Oppenheimer (2023) | REVIEW

Directed by Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk; Tenet) — Screenplay by Christopher Nolan.

In 1965, famed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer appeared on a television broadcast, and, on said broadcast, he gave an account of how people reacted and what went through his head during the so-called ‘Trinity Test’ in 1945, when Oppenheimer and a group of physicists had successfully created and detonated the first nuclear weapon. Oppenheimer claimed that a specific line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita popped into his head: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It is a chilling quote that has echoed through generations and had a life of its own. For the twelfth feature film in his oeuvre, the immensely popular auteur filmmaker Christopher Nolan opted to tell J. Robert Oppenheimer’s story. It’s a film about a man full of paradoxes, such as how he became a political figure with strong left-wing disarmament views but was also the man who is known for having willfully created a weapon that once dwarfed all others and forever changed warfare and foreign policy. But it is also a film that gets to the heart of the rot of the American soul in the 20th Century. It is an intimate account of the complicated headspace of a historically significant genius, but it is also a haunting and damning cautionary tale about learning the wrong lessons, naivete, guilt, covetousness, and ripple effects. It is an astoundingly brilliant achievement and much more than your average biopic.

Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Shewin’s biography American Prometheus, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer tells the story of the ‘father of the atomic bomb,’ J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy). We follow the titular theoretical physicist from his time studying under Patrick Blackett (played by James D’Arcy) and being starstruck by the renowned Danish physicist Niels Bohr (played by Kenneth Branagh) through his involvement in the Manhattan Project and all the way to his infamous 1954 security hearing in which the U.S. Government tried to sweep him up under the rug through a Red Scare smear campaign. However, in true Christopher Nolan fashion, this isn’t merely a linear biopic concerned with just the bullet points of the life of a great man. Nolan is always intrigued by time and dreams, and Oppenheimer puts his fascinations to good use. There are essentially three tracks to follow in Nolan’s dense biopic. One is the more-or-less chronological retelling, and the remaining two are essentially elaborate framing device stories. The first of these sees the titular physicist recount his own life in the aforementioned security hearing, in which he is cross-examined by a prickly prosecutor (played by Jason Clarke). The final track — and second framing device — is one that follows another character entirely, namely Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey, Jr.), a senior member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, who is telling his version of the story during his own Senate hearing in which he hopes to be confirmed to the cabinet position of Secretary of Commerce.

Oppenheimer is, with its three stories to track, thus very much a Nolan film. Edited by Jennifer Lame, the film deftly cuts back and forth from various perspectives and time periods (to the best of my recollection, we never see a year written on-screen to keep us on track). It is a dense film with a lot of characters (and so many recognizable actors that it would be difficult to touch on all of their performances) and some concepts that can be difficult to wrap your head around. But the film isn’t all that interested in talking down to its audience. It is a demanding but powerful film that addresses its audience with an expectation that they are keeping track. But it is well worth the effort of “watching closely,” for all three hours of its runtime. It is a rich, realistic, and ambitious biopic that puts so many other films to shame. Nolan could’ve limited the story to only be about the Trinity Test and probably gotten a pretty terrific movie out of it, but instead he has aspired to make something that interrogates the soul of a nation and the contradictions of a man both lauded and condemned for his actions.

As much as this is an external story about the race to build a nuclear weapon to end the Second World War before the Nazis get ahold of their own weapon of mass destruction, it is also an internal story about how one man’s beautiful and wild understanding of theory, physics, and art was bulldozed by the monstrous creation that forever changed his brilliant mind and the world which he naively thought could be saved by it. The film communicates the titular physicist’s headspace and passions with these interwoven shots of light, energy, and particles that sum up how he imagines the quantum reality of his theories to appear. After the Trinity Test, he is preoccupied with other visions, and these new visions are that of a horror movie. There is this unforgettable scene in the film where Nolan attacks Oppenheimer’s contradictions head-on by showing him nervously stumble through jingoistic remarks only for him to be struck with a violent anxiety attack, in which the sound of a roaring crowd’s stomping feet makes him envision utter destruction around him. The wall behind him starts to shake. The light intensifies. He imagines himself walking through ashes, and he sees someone’s face (that of the director’s daughter, Flora Nolan) being peeled off right in front of him. It’s all in his head, but it is one of the most horrifying and haunting sequences you’re ever going to see.

