I've listened to the plays, seen previous adaptations, know the story backwards and forwards. I got a C+ on my final paper around the subject of "Should we have dropped the bomb on Japan?" (I don't remember which side I took, but I believe it was favoring the Demonstration scenario).
But, I've been interested in seeing Oppenheimer, because I wanted to see what director Christopher Nolan would do with it. J. Robert Oppenheimer led a life that could have filled a few movies, but Nolan has compressed it into one three hour film, with the highs and the lows, and of the parallel tracks and rippling occurrences that underscored and undercut his career, and made the man who oversaw the construction of an atomic bomb from theory to reality become a pariah to the very country he handed it to on a desperately sizzling platter.
And Nolan in the past has been a wizard of sorts playing with the possibilities of story-telling and film-making, and juggling and parsing scenarios so as to create adrenaline-generating third acts that brings everything together for a thematic jolt. One could say he creates these puzzles in the editing room, if the conceits of the films weren't so inextricably linked to the construction.
But, here, Nolan keeps it rather simple: two stories running parallel to each other, both involving hearings on their subject matters. They're sub-titled 1: "Fission" (in which atoms are split): in color, involving an older Oppenheimer in 1954 being grilled by a back-room secreted committee over whether he would retain his top security clearance; 2: "Fusion" (in which atoms are combined): in black and white, involving the very public hearing ofLewis Straussto become Secretary of Commerce in Eisenhower's cabinet in 1959.
Two seemingly unrelated stories, but tied together so deeply that to split the two would be like splitting atoms, as they both deal with brilliance, arrogance, ego, and their limitations. There couldn't be one story without the other. And just as you can't have a nuclear explosion without fallout, both men—Oppenheimer and Strauss—would learn of consequences, that will haunt them to the end of their days.
Nolan starts the movie with a peaceful image—rain falling in water—but, as serene as it is, it's the natural image to describe the film. Just as rain falling will ripple out in concentric circles, actions will have reactions and those will spread without much control, a chain reaction that will only dissipate until it runs out of energy. And Oppenheimer is a film interrupted with small moments—a spark, a ripple, the sound of stamping feet, a line of poetry—that will echo throughout the film as mysterious fragments until we see them in context and realize their importance to the whole, like little figments of conscience that haunt until they are reasoned into clarity.
We see the the path of Oppenheimer (brilliantly played by Cillian Murphy) to Los Alamos—a terrain he loves ("If I could combine physics with New Mexico, my life will be perfect"), through European studies—he gives lectures in Dutch—meeting the great minds of physics—Heisenberg, Bohr—then re-enters the U.S. to teach at Berkeley, hoping to initiate a field of study in quantum physics, which starts with one student, then many. Concerned with unionizing the colleges for faculty and techs, he flirts with the Communist Party, but, does more with one of their members, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), who will challenge him, mystify him, and ultimately be used against him.
He marries Kitty Puening (Emily Blunt), has a child, and although he's playing with things nuclear, he can't seem to manage a nuclear family. He's approached by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to lead the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear bomb before the Nazis, and although Groves knows Oppenheimer's leftist leanings, he still wants "Oppie" to lead the project—"I wonder if you could tell me how the Army would treat a humble physicist" "I would if I ever met one"—and as part of the project, Oppenheimer figures out the best rail-access for delivering fissionable material from three corners of the country and winds up with New Mexico, isolated, empty of population and surveillance, to build something that is only a theory...before the Nazi's do. "We have one advantage," Oppenheimer tells Groves. "Antisemitism." Germany has driven out its top nuclear physicists.
