"Oppenheimer" review — Nolan brings fire from heaven in atomic thriller
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
This film was featured on my Best Films of 2023 list.
Towards the end of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, during one arduous hearing with a small committee, a prosecuting attorney asks Oppenheimer when his regret about the construction and use of the atomic bomb first began. This question frustrates not just Oppenheimer, but the viewer as well. Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is painted as a fool. Did he not realize what a weapon like this would unleash? Why this remorse now? After spending years planning and developing, did the outcome of death, destruction, and international disaster never occur to Oppenheimer or his team? Oppenheimer, as depicted by Nolan and actor Cillian Murphy, is a man of brilliance and supreme shortsightedness, tormented as a young man of a universe opening up before his eyes in new and exciting ways and tormented decades later by fire and death. Maybe it was hubris, maybe it was blindness, or maybe he was just convicted of the righteousness of his cause. Maybe Oppenheimer knew that if he didn’t build the bomb, someone else would. When Prometheus brought down fire from Olympus, did he know what he had unleashed?
Oppenheimer — the twelfth feature film by Christopher Nolan, the director of hits like The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005-2012), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and, most recently, Tenet (2020) — is a cerebral, intimate, yet sprawling insight in the mind of one of the most important and divisive figures of the twentieth century. Spanning about 30 years through one of the most turbulent periods of recent history, split across two primary timelines at a runtime of three hours, with a massive cast of players, pulling off a film of this scale is no small feat. Nolan is remarkably successful here, delivering a truly stunning sensory experience with a breathtaking leading performance by Cillian Murphy. Nolan’s dedication, however, to telling a story on Murphy’s back seems to come at the cost of creating a consistently compelling cast of supporting characters. Still, the pure scale, grandeur, and deep sense of remorse and foreboding that occupies every frame make for a compelling theatrical experience.
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| Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer. Photo: Universal/Syncopy. |
Fission and Fusion define the intercut two halves of Oppenheimer. “Fission,” shot in colour, tells the story from the perspective of Oppenheimer. The second is titled “Fusion.” shot in black-and-white, and tells the story from the perspective of Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.), one of Oppenheimer’s chief rivals in the post-war years. These two halves of the story play off each other well, telling a story where the end and the beginning seem to be one and the same. The film is shot by Nolan’s frequent collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema on stunning IMAX film. Even in a regular theatre, the quality of each image, the striking compositions, powerful lighting, and excellent blocking make the film’s visuals extremely effective. Visually, there is so much to feast on, highlighting Nolan and van Hoytema’s excellent working relationship. There is a visual majesty on display here that makes the film such a delight to look at.
The film tells the true story of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, making for Nolan’s first-ever biopic. It jumps freely through time, backwards and forwards, slowly painting the story from all temporal points all at once. Its earliest moments are set during Oppenheimer’s humble beginnings as a college student in the 1920s. His early academic career is marked by professors who don’t believe in his ability, an inability to handle a laboratory, and a natural distaste for the rigours of algebra. And yet, he is frequented with visions of a new, atomic world and the limitless potential that this new frontier represents. A chance meeting with Niels Bohr (played by Kenneth Branagh) seems to set Oppenheimer back on the right track. “Algebra is like music,” Bohr says. It’s not if you can read the notes, but if you can hear, if you can feel, the music.
Cillian Murphy takes centre stage in a riveting performance as Oppenheimer himself. The film is largely built on the back of Murphy, a fact Nolan and the rest of the cast have been quite open about. Murphy’s performance is as excellent as the early press coverage has promised. He brings such a haunted, tormented presence to the character — portraying his gifts in equal measure as a blessing and a burden. Murphy’s distinctive features give Oppenheimer a sunken, almost skeletal quality. Despite how frustrating and hubristic Oppenheimer comes across at times, Murphy’s emotional and empathetic performance demands that the viewer comes to, in some way, connect with the character.
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| Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. Photo: Universal/Syncopy. |
We pass into the 1930s and Oppenheimer, now equipped with a PhD, is off to build Berkley’s quantum physics department from the ground up. His first class has only one student attend, but he’s not dissuaded, convinced that the revolutionary ideas of quantum physics will drum up enough interest to make the department a flourishing place. As his reputation as an academic grows, Oppenheimer begins to develop some affinity for more revolutionary ideas. He supports the faculty unionization at Berkley, sends money to the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War, and even attends meetings of the Communist Party. Gasp. In the 1930s, Oppenheimer meets many of the most important figures in his life, including fellow academic Ernest Lawrence (played by Josh Hartnett), his future wife and biologist Katherine “Kitty” Puening (played by Emily Blunt), and future lover and Communist Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh).
