SPOILER WARNING: This post, after a brief spoiler-free review section, will contain full spoilers for Oppenheimer, Barbie and Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, and some for Across the Spiderverse. Movies are so back. While they are having their Barbieheimer moment, it seems worthwhile to gather thoughts of myself and others on both movies, and also mention two other recent pictures.
How on earth do you get the idea that Oppenheimer said the nuclear bomb was a tragedy? It presents its building as a race against the Nazis doing the same, and everyone agrees they are bad. It also portrays the Soviets as a real danger, and there’s no indication that Oppenheimer’s arms control schemes could have worked. The movie presented international politics as tragic, which requires more than pie in the sky thinking and that one be hardheaded about bad governments in the world.
Of these movies I've only seen Barbie and I don't know if it's exactly a good movie but it is very interesting. I think it's good art because people can see so many different things when they watch this movie. This movie can say all kind of things depending on how you watch it.
Having said that, I hated the 'how hard it is to be a woman' speech. We live in the easiest time, in the easiest country that humans have ever lived and you're whining about it? Shut up.
"Where you can absolutely cut down on are the nudity and love interests."
No. Even setting aside my prurient interests, I think Nolan did something quite smart with the way he depicted Oppenheimer's interpersonal relationships and their cost to him and others. If anything, I think the movie made a mistake not mentioning his indiscretion with Linus Pauling's wife and the resulting fallout (pun unintended).
I agree that The Entity is given a degree of power to predict that is overblown in the movie, but disagree with your interpretation of the ending.
I think the friendly interpretation is that The Entity _cannot fully predict the IMF_, because the IMF _is nearly-disconnected from the graph of nation-state activities_ it was trained on. The Entity is indeed powerful, but incomplete and not yet scaling to AGI Lovecraftian excess; it still has vulnerabilities and demonstrably still requires human proxies. Even when The Entity predicts events, it predicts imperfectly when people who are in the shadows are involved, roughly in proportion to how in the shadows they are, and indicates that multiple outcomes are possible.
Heck, the Entity runs a whole mission with the goal of just collecting some basic data on Benjy's _motivations_.
So why does Ethan pull off the magic trick successfully? Because The Entity genuinely was unaware that it was within his capabilities, because canonically Ethan _only uses that skill on missions where Ethan has gone black already._ The movie emphasizes that even The Dread Pirate Rob...I mean, the DNI is unaware of the IMF and has no direct contact protocol for the teams other than devices that self-destruct, so presumably they're not within any of the files that The Entity has access to, either.
Ethan Hunt is a hole in the graph, inferrable only by the ragged edges he leaves in the data. The Entity doesn't have enough data to fully predict Ethan, or the insanely dumb things he'll do to try to win -- all it knows is that universes where it appoints Gabriel as one of its proxies, and intentionally trawls Gabriel through arms dealer nightclubs, has a better P_win for The Entity than all the other universes. (Because, we as the audience know, Ethan hates Gabriel and might slip up. The Entity doesn't care why that's the case).
"You can sometimes win battles, and you can impact the balance of power, there are better and worse powers, but you have to know power and that ultimately in all its forms it is your enemy, you have to fight, and you have to fight largely on their battlefield, and some form of power almost always wins the war. The details of how this works should be observed and remembered."
This is so close to a proper Continental post-modernist take, with all that implies (standpoint epistemology, most dramatically), that it hurts.
On Barbie: The "hard to be a woman" speech bugged me too - it seemed so obviously a "hard to be HUMAN" speech that weirdly pretends to only be about women, plus the whole rant seemed tired, like it belonged to some distant earlier time. Like going to a comedy club and getting a long bit about not liking airline food. It only took a couple examples before I found myself saying: yeah, yeah, if you want to be maximally liked you do need to show ALL the positive traits IN MODERATION because having too MUCH of any positive trait can engender jealousy (plus it's a better signaling story to casually HAVE the trait than to have been conspicuously working hard to GET it), while having too LITTLE of a positive trait means you're not aspirational/admirable in that respect.
Too bad; that's humanity for you!
IF you want everyone to like you you'll want to thread that needle of being good but not truly outstanding in all positive traits...but another option is to GIVE UP on the goal of wanting almost everyone to like you and just be okay with knowing only SOME people will like you. There is nothing forcing women - or humans generally - to choose option A yet suffer mightily for falling short of the ideal; they could choose option B instead. Or they could choose A but acknowledge it's a hopelessly unrealistic goal so it's okay and expected to fall short!
Just came back from my Barbie watch. So much subtext was about rehabilitation of the Barbie brand for 2020's women. After every dialogue line about how hard it is to be a woman, the movie insists how hard it is for a corporate brand to be PC. As soon as you listen for this, you will be deafened, the dialogue is shouting it in your ear every minute. [Mattel itself is allowed to be evil; this is to deflect / contrast from the branding image of Barbie, which is being re-positioned to defuse feminist complaints]
which called the movie fascist is indeed a generally awful review and really doesn't deserve much credit, but got the closest of the linked materials to bringing up this take.
"Shut down the internet" was in the Battlestar Galactica's Overton window, they had laws and social norms against networking computers, maybe that's a show we need to generate a little renaissance for to get people to open up to the idea in case it's necessary. You can still have computers, and move data around on cool octagon disks!
