Christopher Nolan is one of the few major filmmakers still
doing gargantuan, sprawling event movies that push the envelope and
possibilities of the cinematic celluloid medium as far as it can conceivably go. From films like The Dark Knight to Interstellar
and Dunkirk, the British filmmaker is second to Paul Thomas Anderson one
of the only still using 65mm film photography and exhibition with a director
clout not felt since the days of Stanley Kubrick.
Like Kubrick, the director also had a longstanding
supportive rapport with Warner Brothers Pictures who produced everything from Insomnia
to his celebrated Batman trilogy.
But after his previous film Tenet was shuttered by COVID-19 and
Warner Brothers began simultaneously releasing films theatrically and online,
Nolan broke away from the company to direct his first feature film for
Universal Pictures and his first R rated production since Insomnia: a cross-cutting
biographical account of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who invented the atomic
bomb that was ultimately dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize
winning biography American Prometheus and starring Cillian Murphy in the
titular role of Oppenheimer, the sometimes-hallucinatory ensemble period
piece is broken up into several sections primarily stemming from his time at
the University of Cambridge, his tenure at the University of California as a
physicist and his mingling with a member of the communist party named Jean
Tatlock (Florence Pugh) which, along with his brother Frank, a friend and
eventual wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) comes back to haunt him years later.
Still, these details didn’t prevent
Oppenheimer from being drawn into a top-secret government project involving
several scientists from across the nation in a new arms race to beat the Nazis
to the completion of the world’s first nuclear bomb. Selected to be the project director by
General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Oppenheimer’s team consisting of scientists,
civilians and the military eventually convenes in a secret ranch in Los Alamos,
New Mexico, the site for the world’s first nuclear detonation entitled the
Trinity test.
Jumping back and forth between past and present, largely
stationed in real time inside a special security hearing spearheaded by AEC chairman
Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) who had an axe to grind with Oppenheimer and
sought to destroy his credibility after he began speaking out against the
development of the hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer running at three hours is
a riveting watch that at once invites you to lean forward in your seat while
your heart pounds with terrified anticipation.
More interested in the man himself and his own wealth of character flaws
including but not limited to an opening scene where he tries to poison his tutor
in his early college years, his untidy infidelities and his eventual
realization of the gravity of what he unleashed upon the world in the ushering
in of the atomic age, Oppenheimer while being about the invention of the
atomic bomb is largely a character study that tries to put you in the man’s
shoes and see and hear through his eyes and ears.
Compounded
with Hoyt van Hoytema’s crisp 65mm cinematography including, for the first
time, black-and-white IMAX footage and a feverishly nerve wracking electronic
experimental score by Tenet composer Ludwig Göransson, the film is a
transportive, sometimes psychedelic odyssey as the film sees and hears atoms
and static rumblings through the eyes of its title character.
Take for instance a scene where he is being
interrogated at the infamous security hearing and the soundtrack builds up to
an explosive roar as the camera slowly pulls back away from Cillian Murphy’s
face, and his eyes gazing downward dart upright and the sound stops. This technique is used throughout the film to
highly unnerving effect including a speech given by Oppenheimer where the walls
seem to shake behind him and he imagines the crowd of onlookers being vaporized
by a nuclear blast.
The film also makes
excellent use of silences, ala Interstellar, where we witness something
catastrophic but don’t initially hear it, building perhaps the highest level of
tension ever felt in a Nolan project.
Cillian Murphy has been a veteran character actor in Nolan’s films for years starting with Batman Begins before moving on to Dunkirk as a shell-shocked soldier but this is the actor’s first central leading role in perhaps the director’s most ambitious project of his career. Murphy is tasked with portraying a wide variety of deep-seated anxieties and emotions often without speaking a word, just slowly zooming in on the actor’s forlorn face.
Cillian Murphy has been a veteran character actor in Nolan’s films for years starting with Batman Begins before moving on to Dunkirk as a shell-shocked soldier but this is the actor’s first central leading role in perhaps the director’s most ambitious project of his career. Murphy is tasked with portraying a wide variety of deep-seated anxieties and emotions often without speaking a word, just slowly zooming in on the actor’s forlorn face.
Just as strong if not stronger is Emily Blunt as the exhausted and beleaguered
wife Kitty Oppenheimer who knows of her husband’s infidelities but remains a
supportive anchor who occasionally has to whip him into shape and get him back
on his feet. Matt Damon as General
Leslie Groves makes an excellent ally to Oppenheimer, initially skeptical and
strict but eventually adhering to the scientist’s special requests. Then there’s the supporting cast consisting
of Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Matthew Modine, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek,
Kenneth Branagh and even director Benny Safdie, rounding out an ensemble set of
gifted players helping to propel this technically as well as morally
complicated saga across the silver screen.
Much has been made of Nolan’s ongoing resistance towards using CGI, opting to create the Trinity test and other hallucinatory visual effects scenes practically and seeing the end results in full 70mm projection is among the most photorealistic recreations of a nuclear detonation since David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return which might still be the most terrifying dramatization. Nolan being one for realism and being secretive about the techniques used to simulate the blast has outdone himself here with an ongoing cacophony of visual effects interspersed with scenes of Oppenheimer and his team theorizing about how to build this bomb in the first place. Watching Oppenheimer you are hit with pin drop silences and deafening nuclear roars and many of the film’s striking visual effects come at you subliminally as if you’re catching a glimpse of atomic energy itself.
A film that induces a sense of awe and terror in the viewer with the bomb itself and is curiously sympathetic to Oppenheimer’s ongoing ordeal of building the bomb and clearing his name of communist affiliations, Oppenheimer is perhaps the most riveting three-hour nailbiter of its kind since Oliver Stone’s still controversial JFK. A film that seems to reach out with invisible arms and grab ahold of you, raising your blood pressure and sending your anxieties into the sky, Oppenheimer is a confident, indefatigable new masterpiece from one of the biggest film directors in the world in perhaps his most daring achievement yet.
With fears of nuclear holocaust still very
much alive in the world today, Oppenheimer canonizes that fear
officially while trying to get a little closer to the man who unleashed those
fears upon the planet than any other picture has come before. By the end of it, you feel as though you’ve
been in the midst of a deadly blast wave yourself.
--Andrew Kotwicki
