I have enjoyed Nolan's films all along until last night, when I viewed his "Oppenheimer".

I've been fascinated by the story of our abrupt entry into the atomic age, I built a 1/3 scale Little Boy for the sixth grade science fair. This being 1966, so the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki really happened only twenty years earlier, which never fully hit me til much later.

So: fair to say I'm reasonably well informed about Oppenheimer and Trinity having read as many books and viewing as many films as I could.

So Nolan's fever dream of a film tells the story (so I've been told) in three nearly incomprehensible hours. Not to rip on unconventional cinema- big Charlie Kaufman fan- but this was a hard watch for me. Character development is more or less absent, or left to the viewer. I used to think I knew every player in the story, but it helped little here. The scenes are constantly interrupted by flash forwards (so I assume) of sparks flying and general SFX distractions probably designed to symbolize and constantly remind us of the horror they brought to the world. But the only horror I got out of it was the three hours I'll never get back.