Everything from the cast to script makes you question the director's competence as a film maker. In fact, it feels like something a fresh-out-of-college film school graduate would make, as nothing about it feels original or organic but instead taken straight out of the director's college notebook.
Consequently, we get a sequence of different cinematic effects and manipulations, mise-en-scène of all sorts, that are constantly in conflict with the different aspects of the movie: with Golda as a person, Golda as the Prime Minister of Israel, and the war. I believe some of it could be mitigated weren't it for the director's assumption that viewer is familiar with Israel's history, which made him put little-to-no effort to explain Israel's size, politics, and who Golda Meir was prior to becoming the PM. Which leads to my second problem: for whom this movie was made? The movie is about Israel, and the fact that the movie is released on the 50th anniversary of the war is not a coincident, but it's not just of the Israelis - the movie was produced by British and American studios, there are British actors playing 'major' roles, and everyone is speaking English. But why? Don't get me wrong, Helen Mirren looks great as Golda, but is it really appropriate to make it a movie in a foreign language and foreign actors when the whole story is about a country that fights to protect its identity as a Jewish, Hebrew-speaking, nation?
There are plenty of other issues I'm not happy about, like the director's tendency to forsake historical accuracy to over-dramatize certain events and people, but the movie is honestly not worth overanalyzing - it's just a bad documentary and drama.
So, what Oppenheimer has to do with this? In my opinion, they share similar issues, and - interestingly enough - use the same movie techniques. However, what makes Golda slightly better than Oppenheimer, is that at least it's relatively short, cohesive, and didn't look half as bad as Oppenheimer despite having a small budget.
Consequently, we get a sequence of different cinematic effects and manipulations, mise-en-scène of all sorts, that are constantly in conflict with the different aspects of the movie: with Golda as a person, Golda as the Prime Minister of Israel, and the war. I believe some of it could be mitigated weren't it for the director's assumption that viewer is familiar with Israel's history, which made him put little-to-no effort to explain Israel's size, politics, and who Golda Meir was prior to becoming the PM. Which leads to my second problem: for whom this movie was made? The movie is about Israel, and the fact that the movie is released on the 50th anniversary of the war is not a coincident, but it's not just of the Israelis - the movie was produced by British and American studios, there are British actors playing 'major' roles, and everyone is speaking English. But why? Don't get me wrong, Helen Mirren looks great as Golda, but is it really appropriate to make it a movie in a foreign language and foreign actors when the whole story is about a country that fights to protect its identity as a Jewish, Hebrew-speaking, nation?
There are plenty of other issues I'm not happy about, like the director's tendency to forsake historical accuracy to over-dramatize certain events and people, but the movie is honestly not worth overanalyzing - it's just a bad documentary and drama.
So, what Oppenheimer has to do with this? In my opinion, they share similar issues, and - interestingly enough - use the same movie techniques. However, what makes Golda slightly better than Oppenheimer, is that at least it's relatively short, cohesive, and didn't look half as bad as Oppenheimer despite having a small budget.