert Downey Jr really stands out. He brought that character to life. Cillian Murphy did a great job portraying Oppenheimer who was such a complex character. He was in pretty well every scene surrounded by amazing actors yet he always stood out. I noticed he snuck in a few Peaky Blinder mannerisms too!

I'm not sure the non-linear format was wholly successful. The progression from deeply disturbed student to brilliant but caustic professor to skilled manager of a huge collection of enormous egos to the final showdown with the lesser people he bruised on the way is confusing enough without getting it in random chunks. I was familiar with Oppenheimer's history so I could follow it, but my wife was getting a bit lost with all the characters.

My wife also didn't know that the H bomb and the atomic bomb were two different things, which plays a significant role in the story, so that also added to the confusion.

I saw it in 70mm regular and it looked great. The colour seemed to change depending on when the action took place, with slightly washed out images with crushed blacks in the thirties, full Technicolor in the forties and "Color by Kodak" in the fifties and sixties. The dialogue is sometimes a bit hard to understand though because of the strange timbre that body mics give to a voice. Maybe next time Nolan will go back to boom mics to complement his use of film.