On August 6, 1945, the United States military dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  Three days later, on August 9, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.  Early estimates stated that over 100,000 people were killed in these two attacks, many of them civilians.  These weapons were developed over years of research in “The Manhattan Project,” led by J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), a theoretical physicist born from German immigrants and later developing questionable ties to the Communist party.  Rattled with guilt over the lives lost, and fearing the continued development of nuclear weapons, specifically the Hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer pivoted his focus in his later years advocating for the careful and responsible study of nuclear physics to prevent the firey and immediate destruction of humankind that atomic weapons are capable of. 

Christopher Nolan, after a messy breakup with Warner Brothers‘ day-and-date HBO Max release strategy in 2020 and 2021, found new distribution with Universal Pictures for his latest feature, Oppenheimer, a 180-minute epic that plumbs the depths of consciousness on one of the premier theoretical scientists of the modern age.  True to form, Nolan does not deliver a liner adaptation of the Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus as it cuts between the main action at the Los Alamos lab, Oppenheimer’s security hearing, and the senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.).  Delivered in pieces, and doubling – sometimes tripling – back through the lens of a different character, Oppenheimer is a dense film, but it is not particularly difficult to follow nor is it just a massive information dump.  It is a thoughtfully crafted and constructed narrative, thematically split into two distinct arcs of “fusion” and “fission,” that also serves as Nolan’s most mature film to date. 

The film is primarily framed through Strauss’ confirmation hearing, distinctively shot in black and white, as the cabinet hopeful recalls his meetings and interactions with the famed physicist. While the film mainly pivots around its title character – and Murphy delivers a strong performance as the embattled man with the weight of the world on his soul – Downey Jr. is an absolute force in this epic. His story really comes to fruition in the third act when the film settles most comfortably on being a political thriller. Unfortunately, the third act – despite the performances – is the weakest insofar as story and development are concerned as it is mostly long sequences of men in a room talking; but to be fair it is almost impossible to capture the same highs achieved during the Trinity Test scenes. It feels as if Nolan is trying to posit Strauss as a foil to Oppenheimer, but it does not quite land. Both men have ambitions that far outreach the singularity of their person, but Strauss is revealed to be cunning, selfish, paranoid, and manipulative even though he is working as a civil servant, whereas Oppenheimer is shown to be acting in more altruistic ways despite his hand in creating some of the deadliest weapons ever used in warfare. It is not developed as well as it feels to be intended, but this heavy focus on the duality of man transported out of the realm of the imagined makes Oppenheimer one of Nolan’s most profound and harrowing works even beyond its subject matter. That final hour, without the propulsiveness of getting the team together and discovering the power of the atoms, really requires us to sit and be held accountable in ways that his fictional works never required, let alone even asked.  

As for Oppenheimer’s security clearing, this time shot in color in a brutally confined room in which Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) creates an even more suffocating environment by sucking up all the air in his questioning assault of the scientist, it helps to frame the other side of the story. Nolan is never one to deliver a simply linear timeline – unless one is watching the reverse cut of Memento (2000) – and here is no exception. By doubling back on some of the various sequences through the different perspectives of the two men, and then either coming into the scene earlier with them or following them later than what we have seen before, what becomes a relatively known fact of history – that the Trinity Test was successful and that two atomic weapons were unleashed on Japan – becomes an engaging mystery. 

One of the most interesting elements of the story is how Nolan shows the increased lack of control which Oppenheimer has over the consequences of his actions. The film opens with a scene where he poisons his professor’s apple in an act of rage and revenge. Riddled with guilt, he races back to the classroom the next morning and knocks the apple into the trash before it can be bitten into, though not by Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcy), the intended target, but rather by Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) who was giving a guest lecture at the school. Thus, the catastrophe had been averted and “innocent” lives were not lost. This sequence sets Oppenheimer up as a petty and petulant child, though as the narrative unfolds and his arc begins to develop, we see him take on more and more responsibility for things that have grown increasingly out of his control. The framework is all there, and one does not need to dig deep to access these themes, but it would have benefited the film to focus more on the moral dilemma in the third act as it relates to Oppenheimer, and not so much the downfall of Strauss. In the same way that David Fincher stumbled when he tried to galvanize the political sentiment of the 1930s in Mank (2020), Nolan really struggles to energize a communist witch hunt, though he has the benefit of telling a much broader story so there is considerably more to latch on to here. 

Another unique thing about how Nolan handles the tough moral questions in Oppenheimer is how he relates them to the inherently political use of the bombs. Nolan’s filmmaking during the Trinity Test is nothing short of awe-inspiring as the pillar of fire breaches across the night sky. As the fire fills the frame, audiences are slowly overcome with a sense of dread about the entire sequence knowing the road of destruction that this will lead. This feeling is further amplified by a jingoistic speech Oppenheimer gives to the people of Los Alamos, cheering and waving American flags as they are regaled with the news of the successful detonations over Japan and Oppenheimer’s jest about wishing that it was made in time for use before the German surrender. While Jewish himself and not a Nazi, it is an uncomfortable moment as Oppenheimer’s musings about the theoretical annihilation of his ancestral country are met with the ravenous cheers of the American populous. This scene should feel dirty and gross and uncomfortable – the correct response to propaganda – and Nolan knows it. Instead of turning this into a star-spangled parade, it becomes a living horror. Amidst the cheering crowds whose hands reach out at Oppenheimer as if they are zombies, editor Jennifer Lame intercuts quick scenes of members of the project puking from the radiation and the charred bodies of the Japanese civilians who were killed in the blasts. It is a terrifying turning point for the film, and Murphy navigates it expertly going from the theoretical dread of atmospheric ignition to the very personal responsibility of ushering this technology into our world despite knowing the calculations that all pointed to disaster and his general mistrust in humanity to leave things be.  

The film does not grapple too much with the innate dangers of curiosity; that it is in our nature to seek answers and find an understanding, and that that tendency has led to the field of science and theory. If it was not Oppenheimer solidifying this theory and proving its viability, then who? It was never a matter of if, only when. Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) who was pushing for the development of the more efficient – and potentially more destructive – Hydrogen Super? The Russians or the Germans when they realized they made a wrong turn in their own research about how to harness the power of splitting atoms? Oppenheimer frames its subject as a martyr, and while the validity of that claim can be debated, in the context of the film, it follows a very clear rise and fall arc where Oppenheimer sacrifices everything in order to shepherd this massive power off of the chalkboard and into the real world. But you can never put the genie back into the bottle and the guilt of his creation is something that will continue to haunt the man for the remainder of his life. 

There is no avoiding the dense nature of Oppenheimer, but Nolan crafts the narrative in such a way that it becomes an engaging work and not a lecture. As previously mentioned, it is his most mature film to date in that he takes many of his storytelling tropes and expands on them in new and creative ways and is his strongest claim to date of having inherited the mantle left behind by Stanley Kubrick after his passing in 1999, a year after Nolan’s debut feature Following (1998) premiered to acclaim at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Reteaming with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema who has lensed all of his films since Interstellar (2014), and composer Ludwig Göransson who took over for Hans Zimmer with his work on Tenet (2020), Nolan has posed a creative challenge not only to his cast and major departments but also to himself as he continues to write scripts separate from his brother, Jonathan. Stripped of the fantasy he established in Tenet where it was possible to go back in time to alter events, he instead operates in reality with Oppenheimer where time moves ever-forward, though the themes of the narrative greatly benefit from hindsight. Miraculously, he takes something as gargantuan as the creation and detonation of nuclear weapons and filters the experience down to a personal story of two men who flew too close to the sun and destroyed their very lives and souls all in pursuit of doing what they thought was right.