How on earth do you get the idea that Oppenheimer said the nuclear bomb was a tragedy? It presents its building as a race against the Nazis doing the same, and everyone agrees they are bad. It also portrays the Soviets as a real danger, and there’s no indication that Oppenheimer’s arms control schemes could have worked. The movie presented international politics as tragic, which requires more than pie in the sky thinking and that one be hardheaded about bad governments in the world.
Of these movies I've only seen Barbie and I don't know if it's exactly a good movie but it is very interesting. I think it's good art because people can see so many different things when they watch this movie. This movie can say all kind of things depending on how you watch it.
Having said that, I hated the 'how hard it is to be a woman' speech. We live in the easiest time, in the easiest country that humans have ever lived and you're whining about it? Shut up.
"Where you can absolutely cut down on are the nudity and love interests."
No. Even setting aside my prurient interests, I think Nolan did something quite smart with the way he depicted Oppenheimer's interpersonal relationships and their cost to him and others. If anything, I think the movie made a mistake not mentioning his indiscretion with Linus Pauling's wife and the resulting fallout (pun unintended).
Don’t you wish you lived in the matriarchal Woketopia BarbieLand?
I kept hoping von Neumann would show up at Los Alamos to solve the symmetry problem og the implosion bomb.
I agree that The Entity is given a degree of power to predict that is overblown in the movie, but disagree with your interpretation of the ending.
I think the friendly interpretation is that The Entity _cannot fully predict the IMF_, because the IMF _is nearly-disconnected from the graph of nation-state activities_ it was trained on. The Entity is indeed powerful, but incomplete and not yet scaling to AGI Lovecraftian excess; it still has vulnerabilities and demonstrably still requires human proxies. Even when The Entity predicts events, it predicts imperfectly when people who are in the shadows are involved, roughly in proportion to how in the shadows they are, and indicates that multiple outcomes are possible.
Heck, the Entity runs a whole mission with the goal of just collecting some basic data on Benjy's _motivations_.
So why does Ethan pull off the magic trick successfully? Because The Entity genuinely was unaware that it was within his capabilities, because canonically Ethan _only uses that skill on missions where Ethan has gone black already._ The movie emphasizes that even The Dread Pirate Rob...I mean, the DNI is unaware of the IMF and has no direct contact protocol for the teams other than devices that self-destruct, so presumably they're not within any of the files that The Entity has access to, either.
Ethan Hunt is a hole in the graph, inferrable only by the ragged edges he leaves in the data. The Entity doesn't have enough data to fully predict Ethan, or the insanely dumb things he'll do to try to win -- all it knows is that universes where it appoints Gabriel as one of its proxies, and intentionally trawls Gabriel through arms dealer nightclubs, has a better P_win for The Entity than all the other universes. (Because, we as the audience know, Ethan hates Gabriel and might slip up. The Entity doesn't care why that's the case).
Great reviews but my favorite part was the Sumner reference.
"You can sometimes win battles, and you can impact the balance of power, there are better and worse powers, but you have to know power and that ultimately in all its forms it is your enemy, you have to fight, and you have to fight largely on their battlefield, and some form of power almost always wins the war. The details of how this works should be observed and remembered."
This is so close to a proper Continental post-modernist take, with all that implies (standpoint epistemology, most dramatically), that it hurts.
They already kind of MADE a Rock 'em Sock 'em robots movie: Real Steel (2011).
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obYuPJH2oTE
On Barbie: The "hard to be a woman" speech bugged me too - it seemed so obviously a "hard to be HUMAN" speech that weirdly pretends to only be about women, plus the whole rant seemed tired, like it belonged to some distant earlier time. Like going to a comedy club and getting a long bit about not liking airline food. It only took a couple examples before I found myself saying: yeah, yeah, if you want to be maximally liked you do need to show ALL the positive traits IN MODERATION because having too MUCH of any positive trait can engender jealousy (plus it's a better signaling story to casually HAVE the trait than to have been conspicuously working hard to GET it), while having too LITTLE of a positive trait means you're not aspirational/admirable in that respect.
Too bad; that's humanity for you!
IF you want everyone to like you you'll want to thread that needle of being good but not truly outstanding in all positive traits...but another option is to GIVE UP on the goal of wanting almost everyone to like you and just be okay with knowing only SOME people will like you. There is nothing forcing women - or humans generally - to choose option A yet suffer mightily for falling short of the ideal; they could choose option B instead. Or they could choose A but acknowledge it's a hopelessly unrealistic goal so it's okay and expected to fall short!
Just came back from my Barbie watch. So much subtext was about rehabilitation of the Barbie brand for 2020's women. After every dialogue line about how hard it is to be a woman, the movie insists how hard it is for a corporate brand to be PC. As soon as you listen for this, you will be deafened, the dialogue is shouting it in your ear every minute. [Mattel itself is allowed to be evil; this is to deflect / contrast from the branding image of Barbie, which is being re-positioned to defuse feminist complaints]
I think this review of the ones Zvi linked (https://im1776.com/2023/07/27/barbie-review/)
which called the movie fascist is indeed a generally awful review and really doesn't deserve much credit, but got the closest of the linked materials to bringing up this take.
"Shut down the internet" was in the Battlestar Galactica's Overton window, they had laws and social norms against networking computers, maybe that's a show we need to generate a little renaissance for to get people to open up to the idea in case it's necessary. You can still have computers, and move data around on cool octagon disks!