These days, it seems there’s no better way to get under the skin of cinephile figureheads than by uttering “blockbuster,” a word that conjures up images of CGI-laden cape shenanigans and other stentorian plights that offer up escapism via a sledgehammer rather than a magne.
Of course, with Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan having stepped into the fray this summer, the blockbuster game has been brought back down to Earth thanks to the combined efforts of Barbie and Oppenheimer, the latter of which has since earned a vocal supporter in Oliver Stone; a known vocal detractor of all things Marvel and John Wick.
The Scarface scribe, who once decried John Wick: Chapter 4 as “not believable” shortly after deploying the bold strategy of watching the film on a plane, seems to have fallen back in love with blockbusters again thanks to Nolan’s gripping biopic, and while a prolific filmmaker gushing over Oppenheimer isn’t much in the way of a newsworthy event, Stone’s adoration for Christopher Nolan’s latest is sweeping, with extra-special praise given towards Cillian Murphy’s leading performance and the film’s foundational sense of tragedy.
Stone also mused on a time where he had the opportunity to delve into the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer on the big screen, ultimately deciding against it after feeling unable to sink his creative chops fully into the meat of American Prometheus, the biography that Nolan’s film is based on.
We’re going to go out on a limb and say that we drew the long straw in occupying the timeline where Nolan took the reins instead of the much more controversial Stone, especially given the precarious weight of the film’s subject matter. At the end of the day, though, it seems that Stone was also a winner in restricting his Oppenheimer involvement to “audience member,” so perhaps he’d be inclined to agree.