Kagemusha (1980)

Kurosawa likes to do this thing where he makes a scene three or four times longer than it needs to be just to try and give the audience time to appreciate the gravity of what’s happening. It's on full display here, like during the nighttime battle at Takatenjin Castle, or at the end when the army is slaughtered and there’s like 5 minutes of slowmo shots of horses kicking their legs in the air.

I know that in the 1980s they loved their slowmo shots. I don't mind these big atmospheric scenes, but I don't think that I like them, either. Kagemusha moves along at such a good pace for so much of its runtime, that when we're treated to 10 minutes of men shouting and running back and forth in the dark, you feel it. I wanted to get up and make a cup of tea and then come back when the story got going again.

However, the parts of the movie where the story does got going are a treat. Visually stunning, dramatic, propulsive. And Tetusya Nakadai is a treasure as per. I could spend the rest of my life watching movies where he just stares traumatised into the middle distance.

80% of the runtime is a Good Movie. It looks really good and is well-acted. Ralph Fiennes looks like my grandpa, which is a bit uncanny.

The sound design is a little weird—there are lots of scenes with gratuitous breathing noises as people stand around wondering what they should do. It also feels like the sound designer unnecessarily muted background noise, so that when characters talk the sound sort of pulses in and out to ensure total silence in between the lines.

There are subplots that are not resolved and never go anywhere—terrorist plots occurring outside, Fiennes’ crisis of faith—and subplots that appear out of nowhere in the final five minutes of the film and also don’t go anywhere.

The whole movie builds and builds and then goes, “Oh no! Anyway,” like Jeremy Clarkson, and then it’s the end.

It’s good! It’s Spielberg so it’s going to be good. I watched this basically entirely on the premise that it's adapted from a J. G. Ballard book: the last J. G. Ballard book I read was a bit of a trip.

The pacing of The Empire of the Sun was a little weird, it kept going in fits and starts. There’s a big time skip in the middle that I think was the right thing to do. But also a lot of what we would now recognise as tropes that seem a little bit facile.

The kid on the other side of the fence basically just got used as a prop, and multiple props at that. I don’t know what the story was with his stand-in parents, Natasha Richardson and that other bloke. For a little while I thought they were his parents and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t reacting more powerfully to seeing him again.

On the other hand, boy oh boy can Christian Bale act. Seeing his face, already so expressive but so familiar from his adult work, was a real treat. And John Malkovich’s character was terrific as well, always ready with a bon mot. I appreciated that his disappearance in the end actually turned out to be a bit of a blessing: if Jamie had gone with him then I suspect that things would have gone poorly. Davy, the other boy that John Malkovich's character was close to, was nowhere to be seen later on (I think).

Although geographically I just could not figure out how everything hung together, how people showed up or disappeared. I guess that’s just the Magic of Moviemaking (tm)!

I think I agree with Craig Mod about wishing that it was more a story about the birth of the atomic bomb rather than the story of Robert Oppenheimer specifically. I read Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb back in my twenties at some point, and it, along with Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, are the only two books I really remember from back then.

Still—Oppenheimer was great! I think that given the direction that Nolan decided to go with it, he made the best movie he could have made.

I think that Oppenheimer's many infidelities could probably have taken up a bit less screentime—by the end they're numerous enough that they barely get acknowledged—but it's a character study, so I suppose it's to be expected. Not being acquainted with Oppenheimer's fall from grace directly after the war, I was expecting that the political drama would end in disappointment, but I was glad to see that Oppenheimer was, at least nominally, politically rehabilitated (Soviet style!) much later. Downey Jr.'s Strauss was fantastically acted, but the twist-villain thing in the third act felt a little rushed.

Something I hadn't heard much about before seeing the film: the sound was absolutely fantastic! See this in theatres if you can. I guess I could have expected this of Christopher Nolan, but the dynamics of quiet and roaring noise addedso much to the inner turmoil of Oppenheimer's relationship to the gadget he created.

Not a complaint so much as an observation: I would have watched like a further five minutes of the Trinity detonation, if Nolan had really liked slowed things down and given us the nanosecond by nanosecond on the first detonation. Maybe fetishising nuclear apocalypse like that is problematic.

And a final observation: Jason Clarke's Roger Robb kept saying nucular instead of nuclear and it drove me right up the wall. Knowing Nolan's eye for detail this was probably intentional.

4/5