The Trinity Test itself is also a sight to behold. The film makes use of actual explosives and forced perspective to envelop you in the chaos that you cannot take your eyes off. Of course, this film — shot by DP Hoyte van Hoytema — is a gorgeously made film with state-of-the-art visual artistry. Christopher Nolan’s films are almost always technical achievements, and this one is no different. To communicate its different tracks of which to keep track, Nolan also sometimes makes use of crisp and beautiful black-and-white images. The black-and-white images primarily feature Robert Downey, Jr.’s character and the framing device track that he occupies. Nolan has communicated that he distinguishes between scenes shown in color and those shown in the absence of color for the purpose of establishing what is Oppenheimer’s subjective experience (in color) and, on the other hand, what is the objective truth (in black-and-white). This is an interesting approach that also helps to limit confusion during cross-cutting, but the whole subjectivity/objectivity intention didn’t fully click for me on my first viewing (I only knew about the intention after having seen it, though, so it may make more sense on a second viewing). Just like the film is an incredible visual experience, the film is also accompanied by a must-hear soundscape. To me, it sometimes genuinely felt like I imagined it would be to have your head inside of empty space with sparks popping off (or a pressure cooker). It may have become old hat to say so, but this genuinely blew me away, in part, thanks to the way Ludwig Göransson’s expressive score can both be quite beautiful and chill you to your core.

Christopher Nolan’s script was reportedly written in first person so as to emphasize his internal and intimate approach, and you can tell that he got a great deal out of his leading man, Cillian Murphy. A frequent collaborator of Nolan’s, Murphy has been thrust into the most high-profile role of his career and he doesn’t disappoint. Cillian Murphy disappears into the role, and his intense eyes drill their way into your soul. I believe it is one of the best lead performances that a Christopher Nolan film has ever had. Robert Downey, Jr., from a certain point of view, plays the Salieri to Oppenheimer’s Mozart. This is a return to high-profile adult-oriented cinema for Downey (this is coming from a Marvel fan, I should stress), and this will stand out as one of his best performances, as his pent-up frustrations are communicated extremely well by the immensely electric star. Over the years, a lot has been said about the female characters in Christopher Nolan’s films, and I think Oppenheimer is a bit of a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ situation. Now, both Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh deliver strong performances, but one gets far more to work with than the other. Blunt plays Oppenheimer’s wife, ‘Kitty,’ and though her screentime is limited, she has a complex character that asks far more of her than your average spouse in a ‘great-man-biopic.’ She is the only one who sees her husband for who he is, and the internal fire with which Blunt plays the character really shines through. Pugh plays Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s volatile lover, with the exact right amount of allure, but she is perhaps more of a plot device meant to influence the titular physicist’s swings and inform on the fallibility of said character than a fully formed character. I could go on and on about the huge cast, but I’ll end this section on this nitpick: as a Dane, Kenneth Branagh’s attempt at a Danish accent wasn’t all that convincing to me.

Sometimes the exact moment a film has cut to the credits and the lights turn on in the theater, you are rendered speechless. This is the kind of haunting masterwork that succeeds in transporting you into the headspace of its main character, which means that it gradually fills you with existential dread. This is accomplished in large part thanks to the intense central performance delivered by Cillian Murphy, its expertly edited non-linear structure, and its awe-inspiring soundscape that sends shockwaves and shivers down your spine, as well as its visual artistry and its practical effects insistence. But this is also one of the sharpest directed films of Christopher Nolan’s career. At every step of the way, he knows exactly what he is doing, and, though some things happen off-screen, he never sugarcoats anything. Oppenheimer is a shattering three-hour American epic of the highest order that is both an intimate portrait of the forever altered headspace of a paradoxical physicist and a damning depiction of mid-20th century American history. One of the best films of Nolan’s career, it both emphasizes the toxicity at the core of the Red Scare and speaks to how the nuclear anxiety of the 20th century still resonates to this day. Some genies cannot be returned to the bottles from which they came. J. Robert Oppenheimer knew that and so does Christopher Nolan’s outrageously ambitious and bold biopic. Nolan smartly steers clear of hagiography by focusing on naivete, guilt, consequences, and the disturbing but clear-eyed self-reproach inherent in the quote that Oppenheimer is often partly remembered for.

10 out of 10

– Review Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.