Here we have the first of two movie ‘events’ of this summer—and it’s felt like a while since we’ve certainly had one of those. Between reboots and superhero continuations…it turns out that one way to get people crowding cinemas again is something that’s both new, and still has the style to rope in audiences. Nolan, whatever you feel about him, can certainly pull off spectacle—but let’s see if Oppenheimer is in fact canned sunshine, or a damp squib…
We have yet another runtime of three hours—which seems to be a recurring thing lately, and it’s not something that thrills me. I’m not fond of certain streaming shows essentially becoming movies stretched out over twelve hours either. Still, at times it can be justified, especially with an ‘event’ flick…and here, while the film certainly tries to justify that, it does feel ever so slightly padded near the end, which I’ll get to.
Still, despite that, I’ll certainly credit that it has a zippy pace—chronicling the career of the Father of the Atom, Robert Oppenheimer himself, as played rather well by Peaky Blinders star Cillian Murphy. In fact, the cast is by far one of the strongest points here—Robert Downey Jr is at first almost unrecognizable as our designated villain Lewis Strauss, Emily Blunt is great as Katherine Oppenheimer, Matt Damon is entertaining as always with officer Leslie Groves, and we do have a somewhat underused standout with Florence Pugh as Robert’s Marxist heartthrob Jean Tatlock. With the timeline jumping around as you expect from Nolan, there's various levels of ageing makeup for all on top.
The presentation is quite Hollywood, with lots of very intense ambience across the score, and Nolan giving us lots of rapid cuts—but this is a movie largely about a gathering of nerds trying to come up with a new mechanism of physics. As far as making that exciting and energetic for global audiences trying his best, Nolan is certainly doing his best—and as cinematography goes here, there are certainly highlights. We have use of visual metaphor to quickly represent a character’s turmoil—some of it is done actually quite well, like when Oppenheimer is reacting to the implications of the Hiroshima bombing (which, tastefully, we don’t really get Michael Bay disaster porn of). On another moment, however, it’s done, shall we say, a bit too on the nose.
All the scenes of competing academics using all their powers of metaphors with marbles to quickly illustrate scientific concepts come to a head with our sequence of the historical Trinity test—and as far as history goes, one can pinpoint that moment as the one where the rest of the 20th century and our entire geopolitical era started. For that momentous occasion, it’s done just right, and is the highlight of the film—when that ball of uranium and wires goes off, you damn well feel it.
The rest of the film turns into something of a courtroom drama--Murphy is doing his best to portray a man torn apart by conflict within, as he is in turn met with wildly varying reactions from politicians and fellow scientists. As the film notes, being a Jewish person, the quest to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany did would have been a very personal one for Oppenheimer—and it’s one that overtakes his far more general studies on black holes, neutrons, and other areas of science not so given to destruction. But as it always does, history takes its own turns—and there’s a decent enough effort to portray what all this does to a man.
However, that still leaves a somewhat overlong last act that just feels a bit redundant at times, with a few gratuitous historical references and cameos from a Spontaneous Einstein as played by Tom Conti. Personally, I would’ve explored more of the post-war legacy of the Manhattan Project—Oppenheimer, of course, was alive to see a certain crisis in Cuba.
As far as Nolan goes for me, this one is definitely better than Tenet, though still not matching Interstellar. And while gratuitous at times, when the film does stop to illustrate most of its key moments, it does work well—for most viewers, it’ll be brisk enough. Not to mention, that almost eighty years on, we all still live in the shadow of its titular Destroyer of Worlds—he certainly likely never intended for that atomic specter to still loom in the way it does now. But, again, as the film shows, history is always a greater force than any one man…
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