Well, you know the story. We've all lived in a world with constant nuclear brinksmanship, and the few souls who remember a time before "The Bomb" are dying off. We're used to it now (which seems inconceivable to me) and we're at a time of such complacency that you still hear mentions on the news of "nuclear options" and "tactical nukes." But, Oppenheimer takes us back to a time when the Atom Bomb was not only apocalyptic, but also inconceivable. At the time of its creation, there were a lot of "unknowables" about the Bomb. All they knew was that it would be big and cause a lot of destruction in a wide area—a city destroyer. But, at the time of the Trinity test, nobody knew if the chain reaction in the air would stop or if it would keep feeding on itself, incinerating the area, and possibly more. And, they didn't know anything about fallout.
The fallout—of all kinds—is the new thing here. With the responsibility of building a weapon with so much destructive power—with the complete agency of the government to do it—comes with it the emergence of those who see that power and covet it. And this is where the Strauss story comes in. Played quite amazingly by Robert Downey Jr., Lewis Strauss is a political operative and functionary, whose ego cannot merely appreciate the accomplishments of Oppenheimer and his team, so he must control it, harness it, and by doing so, subvert it to his own ends. As Oppenheimer did to nuclear fission, Strauss does to Oppenheimer and does so with a cold-blooded zeal. And given Oppenheimer's past propensity to fill any intellectual void with affairs and radical politics, Strauss is given the very weapons needed to undermine any attempts to prevent the scientist's efforts to keep the destructive genie contained, slowing nuclear proliferation and ever-increasing mega-tonnage. "Amateurs chase the sun and get burned," Strauss says at one point "Power stays in the shadows."
Oppenheimer is a solid three hours long, packed pillar to post with detail and small roles by very good actors—Nolan newbies like Rami Malek, Casey Affleck, Alden Ehrenreich, Josh Hartnett, James Remar, Jason Clarke, and vets of past films like Kenneth Branagh, David Dastmalchian, Matthew Modine, Tom Conti, Gary Oldman—and one may begin to think that the Strauss story gets a bit superfluous and should even be cut, but it is essential to the story and theme of how one man can make a difference, for good, evil or both. And of how power corrupts—even the pursuit of power corrupts—and though one may blaze with brilliance like a nuclear flash, it is not self-perpetuating...and fades...even if it consumed by itself.
Yeah, I took a course in college. But, you learn something new every day...if you're doing it right.
Nolan wrote the screenplay, based on the 2005 biography "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" and starts with these apt words: "Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity."
U.S. Marshals(Stuart Baird, 1998)A sequel to The Fugitive, but where that film's Dr. Richard Kimble had been captured and cleared of the murder of his wife, it would seem a little silly to have him go through the same situations, innocent of another horrible crime with which he's charged.
Talk about "Double Jeopardy!"
But, Tommy Lee Jones received a much-deserved Oscar for his portrayal of U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard, so if the success of The Fugitive dictated a follow-up, best that it concentrate on Gerard and his team of dedicated if eccentric agents working with him, that made so much of an impact in the earlier film. So, along with Jones, came back Joe Pantoliano, Daniel Roebuck, Tom Wood, and LaTanya Richardson Jackson, their wise-cracking timing just as smart-alecky and operating just enough off the rails for "Big Dog" Gerard to rein them in.
But, whereas Gerard in the first film is the active member of a squad seeking to run down a fugitive from justice, here he stumbles into the assignment, accidentally becoming involved in the case in a situation not unlike how the character—with a different first name—was directly, and personally, involved in the escape of the TV "Fugitive." He's part of the deputized contingent escorting prisoners when the transport carrying them suffers a catastrophic accident.
How did he get there? A fugitive-round-up that goes a bit South leading to "excessive force" complaints puts him in dutch with his commander (Kate Nelligan), and as "punishment" he's assigned to escort his prisoners to their holding facility by plane.
Too bad that he doesn't know that the movie's been following a parallel track of following an unrelated investigation into the murder of two Diplomatic Security Service agents trying to stop an exchange of diplomatic secrets. The main suspect of that case is one Mark Roberts (Wesley Snipes), who has been posing as a truck driver but was arrested following a traffic accident. Roberts' fingerprint was found on the scene of that double-murder and now he's being transported on that same plane. Trouble is, he's been targeted for assassination, and that attempt led to the plane crashing. Roberts escapes and Gerard leads the investigation to find him.
