christopher-cole83

This is a movie that doesn't quite know what it wants to be. Does it want to poke fun at the moon landing conspiracies? Mafia movies? Award shows? Does it even want to be a comedy? If it did maybe they should have cast more than one comedian in it. Amy Schumer is definitely not funny in it. Melissa McCarthy is only marginally funnier. If you want to make a comedy why would you cast two very unfunny comedians? Additionally, Jerry Seinfeld is just meh. The only actual funny comedian in this movie is Jim Gaffigan and he's what makes me give this review 3 of the 4 stars I gave it (the first star only because it won't let me give 0 stars). Yet even Jim, who is known for comedy revolving around food, seems like his talent is being wasted in it.

Even my wife, who tricked me into watching this, declared it was boring just 25 minutes into it.

The lesson here is if you want to make a funny movie cast comedians who don't fail at being funny.

History is hardly ever as straightforward and simple as we something believe it to be. The same goes for people like J. Robert Oppenheimer. In learning about World War II and the development of the atomic bomb, the thing I remembered the most was that he was a brilliant man who was suspected of being a communist, thereby tarnishing his legacy. That however seems to be somewhat of the straightforward simple history we tend to like.

Yet if this movie is as accurate as is claimed, a theorist (not just a theoretical physicist) might have an intellectual interest in leftist (specifically communist) ideas while, simultaneously, never fully committing. This was a theme touched on throughout the movie in which Oppenheimer was, in several instances, content to stick with theory.

When the Trinity test then took place and he saw what came from theory being put into practice, I do believe that fundamentally changed him. Wrestling with the unleashing of such power and knowing he led the scientists responsible for it, should really change anyone with a conscience.

What this picture does really well is show Oppenheimer neither as a saint who might have saved millions of lives at the cost of hundreds of thousands, nor as a sinner caught up in communism as might have been the case during the era of Joseph McCarthy and the Cold War. Rather, he was a man as brilliant as he was defiant, ordered as he was rogue, disciplines as he was cavalier. I believe Nolan, as the primary screenwriter and obviously director, respects us as the audience enough to leave it up to us to draw our own conclusions.

While parts of this...uh...documentary, I think...were good and informative on some level, overall it just seemed to me to regurgitate some old ideas and repackage...or, "market" them in an updated way.

What really stood out to me, and really got me skeptical about this title, was presenting the idea that Paul was some sort of marketing genius who came around simply to convince Gentiles to believe in Jesus. Throughout both the Old Testament and New, there is the sense that while God is working His plan of redemption out through the Hebrew people (of which the Jews were part), it was not for their redemption/salvation alone, but that of the whole world. Jesus Himself in the gospel of Luke that He had not seen greater faith demonstrated in all of Israel than by a Roman centurion requesting his servant be healed. And Paul was not the first Apostle to the Gentiles recorded in scripture, but Peter was, having gone to the house of Cornelius.

Furthermore, speaking of Paul, he never went to an area without first visiting the local synagogue to talk with the Jewish population. And then, if the ideas of a human being divine, dying, and coming back to life was such a ready made concept in the Greco-Roman world, then why was Paul rejected by anyone on Mars Hill in Athens?

To me this isn't any real serious look at the history of Christianity. It just exists to add to the noise.