And finally the time has come to watch Oppenheimer in the movies!! Expectations met with plenty, the 3 hours of film went by smoothly, a film of text, sound and photography!
Fabulous, impeccable Cinematography by the Swiss Hoyte Van Hoytema.
Born in Switzerland and raised in the Netherlands, van Hoytema studied cinematography at Poland’s National Film School, but only after the Dutch Film Academy rejected his application – twice. Upon graduating, he moved back to Amsterdam and tried to establish himself in the industry. He served as a clapperboard loader for Jules van den Steenhoven, NSC, and as a camera intern for Robby Müller, NSC, BVK, and although he worked with each cinematographer only once, both became mentors.
Van Hoytema previously partnered with Christopher Nolan on Interstellar.
Here it is impossible not to mention that there is a historic moment of two films that compete for all the attention: OPPENHEIMER and BARBIE! Which we will also comment shortly.
The entire movie is shot in IMAX, unfortunately we don’t have any theaters available, but the great thing about this is that it’s shot in open view! Like this? It is a historicist film and based on a structured biography, it is understood that there are images from the time, you can even see some of them below.
Even IMAX specially manufactured a film in B&W, something that did not exist for IMAX.
But going into the cinematography of the film, what you see is a universe of characters, more than 100 I believe, historical characters, great scientists in a very dense text, only not denser than the story itself, because Oppenheimer or Oppi as they called him is considered the “father of the atomic bomb”, which is a giant weight on his shoulders.
I really liked the architectural fidelity of the lighting, that is, lighting very consistent with the time, the indoor environments rarely had more light than life back there provided, another strong point is the external light, due to the tension of the film, the images were rarely full of light or abundant sun, the psychological aspects of light are fundamental in creating the atmosphere of the film, here something that I repeat and repeat, the good lighting in the Director of Photography helps to narrate the story in its moments and not just illuminate. But for me, the highlight of lighting is facial lighting! The best I’ve seen in recent times, because the actors were also wonderful in their interpretation and the light revealed all the feeling of the moment.
It is difficult to even choose a sequence, but the bomb test scene, Trinity, is something complex in light, feeling and sound, which will be one of those scenes that will be remembered for the lifetime of cinema.