He's not alone, though. Along with his usual squad, he's saddled with DSS agent Royce (Robert Downey Jr.), who's a special kind of cocky that just rubs everybody the wrong way, and who's in a big "hurry-up" to apprehend Roberts, even if it means disobeying procedure and going all-cowboy, moves that turn Gerard twenty-five shades of cranky.
While Roberts is working underground to find out why he's been framed, Gerard and crew go to the source to find out about their quarry. Security footage of that double homicide shows two things—that Roberts' actions were self-defense and that he was wearing gloves, contrary to the fingerprint evidence he'd been assured of. But, Gerard being Gerard, he still pursues leads leading to Roberts, while also wanting to find out what the story is. Complications arise to make him double-down on his efforts to find Roberts—who he learns is actually a CIA operative named Mark Sheridan, suspected of trying to sell U.S. intelligence to the Chinese.
Director Stuart Baird started his career in film as an editor—and a great one, at that--editing Tommy, Die Hard 2, and several films of Richard Donner's including The Omen, Superman, and the first two Lethal Weapon films. His first film as director, the Kurt Russell starrer Executive Decision, was a Warner Bros. programmer that proved to be a trial by fire with quarreling actors—only slightly mollified by million dollar pay-checks—and he was able to deliver a fast, furious hijacking drama that had the momentum to keep plot-holes pushed to the backs of audience's minds.*
U.S.Marshals was his second stint in the director's chair**and he had big expectations to fill. The Fugitive had been a big action hit and Baird and his scripter (John Pogue) stacked the film with chases, a couple of spectacular stunts, and shifting narratives and divided loyalties. He also had a bigger canvas--Executive Decision was claustrophobically centered around the interior of a 747 Boeing passenger jet--and he took advantage of it, not only employing varying urban environments, but also Louisiana swamps, even a massive grain freighter.
But, the highlight stunt is one that parallels the "Kimble jumps the dam" sequence in The Fugitive—although appearing much later in its respective film—is Sheridan's jump from the roof-ledge of a building to catch a moving train. It is absolutely ludicrous in imaginable consequences and injuries, but Baird's set-up and editing makes it look plausible...and thrilling...even if Gerard is slow in firing his pistol.
This is the second film for much of the cast and they're all uniformly great. The only exception being Robert Downey jr. who, frankly, "protests too much" in his role as the square peg in Gerard's posse. Downey is a miracle-worker as an actor, no one could dispute that, but, here, he works against the movie as much as he seems to work against bringing this fugitive in. Where someone in his position should be a bit more low-key, Downey's performance is a grand-stander that immediately puts him in the audience's cross-hairs as somebody "not right." And for all the tsuris his character causes Gerard, you wonder why Deputy Marshal Sam doesn't just keep him out of the way by assigning him clerical work.
U.S.Marshals is almost a very good movie, if it didn't stumble so much trying to be as good as The Fugitive, but, unfortunately, it takes a very simple formula and complicates it to no good effect. In raising the stakes, it instead just diminishes the returns.
* For example: Sheridan heals awfully fast—his auto accident at the beginning of the film breaks his arm and puts him in a neck-brace, yet that doesn't seem to slow him down any; "Mythbusters" proved that a Smith & Wesson pistol couldn't shoot out the window of an passenger plane, so a less-powerful zip-gun CERTAINLY shouldn't, which would've stopped the movie in its tracks; and although I appreciateIrène Jacob(as Sheridan's girlfriend) running around in a little black dress, it's absolutely ludicrous that Sheridan would attempt to go on the run with her in the cemetery scene—even if she was wearing sensible shoes.
** Baird's third--and so far last—directing effort was the fourth--and last—film featuring the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" cast, Nemesis. He has continued to edit films, most notably two James Bond films of the Daniel Craig era, Casino Royale and Skyfall.
