Christopher Nolan loves to make complicated movies. If we make exceptions for the Batman trilogy (and "Dunkirk" which I haven't seen), we have: "Memento," "Insomnia," "The Prestige," "Inception," "Interstellar," and "Tenet." His success indicates that a lot of people like this, but I find it becomes annoying - and less useful in what's nominally a bio-pic.

On the plus side, it's more accurate than most Hollywood-made biopics. As I mentioned, it's complicated to follow: the movie bounces around in time between approximately four different time periods, often staying only twenty seconds before moving to another time period. And Nolan thinks he's clever by making the most modern of these time periods black-and-white - the senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). The commonly accepted trope is to have the "old" footage, the flashbacks, playing out in b/w. But Nolan is too "clever" to use that idea: I suppose it wouldn't have worked anyway with his multiple levels of flashback. The b/w ends up telling the viewer that this is where the story-telling started.

Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a complicated guy. He's incredibly intelligent - and has an outsized ego to match his intelligence. As most people know, he was involved in the creation of the atomic bomb. Nolan tries to provide us with a view inside Oppenheimer's head with visual and auditory imagery, although this got excessive after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped and Oppenheimer finds himself leaving a gathering and stepping into a crispy corpse that crumbles under his foot. It was heavy-handed, and suggested Nolan didn't think Murphy's acting was good enough to convey Oppenheimer's emotional turmoil ... or perhaps he realized his own plot was too complicated and the scene-switching so frequent that the audience wouldn't have enough time to realize it no matter how good Murphy's acting.

Another thing that bothered me about the movie is that it feels like it's about Oppenheimer and the bomb for the first two thirds, but then that black-and-white frame story kicks in and it feels like it's about Oppenheimer vs. Strauss. It's still about Oppenheimer, sure, but between the reveal about Strauss's behavior and the way that story is weighted, it suddenly feels like it's more about Strauss.

Yet another issue with the movie was the stacked and massive cast: the friend I watched it with and myself were both playing "name that actor" all the way through, as small roles were filled by names who would in most cases lead other movies: Josh Hartnett, Florence Pugh, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Gary Oldman. While this meant that even the smallest role was well acted, it was also somewhat distracting. And the sheer size of the cast is another problem: you're expected to mentally track dozens of physicists, a handful of generals, and twenty-plus politicians. Like I said: Nolan likes "complicated."

In the end it's a reasonably good movie that's prevented reaching greatness by the excessive complexity that Nolan thinks creates masterworks. I like complicated movies, but when I spend pretty much the entire run-time working on understanding the structure and trying to keep track of the excessive list of characters, I'm not paying enough attention to the behaviour of the actual characters that I was meant to be appreciating.