Story Stories
Oppenheimaaaaargh!
How splitting the atom bomb story caused a damp squib.
«A few years from now, assuming the human race isn’t run and we’re not all bones and ashes scattered across a nuclear wasteland, I suspect Oppenheimer will have most of us scratching our peeling heads wondering how it blew away the competition and won just about every award going.»
Matthew Wheeler
50 Pictures Founder
A Best Picture Oscar should, you’d think, be awarded to a film that tells a really good story really well. But it doesn’t always happen. (Crash. The Artist. Shakespeare In Love. Around The World In 80 Days. And now, Oppenheimer.) A film can be visually brilliant, superbly acted, with sharp dialogue, an atmospheric score, incredible sets, and magnificent costumes, and all of this can all come together to mask the fact that the storytelling is actually a bit crap.
The opposite is also true. A writer - six-foot tall, 60-year-old, greying-brown-haired Dan Brown, for example, his piercing blue eyes narrowing in suspicion as this paragraph reveals its true intentions right in front of him – can be absolutely brilliant at storytelling but absolutely shit at writing. The two things are, amazingly, completely separate skills.
The opposite is also true. A writer - six-foot tall, 60-year-old, greying-brown-haired Dan Brown, for example, his piercing blue eyes narrowing in suspicion as this paragraph reveals its true intentions right in front of him – can be absolutely brilliant at storytelling but absolutely shit at writing. The two things are, amazingly, completely separate skills.
So, being an imaginative and hyper-visual film director does not automatically make Christopher Nolan an engaging and compelling storyteller. And the clue to the fact that Nolan’s directing skills occasionally mask a slight shortcoming in his storytelling abilities is his over-reliance on one particularly well-worn narrative device...
Messing with time.
Messing with time.
Deadly Devices
Nolan’s Memento is a good example of when messing with time works. The weird backwards/forwards/the-middle-is-the-end order of events puts us into the protagonist’s mind. Leonard Shelby has anterograde amnesia, so he quickly forgets events, often within minutes, and has to rely on notes, tattoos, and photographs to make sense of his disintegrating world. The effect of Nolan’s clever time-jumping device here is to make us, the audience, know only what Shelby knows at each point in the story, so it enhances the storytelling.
At first glance, Interstellar seems like another Nolan time-warp film. It’s a story about the relative speeds of time and the possibility that the future could influence the past. But Nolan indulges his fascination with time here without bending or rearranging the order of events. He sticks to a conventional timeline to tell the story, and it works.
Two stories where Nolan’s time-warping devices don’t work are Tenet and Dunkirk. Tenet, as that particular saga’s stats show, if you peep with a critical eye, was a boob. And while Dunkirk was a success at the box office, it was a clunky experience to sit through. With the land segment spanning one week, the sea segment covering one day, and the air segment just one hour, it had a structure that repeatedly called attention to itself.
This is Oppenheimer’s problem. Just as in Dunkirk, in the story of Robert J Oppenheimer, Nolan tries to tell too many stories, repeatedly jumping between the 1940s Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer’s 1920s student years, and the black-and-white 1950s hearings.
The effect of jumping between times and from colour to black-and-white to colour to black-and-white is to remind us, at every transition, that we’re watching a film.
And the second you remember it’s all just flickering images on a screen, a story’s spell is broken.
At first glance, Interstellar seems like another Nolan time-warp film. It’s a story about the relative speeds of time and the possibility that the future could influence the past. But Nolan indulges his fascination with time here without bending or rearranging the order of events. He sticks to a conventional timeline to tell the story, and it works.
Two stories where Nolan’s time-warping devices don’t work are Tenet and Dunkirk. Tenet, as that particular saga’s stats show, if you peep with a critical eye, was a boob. And while Dunkirk was a success at the box office, it was a clunky experience to sit through. With the land segment spanning one week, the sea segment covering one day, and the air segment just one hour, it had a structure that repeatedly called attention to itself.
This is Oppenheimer’s problem. Just as in Dunkirk, in the story of Robert J Oppenheimer, Nolan tries to tell too many stories, repeatedly jumping between the 1940s Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer’s 1920s student years, and the black-and-white 1950s hearings.
The effect of jumping between times and from colour to black-and-white to colour to black-and-white is to remind us, at every transition, that we’re watching a film.
And the second you remember it’s all just flickering images on a screen, a story’s spell is broken.
Imagine an alternate version of Jaws where Steven Spielberg added an extra hour to the running time by mixing the blood-soaked drama of the shark with an hour of bone-dry public meetings and police disciplinary hearings.
Picture countless black-and-white scenes showing what happened to Chief Brody AFTER he’d killed the shark. Meetings where, looking increasingly fed-up and bored, Brody was asked to explain how he got the Amity Island job in the first place, bearing in mind that he “couldn’t fucking swim!”
That’s Oppenheimer.