Struggling with writing a review of Cyrano, the latest from director Joe Wright. So, in the meantime, here are a couple reviews from his past work that I haven't put up yet.
In this environment, while recovering from a nasty bicycle accident Los Angeles Times feature reporter Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) is contemplating another failed idea for a column, when he hears, echoing, a high sonority piercing the white noise. It emanates from Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (Jamie Foxx)—homeless, schizophrenic, sawing out pure tones from a violin with only two strings, the sounds of the others only imagined in Ayers' head. It's the stuff human interest columns are made of: a Julliard drop-out, cast adrift amidst the flotsam and jetsam on economic beachrocks, whose music cuts through the din. Soon, Lopez's column puts a face on the L.A. homeless community (numbering 90,000) and the public responds, including the donation of a no-longer-used bass-cello, Ayers' original instrument, and Ayers' simple existence gets complicated.
Joe Wright has made two rarefied films set in the English gentry (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement), but this urban tale of harmony amidst grinding chaos, propels his gifts into a new arena. No longer able to settle on the classical symmetry of English estates, this film is jagged, off-kilter, and sonically and visually complex, both in exterior spaces and in the echoing interiors of Ayers' mind. Music soon supplants the chattering roar of the film, softening and simplifying it, finally allowing it to soar, sometimes literally, evoking the peace that soothes Ayers' mind. But those moments are all-too brief, as the two men are both impacted by each other's demons.
That jagged, off-kilter quality is also necessitated by the editing rhythms Wright is forced into by his principal stars, two of the better "riffers" of the current crop of young actors. Downey, Jr. and Foxxintersect each other, the latter, in a constant stream of focused non-sequiturs, while the former interjects whenever he can, like Ayers' music trying to find structure in the jumble of words and thoughts. The editing of their scenes together is tight and, frankly, a little daunting to consider how difficult it must have been. Like the rest of the film, it succeeds if, in not bringing order to chaos, it offers a respite from disorder.
And, traditionally, Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day...
"Nobody Goes Full-Retard"
There's a good idea in Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder, a comic story about a trio of self-indulgent actors making a Viet-Nam era war film. By a Machiavellian director's conceit, they end up abandoned in a jungle pursued by drug traffickers, with nothing but their persona's to protect them.*The film tosses in more inside-Hollywood jokes than a Scary Movie installment, and some of them turn out to be actually funny.
The trouble is the film itself is top-lined by self-indulgent actors all vying for screen-time to see how broadly they can play their parts. It's meant to be satire, and it's plenty satirical, as long as Stiller, Robert Downey, Jack Black and Tom Cruise are making fun of the Hollywood excesses of...other actors.**But one is reminded of a less-disciplined, unfunny version ofIt's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in the broadness of the playing, and heavy-handedness with which its presented. Imagine Dr. Strangelove if every performance had the wing-nut intensity of George C. Scott's.
Tropic Thunderbrays and screeches constantly, it's soundtrack thudding with an annoying loudness for scenes even taking place in the quiet of night. There might have been some worry on the studio's part about letting the movie breathe, or fear that the pace might slacken. All well and semi-good. But it gives the film the light and airy feeling of a train barreling into a brick wall. And the frenetic style and the frequent unintelligibility of the actors makes it a frustrating movie-going experience.
Still, there are moments: the movie starts with a commercial and previews for films featuring the characters in the film, and they are inspired little mini-movies that skewer trailer-style marketing, as well as Hollywood hype. None too subtle, but they're mercifully short and focused. Then there's the performance of Matthew McConaughey, as the distracted agent of Stiller's Tugg Speedman, a breezy graceful performance that's funny and relaxed, but just as nuanced as the other, more aggressive performances.
