I am not a film critic, and make no pretense to being one. So I cannot speak to the subtleties of cinematography, character development, dialogue, story arc, or whatever it is that film critics dissect when practicing their art. But as a commentor on social and political matters of the day, it is impossible to ignore the current, if fleeting, cultural significance of the “Barbenheimer” (what circle of hell is being reserved for whoever coined that portmanteau?) spectacle this summer.

I have not seen “Barbie,” have no plans to see Barbie, and can conceive of no reasonable circumstance in which I would see Barbie. Furthermore, I am mainly bored by whatever political or social controversies it may have shaken loose. I suppose there may be something mildly interesting in exploring what meaning could be gleaned from the juxtaposition of the two movies and what that may tell us about contemporary society, but I’ll leave that to others.

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I did watch “Oppenheimer,” and in my Philistinian judgement it was a very solid, well-done film. It navigates the complexities of J. Robert Oppenheimer, portrayed brilliantly and masterfully by the talented Cillian Murphy, with (mostly) the delicacy and subtlety it calls for. It may just be my cynicism peeking through the curtains, but I went into the movie with more than a little skepticism. Forgivable, I submit, given Hollywood’s characteristic bias and fetish for trendy leftist themes. And there has long been an institutional bias displayed by that community when it comes to the American government’s security programs after World War II, designed to identify and blunt the influence of communists and communist sympathizers in the face of the threat of Soviet expansion.

The focal point of progressive opposition was U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, whose blustering excesses (albeit in pursuit of an altogether noble cause) led many on the left to consider him a threat to the Bill of Rights, the Ten Commandments and the balance of nature itself (the culture wars were far more fascinating and existential back then). It is difficult to conceive of Hollywood producing a movie based on, say, Whittaker Chambers’ book “Witness,” about the testimony given by Chambers (an ex-communist) against Alger Hiss (who was still a communist, and one highly placed in the U.S. State Department) without making Hiss to look like a saint and Chambers a villain; an inverse of reality which Hollywood often excels at pulling off.

So it was rather pleasantly surprising that Christopher Nolan, the film’s director, did not – quite – go entirely down that path. It portrays Oppenheimer as what he was – a genius, in the most apt sense of the word, a man possessed of awe-inspiring intellectual gifts, whose brilliance was instrumental in creating the atomic bomb for the good guys. It does not ignore his moral blemishes – such as his open association with communists; or his communist mistress, with whom he cheated on his communist wife. These are laid out there, having the effect of anesthetizing the audience against the feeling that his being stripped of his security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission was entirely unjustified.

And yet, the old Hollywood left-wing bias lingers. Oppenheimer is still held up as more of a victim than he deserves. The movie, perhaps for the sake of theatrical license, is tendentiously unfair in its portrayals of Gordon Gray, head of the Gray Board which investigated Oppenheimer and ultimately pulled his security clearance, and Admiral Lewis Strauss, a committed patriot and distinguished statesman who was at the time the head of the Atomic Energy Commission which fired Oppenheimer for being a security risk (which by any objective analyses he was), but also voted subsequently to appoint Oppenheimer to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, on whose board Strauss sat.

The movie made a couple other missteps as well; it succumbed to the standard Hollywood equivocation on the Soviet threat, never quite giving it full form; and where a measure of guilt is unmistakably assigned to Oppenheimer, it is in his creation – the atomic bomb – and its subsequent use on Japan. The film ably captures the moral confliction Oppenheimer clearly felt for – literally – playing with fire, but does so in a way that derisively mocks the decision to use the weapon; a decision which no serious historical analysis can deny saved upwards of a million lives – American and Japanese – in ending WWII.

Oppenheimer, overall, treats its controversial subject matter reasonably well, while leaning a little too heavily on the trendy leftist desire to rehabilitate Oppenheimer. Nolan’s otherwise deeply impressive offering would be improved by more accurately presenting the threat posed by the Soviet Union – every bit as real and horrifying as that posed by Nazi Germany – and leaving the viewer with the lesson that even geniuses, even geniuses who did their country and the world a damn good turn, are not immune from the rules.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.