Picture countless black-and-white scenes showing what happened to Chief Brody AFTER he’d killed the shark. Meetings where, looking increasingly fed-up and bored, Brody was asked to explain how he got the Amity Island job in the first place, bearing in mind that he “couldn’t fucking swim!”
That’s Oppenheimer.
It takes a perfectly good film about the invention of the atomic bomb and blows it to smithereens by intercutting scenes about Robert Oppenheimer’s post-war PowerPoint-style trials and tribulations with a petty former shoe salesman. In doing this, Nolan repeatedly draws you away from one kind of story and plunges you into another. So, despite being inside Oppenheimer’s head for much of the film, we never grasp his core motivations and can never be fully engaged because we’re regularly forced to leap up and down the timeline of his life.
The story of the Manhattan Project - the bizarre world of scientists and their families living in a made-up, middle-of-nowhere town racing to crack the nuclear code before the Nazis - is surely fascinating enough on its own. No?
No, I hear you cry. The periods on either side of the war are essential here. Nolan is telling the story of Oppenheimer’s life, you moron!
To which I reply, first, no offence taken, and second, but in that case, why not tell his life in the order things happened? One thing leading to another, the way nuclear reactions work. That way, we can appreciate how Oppenheimer’s thoughts and feelings from one time to another influenced what he did.
A person is different at different stages of their life, based on what they went through. To put ourselves in that person’s shoes and experience their life through their eyes, we need to witness those changes, not teleport repeatedly between the changed versions, wondering each time, What the hell am I doing here?
The story of the Manhattan Project - the bizarre world of scientists and their families living in a made-up, middle-of-nowhere town racing to crack the nuclear code before the Nazis - is surely fascinating enough on its own. No?
No, I hear you cry. The periods on either side of the war are essential here. Nolan is telling the story of Oppenheimer’s life, you moron!
To which I reply, first, no offence taken, and second, but in that case, why not tell his life in the order things happened? One thing leading to another, the way nuclear reactions work. That way, we can appreciate how Oppenheimer’s thoughts and feelings from one time to another influenced what he did.
A person is different at different stages of their life, based on what they went through. To put ourselves in that person’s shoes and experience their life through their eyes, we need to witness those changes, not teleport repeatedly between the changed versions, wondering each time, What the hell am I doing here?
I’m not saying Oppenheimer is crap. The non-CGI visual effects are great. The sound design is smart - particularly the silence during the test firing and the thump-thump of feet in the auditorium when Oppenheimer envisions the horror he helped to create. The scenes of raindrops on the lake - expanding circles suggesting nuclear proliferation and the inevitable unwinnability of a nuclear arms race - show how powerful a simple visual metaphor can be.
So, it’s a well-directed film. But is it a well-told story?
Be honest. Were you stifling yawns on several occasions and frowning from time to time? (I fell asleep around the mid-point and had to try again the next day.)
Most tellingly, would you want to watch it again?
So, it’s a well-directed film. But is it a well-told story?
Be honest. Were you stifling yawns on several occasions and frowning from time to time? (I fell asleep around the mid-point and had to try again the next day.)
Most tellingly, would you want to watch it again?
A film I have watched many times and would happily watch again is the aforementioned Jaws. My favourite scene is the one where Sam Quint (the barnacle-bearded shark hunter played by Robert Shaw) gives a drunken monologue about the USS Indianapolis. Quint was one of the crew who had “just delivered the bomb.... the Hiroshima bomb” - Oppenheimer’s deadly Little Boy - the first nuclear bomb to be dropped over a city and detonated in anger, killing 140,000 civilians.
The Japanese torpedoed the Indianapolis, and it sank in moments. Quint describes the terror of watching sharks devour your shipmates one by one. In four minutes of gripping, single-minded storytelling - flowing neatly from beginning to middle to end - a drunken fisherman portrays the horror of nuclear war more dramatically than Oppenheimer manages in three overstuffed, period-hopping hours.
The real monster in Jaws, it turns out, isn’t the shark. Quint understands this better than most as he rounds off his story with a smirk.
“Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”
If only Oppenheimer could say the same.
The Japanese torpedoed the Indianapolis, and it sank in moments. Quint describes the terror of watching sharks devour your shipmates one by one. In four minutes of gripping, single-minded storytelling - flowing neatly from beginning to middle to end - a drunken fisherman portrays the horror of nuclear war more dramatically than Oppenheimer manages in three overstuffed, period-hopping hours.
The real monster in Jaws, it turns out, isn’t the shark. Quint understands this better than most as he rounds off his story with a smirk.
“Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”
If only Oppenheimer could say the same.
Takeaway Tip: Hook your audience with a single line and reel them in
The most powerful way to convey complex ideas is usually through simple, focused storytelling. When crafting your next story, resist the urge to leap between storylines and timelines.
Be more Quint. Pick your narrative line and follow it.
Matthew Wheeler is a 50 Pictures StoryFINDER and StoryTELLER
Photo credits: Envato Elements