At the opposite end of the scale is Cruise's studio-headcase Les Grossman. Made up with a balding pate and fat-suit, it's played with a giddily vulgar intensity that's pure hyper-Cruise; one wonders if Tom can play a real human being anymore, or for that, even recognize one. Still, it's quite the artery-popping performance.
But ultimately one is left with a bunch of absurdist little off-ramps that go no where, as in the dramatic send-up typical of the testosterone/weeper when Tugg implores Lazarus, "You tell the world what happened here!"
A puzzled look passes over Lazarus' face: "What happened here?"
"I don't know" is the reply.
I found myself laughing at the vacuousness of the exchange, but now, in retrospect, I regret it. Maybe I was desperate for a laugh at that point.
At one point Speedman and Lazarus are discussing acting techniques, and the former brings up a disastrous attempt at a feel-good Oscar-bait film playing a disabled person. "Everybody knows you don't go full-retard," says Lazarus. "Autistic, yes. Imbecilic, yes. Full-retard, no."
And yet they made this movie, anyway.
* What's really funny about the script is the cribbing of the making of Apocalypse Now. Back in the early stages of Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope film factory, the plan was for screenwriter John Milius and director George Lucas to make the film "guerrilla-style" by actually dropping the actors and a skeleton crew in Viet-Nam to make the movie. Today, Lucas admits the idea was crazy. Milius still imagines it as a lost opportunity for adventure.
** It's pretty obvious who is being made fun of here: Stiller makes a wicked stab at Cruise mannerisms, Downey is tweaking Russell Crowe and heavy-method actors--his Aussie Kirk Lazarus undergoes treatments to turn his skin black and never breaks character from a dialect straight out of Amos n' Andy, and Jack Black is one of the long line of overweight, drug-addicted comedians on a short fuse. And though Cruise has cause to lampoon Summer Redstone, his movie mogul is more in the Weinstein mode (andis supposedly based on Stiller's production partner Stuart Cornfeld).
Wilhelm Alert: @ 2:25 into the film proper (if you can call it that)
Good Night, and Good Luck.(George Clooney, 2005) There had been talk about an "Edward R. Murrow" movie for a very long time, and there'd been quite a few actors who fancied the role—Roy Scheider and Daniel J. Travanti being two that I know of—but nothing had ever been done beyond the script stage. That was the issue; where would you start? The man who had been such a cornerstone of journalism through its transitions from print to radio to television, and had a personal hand in how those mediums affected the form and presentation, had a multi-storied career. Like Lincoln, where would you start and where would you end? What was the section that you would concentrate on that would make the boldest, most informative statement about the man, his principles, and how he fought for them? His work as a radio broadcaster in London during World War II? His ballsy documentaries running in primetime on CBS during the 1950's? But, the seminal moment—his greatest moment and the one that started the end of his career—was when he took on Joe McCarthy.
Clooney (who also co-wrote with producing partner Grant Heslov) begins his film with another "Murrow Moment"—October 25, 1958, to be exact—when he took his broadcast journalist cronies in the RTNDA*to task for letting their values slip in a speech where he was to be given an "honorarium" three months after his last documentary for CBS News. Murrow started the speech with what would amount to him as a prep-joke: "This just might do nobody any good."
It didn't, other than to pass Murrow into Legend. It was seen by his former boss at CBS, William Paley (played by Frank Langella in the film) as a final stab in the back, after years of back-and-forth about the value of Murrow's "brand" of news at CBS. But, Murrow was never afraid to speak truth to power. He was never afraid to put out both sides of an issue. He was never afraid to share bad news. He might have hoped that his reputation would save him, and in a less corrupt industry that might have been true, but Murrow was too well-read, even if it was just the hand-writing on the wall.
