Calm down, everyone, Oliver Stone liked Oppenheimer

The director who turned the project down admits that he found Nolan's film "mind-boggling"

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  August 2, 2023 | 8:12pm
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Calm down, everyone, Oliver Stone liked Oppenheimer
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Oliver Stone has Oppenheimer fever.

The famously conspiratorial and historically-minded film director, known for the Oppenheimer-esque JFK, tweeted his appreciation of Nolan’s film, which Stone himself turned down the chance to direct. “Saturday, I sat through 3 hours of Oppenheimer, gripped by Chris Nolan’s narrative. His screenplay is layered & fascinating,” Stone tweets. “Familiar with the book by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin, I once turned the project down because I couldn’t find my way to its essence. Nolan has found it.”

Stone calls Nolan’s direction “mind-boggling and eye-popping,” noting the speed with which the director “takes reams of incident and cycles it into an exciting torrent of action inside all the talk.” Unsurprisingly, he was impressed by Cillian Murphy, “whose exaggerated eyes here feel normal.” Of course, that leads one to wonder, are Murphy’s eyes typically abnormal? Never mind our questions because Stone has some notes.

Stone adds a note that he and historian Peter Kuznick made in 2012’s Untold History Of The United States. The director argues that “Japan barely knew what hit them on August 6 at Hiroshima,” citing Major General Curtis LeMay’s firebombings of 100 Japanese cities, killing more than 80,000 in Tokyo and leaving a million homeless.

“Japan did not surrender, as American propaganda would have it, because of the atomic bomb,” Stone’s post reads, “but because a few days later, on August 9, 1.5 million Russian soldiers invaded and destroyed their Imperial Army in Manchuria.”

“Aside from the points mentioned in my previous post, the movie packs in the essence of the tragedy of #Oppenheimer, a man historically in the middle of an impossible situation, though one, as Nolan shows, partly of his own making.”

We await Stone’s review of Barbie and whether or not he did the double feature.

 
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