Quite a bit of the film, particularly the scenes in the “Fusion” section, take the viewer into the years beyond the war, where McCarthyism is holding America firmly in its grasp and Oppenhiemer’s red-tinged past starts to catch up with him. Here, Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss serves as our protagonist’s main foil with the structure of this section revolving around Strauss’ 1959 Senate hearing, where he must reconcile with his tense past with Oppenheimer. The Oppenheimer of the 1950s is a prophet of warning, trying to persuade politicians to pursue a policy of peace as the arms race between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. heats up. Strauss and Oppenheimer find themselves on opposite sides of the atomic debate, most notably in the sale of isotopes and the moral quandaries of the H bomb, which sends Strauss on a desperate path to humiliate Oppenheimer publicly. Downey is excellent as Strauss, giving the character a perfect blend of villainy and profound care for the security of the United States.
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| Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer. Photo: Universal/Syncopy. |
But the primary focus of the film is on Oppenheimer’s leadership of the “Manhattan Project,” a top-secret development project that created the first atomic weapons. As we enter the early 1940s, the Manhattan Project is first spoken about in whispers as a top-secret U.S. government project that all of the country’s top physicists are slowly being recruited to. The project was greenlit on a haunch: the suspicion that the Nazis might have been working on the world’s first nuclear weapon. But the project needs a leader. One day, General Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon) arrives in Oppenheimer’s office with a job offer: he wants Oppenheimer to serve as the project’s director. After some persuading, Oppenheimer accepts the job, restructures the project’s design, and creates a rural town — Los Alamos, New Mexico — where all of those who work on the project can live with their families.
The whole narrative set in Los Alamos is all building towards the 1945 Trinity Test of the first atomic weapon. The Trinity Test itself, which serves as the film’s climax, is a nerve-racking sequence. With the instability of the radioactive ore, unpredictable weather conditions, and a ticking clock to an upcoming peace talk, the desperation for such a weapon is palpable, with any failure being disastrous. Nolan’s use of spectacle throughout the film is restrained, yet awe-inspiring. The photography of the explosion of the bomb puts the sheer scale of destruction on display like few other scenes of violence. The sound design makes the film so visceral and thundering, tearing into the viewer with ferocity. The explosions are mixed quite loudly compared to the dialogue and score, giving them punch and aggression. There is a gravity to the explosion of the bomb, and other scenes of explosive material being detonated, emphasized in the filmmaking that is not often found in other films. While there’s no action in Oppenheimer, the threat of death seems more real, palpable, and heavy here than it does in other more action-heavy stories.
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| The Trinity Test as depicted in Oppenheimer. Photo: Universal/Syncopy. |
The score is what makes sequences like the Trinity Test pop so much. After scoring Nolan’s Tenet, Ludwig Göransson returns as composer here. Göransson’s score reverberates throughout the entire time, accompanying almost every single scene. Nolan has always had a reliance on score, but here it is quite effective, helping to maintain the sense of energy that the film desperately needs. There has been plenty of coverage of Göransson’s ambitious, nearly impossible-to-play score for the film in recent weeks. All of this technical finesse and skill pays off. The rich, distinctive, and dynamic sounds of Göransson’s score give depth and gravitas to the skillful filmmaking at hand.
The film’s real MVP is Nolan himself, who pulls the film’s many pieces together in expert fashion. Twelve films into his career, Nolan is one of the most famous and acclaimed directors working today. It is comforting to know that Nolan is showing no signs of slowing down, delivering one of his strongest films yet. Nolan crafts some excellent sequences and fantastic visual moments, leading to a movie that is comprehensive without losing sight of the atomic question at its core. His character work with Oppenheimer is beautiful, subtle, and nuances. The film’s script juggles so many beats without feeling scatterbrained. It’s a tightly wound, intense, and hypnotic experience.
Oppenheimer is based on the biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. This idea of the “American Prometheus” and the almost mythological weight placed upon Oppenheimer’s shoulders is felt throughout the movie. Oppenheimer is a lot. It’s an emotionally intense experience that drums up some pretty heavy feelings of regret, foreboding, and a world teetering on the edge of total destruction. Early into the theoretical work on the atomic bomb, one scientist suggests that the detonation of one of these devices could set off a chain reaction and ignite the atmosphere of Earth. Thankfully, through more math and theory, the chances of such an event are “near zero.” And yet, when the film concludes, one can’t help but wonder if that reaction is still coming, that the power of the bomb will kill the world in the end. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds . . .
Oppenheimer is now playing in theatres everywhere.
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