At the time of the McCarthy broadcast, the prevailing attitude at CBS is fear, with a healthy dose of paranoia, as described by the film: reporters Joe Wershba (Robert Downey Jr.) and Shirley Lubowitz (Patricia Clarkson) are constantly looking over their shoulders—they haven't told anybody at CBS they're married as its against company policy; anchor Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise) is facing crises both personal and professional—he's just been divorced and he's being smeared in the press as a "pinko"—not quite a "red", but just "red" enough; CBS News director Sig Mikelson (Jeff Daniels) is concerned about a piece Murrow (David Strathairn) and his producer Fred Friendly (Clooney) are doing about a U.S. Air Force officer recently discharged from the military for suspected members of the Communist Party in his family—at the officer's hearing, the charges were sealed, a clear violation of legal and constitutional rights. If the story is pursued, there is concern of a backlash from Senator Joe McCarthy, conducting a red witch-hunt, that could hurt CBS, and Alcoa, their sponsor with government contracts, might get hurt even more. And William Paley has to negotiate broadcast licenses with the government; controversy and criticism won't help at all.
Murrow's instinct is to follow the story, and one of his team recuses himself because his wife had been to Communist meetings before they'd even met, It only solidifies Murrow's commitment: "We're going to go with this story because the terror is right here in this room." When the Air Force story is aired, the officer is re-instated, but Wershba is button-holed in the halls of Congress and told by a source that his boss, Murrow, was once on the Communist payroll. Murrow and Friendly run another piece, hitting closer to home, over a McCarthy hearing of a Pentagon code room employee where the evidence is questionable at best. Murrow offers air-time to respond to the questions raised and McCarthy uses it to attack Murrow. Murrow offers a reply the next week, focusing on McCarthy's rebuttal, his tactics, and lack of clarification or defense of his actions, using McCarthy's own words against him, the result of which is a Senate investigation of the Senator himself. Although it all has the tacit approval of Paley, the result is that Murrow and Friendly's positions at CBS are undermined.
Clooney, in directing, makes a couple of critical choices: he shoots in black-and-white, so there is no disruption between the archive footage and the drama going on; he shoots in documentary style to lend the conversations a fast pace and a seeming verisimilitude; and he uses the real footage of McCarthy, so as not to betray any prejudices through casting or directing choices. McCarthy is shown, warts and all, with his failings intact to be judged. He also punctuates the film, approximately every 23 minutes with a jazz song (performed by Diane Reeves) to serve as a "greek chorus." The songs—ironically or suggestively titled—are "TV is the Thing This Year," "You're Driving Me Crazy," "I've Got My Eyes On You," "One for my Baby," "How High the Moon," and (most pithily) "Who's Minding the Store?"
The casting—apart from McCarthy, of course—couldn't be better: Downey, Daniels, Donovan, Clarkson, Langella...and Clooney...give particularly attention and devotion to the words in a screenplay where the words matter. And, in the plum role of Murrow, Strathairn gives a performance that, while not imitating the man, evokes him, the gravitas, and the emotional reserve where someone reacts with thought before feelings—because feelings can be seen on "I Love Lucy." More than anything, he evokes the image of Murrow as we want to remember him—the television knight with a typewriter, not a sword, and a shield of cigarette smoke, that makes him vulnerable, but no less chivalric or prepared to engage because of it.
"It is my desire if not my duty to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening in radio and television, and if what I say is responsible, I alone am responsible for the saying of it. Our history will be what we make of it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred year from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes of one week of all three networks, they will there find, recorded in black and white and in color, evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information; our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses, and recognize that television, in the main, is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture, too late."
* The Radio-Television News Directors Association, although now it's The Radio-Television-Digital-News Association—RTDNA—and every year the give out the Edward R. Murrow Awards
Bullet-Time or "Forewarned is Fore-armed (and Don't Call Me 'Shirley')"
"'Well, well,' said he, at last. 'It seems a pity, but I have done what I could. I know every move of your game. You can do nothing before Monday. It has been a duel between you and me, Mr. Holmes. You hope to place me in the dock. I tell you that I will never stand in the dock. You hope to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me. If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.'
