Few Hours after Release, People Already Think Oppenheimer Is Problematic
Our pre-release countdown only just stopped ticking, but some viewers already found "issues" with the movie… And the responses they received were hilarious.
So, you go to watch a movie, right? That's a great start: everybody loves movies. So, you go to your local theater and buy a ticket for a movie called "Oppenheimer. " The premise tells you that it follows the life of an American physicist who invented the first-ever atomic bomb, and you think to yourself, "Good enough."
You've sat through the 3-hour-long biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, and after leaving the theater and coming back to your house, you went to sleep. The next morning, as you woke up and started working, you reflected on the movie you'd watched and decided to…
Blast it for following the life of an American physicist.
Well, we hope that you didn't do that — but some people totally did, and while we're used to such discourse over every single movie, it's still somewhat saddening.
"People seem to love Oppenheimer but I'll just say it: I was uncomfy watching yet another movie about tortured white male genius when the victims of the atrocities glossed over by the script—Japanese people, interned Japanese Americans, and Native Americans—had no voice," Li Lai from Mediaversity wrote on her Twitter.
While Li Lai's profile openly states that her specialty is "TV & films graded on diversity," her addressing a literal biopic from this perspective is still somewhat questionable. At least, some of the replies are just golden.
"It never crossed my mind that a movie titled Oppenheimer, focused on the life and work of the eponymous scientist, wasn't a documentary covering all of the elements of WWII," said Twitter user 007Vintage.
The sadder thing yet is that, like many people who agreed with her, Lai admittedly wasn't paying attention to the movie and embarrassed herself. Calling out J. Robert Oppenheimer the way she did, she missed one crucial detail about WWII herself.
"Interesting that you're calling him a "white male genius" when his people were being murdered in Europe at the time for being non-white," replied user MadziJ.
That's right, Oppenheimer was a Jew, and you know what it meant at the time. His friends and relatives were being mulled over by the Nazi war machine back in Europe, and he was working on a weapon to end said war… Just to be called "yet another tortured white male genius" a few decades later by unattentive viewers.
Come on, people: do your research or at least care to watch the movie you're reviewing before coming up with another "this is problematic" statement.