Venice Review: Oliver Stone’s ‘Nuclear’
Surprisingly, Nuclear is not one of Oliver Stone’s “devil’s advocate” documentaries, the spate of films he started making in the early 2000s that seemed to troll liberals everywhere by spending time with notorious human-rights abusers such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. In the real world right now, nuclear power is about as toxic as those three men put together, but this intelligent and surprising film is an investigation into how that PR damage came about, which makes it arguably more of a piece with his famous conspiracy thriller JFK than any of those. At nearly two hours, it’s a hard watch, being dominated by Stone’s dense, monotonous voice-over and featuring scientists with next to no screen presence (this explains a lot about Adam McKay’s decision to shoot Don’t Look Up with A-listers). Nevertheless, it puts forward a lot of unexpected proposals about nuclear energy, debunking powerful myths along the way.