"'You have paid me several compliments, Mr. Moriarty,' said I. 'Let me pay you one in return when I say that if I were assured of the former eventuality I would, in the interests of the public, cheerfully accept the latter.'
"The Final Problem" Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadowsis the inevitable (and one should say quick-on-its-heels) follow-up to Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, and as an adaptation of Conan Doyle's "The Final Problem," It has as much source-relationship as the later Bond films have to Fleming—the bare-bones structure is there, but it's pumped, plumped, and trumped-up to fulfill the needs of action, humor and modern audience identification.
Really, "The Final Problem" is enough, we don't need the world-conquering machinations of Professor Moriarty (The Napoleon of Crime, the Scourge of London, and Holmes' best match) to make him a worthy adversary. He merely needs to be omnipresent by means of his web of chicanery, rather than an omniscient history-maker. In fact, Conan Doyle's Moriarty would rather his bad work went undetected, as opposed to this movie's version producing a shattering World War. Here, in the words of Robert Downey Jr.'s Holmes, the plot is "so overt, it's covert," involving twins who aren't twins, TB, the Romany, anarchists, darts for various purposes, intricate explosive devices and not-so-intricate shell-firing ones, countries that can't be named ("although they speak French and German"), and the prospect of "war on an industrial scale."
20/20 hindsight always looks like genius when set in the past.
Actually, it's pretty clever how the doom-laden inevitability of "The Final Problem" is translated into the fore-shadowing of the war-torn 20th Century (the screen-writers are the wife-husband team Michele Mulroney and Kieran Mulroney*), and its focus on large artillery and semi-automatic "machine-pistols" has a nice hard edge as opposed to the original film's emphasis on the psuedo-occult.
But, director Ritchie seems to have lost of his edge somewhat, as the fight-sequences (and therearemany) are nicely fore-shadowed with flash-cut Holmsian cognitive pre-functioning, but when the fisticuffs and baritsu moves start flying, the action is hard to follow, even when the action is slowed to a crawl—there is far too much ramp-editing and Matrix-y "bullet-time" FX in the film for no good purpose other than to slow down the practical and digital effects and give us the illusion of "wow, that was close." (Thanks, we assume that fire-fights and shellings are dangerous things). However fast the editor can manipulate images, one still gets the impression of the film being a bit too "fussy" for its own good, delaying information or simply obfuscating it for a later time, giving one the impression that one is seeing a lot of the movie twice. Efficient, it ain't, even if the titular character is supposed to be the height of it.
Also, although the first of Downey's adventurings could be seen as being a nicely nuanced (if scruffy) interpretation of The Great Detective, here the character is allowed to go a little more broad, dressing in comedic drag ("I admit, it's not my best disguise") and another, which is actually taken from The Pink Panther series (mind you, Steve Martin's "Pink Panther" series), the comedy is played up and not necessarily in character, and Holmes is seen to be practically infallible—even his getting seriously hurt is all part of his plan.
As fun as it is, one can't help but look at it as a step down—the filmmakers are getting further afield of the Holmes characterization, and it's only a matter of time before the Downey, Jr. version is locked into buffoonery and slapstick, and it comes perilously close to teetering off the edge here. As it is, this plot is more reminiscent of the Basil Rathbone films set during WWII—entertaining if anachronistic fluff.
Paget's Strand Magazine illustration of the first of two Holmes-Moriarty encounters.
We see the the path of Oppenheimer (brilliantly played by Cillian Murphy) to Los Alamos—a terrain he loves ("If I could combine physics with New Mexico, my life will be perfect"), through European studies—he gives lectures in Dutch—meeting the great minds of physics—Heisenberg, Bohr—then re-enters the U.S. to teach at Berkeley, hoping to initiate a field of study in quantum physics, which starts with one student, then many. Concerned with unionizing the colleges for faculty and techs, he flirts with the Communist Party, but, does more with one of their members, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), who will challenge him, mystify him, and ultimately be used against him.
