OPPENHEIMER FILM. Christopher Nolan’s film was released in theaters this Wednesday, July 19, 2023. If “Oppenheimer” seduced critics, did it make the weight at the box office against “Barbie”?
[Mis à jour le 20 juillet 2023 à 09h45] The box office match promises to be tough between “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie”, released the same day. If the film directed by Christopher Nolan is more unanimous on the side of the critics, the public has for the moment given its preference to the Mattel doll, which collected 268,359 admissions on its first day of operation.
But “Oppenheimer” does not have to be ashamed of its results either, since it too was a great success on the day of its release, this Wednesday, July 19: 150,000 spectators in France discovered the biopic on the atomic bomb of Christopher Nolan for this first day. The question now remains how word-of-mouth will impact the theatrical life of these two feature films.
On the critics’ side, the match is tight but gives the advantage to “Oppenheimer” and his press rating of 3.8/5 (26 titles listed) on the Allociné review aggregator, while “Barbie wins the press rating of 3.5/5 (out of 19 titles listed). We detail the reviews of “Oppenheimer” below.
According to the press, the biopic on the complex figure of the inventor of the atomic bomb is “exciting” (Le Parisien), “sophisticated and didactic” (franceinfo) but also a “prodigious bet” (Ecran Large). For the specialized media Cinemateaser, “Chris Nolan continues to lead the great American show towards singular and experimental territories, between intimate portrait and political fresco. Very great cinema.” Télérama, for its part, salutes a “biopic as subtle as it is incarnate”, the performance of actor of Cillian Murphy but also by Robert Downey Jr. are unanimously acclaimed.
Not all reviews, however, are entirely unanimous. This is particularly the case of Liberation, which writes that this film “too much reinforcement of pyrotechnic effects shows nothing of the life of the” father “of the atomic bomb”. For its part, Les Numériques admits that the film is “impressive” but “lacks heart”. It’s the spectators’ turn to form their own opinions this Wednesday.
Synopsis – “Oppenheimer” is a biopic devoted to Julius Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant researcher known for having led the creation of the atomic bomb in the United States during the Second World War.
In 1945, Julius Robert Oppenheimer changed the face of the world. It is to him that we owe the invention of the atomic bomb, a weapon which completely upset the balance of power in the world and which caused a veritable massacre of the population in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki August 6 and 9, 1945. These bombings killed more than 200,000 people. Faced with this tragedy, the scientist denounces the massacre to President Truman and resigns from his post. Accused of sympathizing with the Communists during the Cold War, his security credentials were withdrawn in 1954. He died on February 18, 1967, at only 62 years old.
How was the scene of the explosion of the atomic bomb shot?
Who says biopic on Julius Robert Oppenheimer, necessarily says scene where we see the atomic bomb exploded. Near TF1, the film crew returned to the shooting of this sequence. We thus learn that Christopher Nolan chose not to use digital effects so that the viewer feels “the feeling of threat” during the blast of the first nuclear explosion. Actor Cillian Murphy explains that this sequence required several days of filming in the New Mexico desert. However, the way in which this scene was shot and reproduced with precision will not be detailed by the film crews. “The accomplishment of this impossible task arouses a feeling of victory and enthusiasm, details the director at the microphone of TF1. But the implications for the world are devastating and will always be felt. I like to think that we knew capture that in film.”
Why The Oppenheimer Movie Will Be Very Different From Other Nolan Movies
In an interview before the release of “Oppenheimer” on July 19, 2023, Christopher Nolan described the particularities of this explosive feature film. The director of “The Dark Knight” and “Inception” assured that his latest film contains more romance, “a lot more than what [qu’il]The film contains “nudity scenes and sex scenes” between Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh, who plays the scientist’s former fiancé, which the director had never allowed himself to do so far in his filmography. Other differences exist between “Oppenheimer” and the rest of the filmmaker’s filmography, since it will be the director’s longest film, and the first since “Insomnia”. (2002) to receive the “R” rating, synonymous with “Restricted” in the United States. This means that minors under the age of 17 must be accompanied by an adult to see the feature film in theaters.