I believe I preferred Day One (1989)

As a fan of both Nolan and the film's subject matter, I'm surprised at how let down I was by this movie. It seemed to make an extremely interesting, fairly straightforward real-life story come off very all over the place, poorly paced, needlessly difficult to follow, and kind of boring.

While I typically appreciate Nolan's big effects, artistic ways of presenting a narrative, and nonlinear structure, for this particular story these tactics came off as very forced and unnecessary. It felt like gratuitous artistry, in my opinion, that ultimately hindered the story more than enhancing it. It was almost gimmicky to me.

In 1989, two films about Oppenheimer and The Manhattan Project were released: the feature film, Fat Man and Little Boy (starring John Cusack and Paul Newman), and the TV movie, Day One, featuring Brian Dennehy and David Strathairn. Despite lacking the grandeur and high production values of Christopher Nolan’s film, I found both to be significantly more informative and, frankly, a lot more entertaining; particularly Day One (Fat Man and Little Boy was a bit meh). Together, both films covered a lot more ground and went into better detail about events such as the bomb from its conception by Leo Szilard and his first attempts to get the government to take notice of the idea, to the political and moral dilemmas of politicians and scientists, the construction of the makeshift town on Los Alamos (and more time spent on how that affected the scientists and their families living there), the scientists who died of radiation at Los Alamos, and just so many more interesting details than such things as Oppenheimer's love life or him having his security clearance revoked.

Granted, the film is titled "Oppenheimer", so perhaps I should give it more of a break for focusing more on him rather than the bomb itself, its construction, or Los Alamos and the events which occurred there.