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Imagine a WWII movie with cartoonish, snarling Nazis, terrible or absent character development, French characters with British accents and a musical score from "Call a Midwife" and you get some idea of what an intolerable experience watching this movie can be.

My wife read the book and raved about it. Before I was compelled to leave the tv room after watching nearly to the end, all she could say was "sorry, the book was great".

Great cast of talented actors who were brave enough to attempt to save this poorly conceived film based on a highly successful book.

The best thing I can say about this movie is that it was relatively free of the gratuitous filthy language that seems to be incorporated into so many of todays popular movies.

Being a student of the history of nuclear weapons development, I was pleased that the film was surprisingly accurate in terms of Oppenheimer's role in the development of the atomic bomb. I was especially interested in the efforts made to destroy Oppenheimer's reputation after the war and applaud Robert Downey's Academy Award level performance. My reason for rating this film lower than I had hoped to rate it is the sound track. Three of us found it difficult to clearly hear the cast members because of either distortion in the recording or masking level ambient noise in the film. The use of "airy" voices that has become so prevalent in todays films is infuriating. It is as if the use of vocal cords in the uttering of speech is now forbidden. I kept wanting to shout out "SPEAK UP". SAY IT SO WE CAN HEAR YOU!" Finally, the use of extreme noise levels in this film was far, far overdone. For an atomic bomb explosion? OK. But the use of room jarring, earth shaking low frequency sound levels over and over again was both gratuitous and ridiculous. I would be very careful in recommending this movies to my friends and relatives.

I don't think I could ever recommend this film to anyone I know. Being a patient person, I thought I could piece the parts of this puzzle together in order to understand what I spent three hours watching. What I did not realize is that I, as a viewer, was viewing the world through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic. Of course it did not make rational sense. Of course it came across as one chaotic experience after another. The fact is that I had just spent three hours seeing, hearing and sensing my world through the eyes of a severely mentally ill person! As I was leaving the theatre I was reminded of being on a very long and tortuous amusement park ride. Let me off! That said, it did hold my interest.