30 Seconds: Oppenheimer

Three quick hits from Tim & Kevin's conversation on Christopher Nolan's historical epic.

SPOILER WARNING

The Acting

Tim Keck: The acting was insane in this. I thought everybody was crushing it.

Kevin Bauer: I thought everybody knew that they were in a movie that was going for an Oscar, and they were behaving as though they were going for an Oscar.

The Casting

Tim: I'm sure they played with the celebrity of the actors as well.

Kevin: Oh, for sure. I think there was a concerted effort to cast younger actors as the young scientists. The older actors are the older statesmen in the government and then the younger actors are the new recruits that have been brought in. So it seems like a pretty conscious effort for him to kind of draw a line in the sand right now for who the current movie stars are and who the up-and-coming movie stars are.

Robert Downey Jr.

Tim: I don't necessarily appreciate that the whole movie as a biopic is about Oppenheimer and then all of a sudden it's about Lewis Strauss, who's Robert Downey Jr's character. I think that's a weird shift. I get why, if you have a guy like Robert Downey Jr. wants to do this role, it's great. I think he's crushing, he's giving great monologues, his scenes are interesting… but the whole thing is about Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer’s internal struggles. Oppenheimer's behavior. Oppenheimer fighting the system. And then it turns out that all of this conflict around Oppenheimer was generated by Robert Downey Jr. And it's a story of jealousy, But Lewis Strauss is not involved with creating the bomb. And then all of a sudden he's important. Like, what? Robert Downey Jr. came into this chronologically so late that I felt like the story was over by the time we got to him.

For more of this conversation, check out Nerdy for 30 on Apple, Spotify or Pocketcasts.