Oppenheimer - Directed by Christopher Nolan
Nearly every minute of Oppenheimer’s three-hour runtime is full of conversation. Much of that conversation is heady back and forth between theoretical physicists while they scribble equations on chalkboards. There’s heated talk between American politicians and military leaders about what will happen to the US if the Nazis win the war. There’s also plenty of loaded exchanges at congressional hearings about those physicists’ loyalty to the United States. Despite how much runtime is dedicated to dialogue as opposed to action, Christopher Nolan, the film’s writer and director, rarely slows down to let J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) think. When he does, we’re treated to the inner workings of one of the world's finest minds through the visuals of neutrons colliding as if the very nature of the man’s work is built upon how his brain operates.
The visual is mesmerizing but also impossible to fully understand – much like the power uncovered during the creation of the first nuclear weapons. Nolan’s film covers far more than the Manhattan Project. Adapting the doorstop-size biography American Prometheus is no easy feat but Nolan accomplishes the task by moving through the story at breakneck speed. We see Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a student as well as his postwar battles with the government over his Communist past. All of this adds up to a talky biopic that pulses with the intensity of an action film. The ad campaign for this film was sort of hilarious in how it advertised to viewers that they’d be sitting through the most intense movie of their lives when anyone who knows the story knows most of what they’re going to see if meetings in offices an bunkers. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Nolan manages to meet the expectations set by those trailers. The screenplay also ingeniously never loses sight of the fact that all these meetings concerned bringing the Earth to the brink of apocalypse. Though the scale is much smaller than nearly all of Nolan’s output Oppenheimer may be his most ambitious film to date.
I found Oppenheimer to be a interesting companion piece to Nolan’s other film based on real events: 2017’s Dunkirk. That film, which depicts the Allied evacuation from the titular city during World War 2 was light on dialogue and heavy on complex action set pieces. It bombarded viewers visually and sonically to achieve the feeling of being in a war zone. It succeeded. Much of Oppenheimer is set during the same war but it focuses on behind the scenes figures who sought to end the conflict without firing a bullet. Though the cast is enormous the film focuses mainly on the Oppenheimer himself whom Murphy plays as a paradoxical, polarizing man. He’s cold at times and completely charming at others. He’s completely sympathetic to leftist causes but changes his tune completely as he begins to head up the Manhattan Project.
The first hour of the movie zips through Oppenheimer’s student years and his early days as a physicist in Europe. There he crosses paths with legends in the field like Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighofer). The discussions about quantum mechanics that these men have are pretty tough to follow but as the film moved along I realized that was the point. Even the greatest minds of their generation were grasping at something they didn’t fully understand. Knowing the outcome of the Manhattan Project in 2023 it’s staggering to watch these men charge forward with a near total lack of awareness. The excitement and desperation to beat the Nazis to discovery is completely understandable but incredibly frightening.
Nolan jumps back and forth in time throughout this story very much like he’s done in his previous films. He painstakingly depicts the 1954 hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance and dredged up both his past associations with Communists and his active love life. A terrific element to the film is a black and white segment that follows former Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (a tremendous Robert Downey Jr.) as he undergoes a confirmation hearing, digging through his tense relationship with Oppenheimer. These sequences move more slowly. They’re hostile and obsessed with the past, a good representation of the conservative paranoia that grew around the US once atomic power had been discovered and utilized for war. These sequences are a great juxtaposition to the film’s main storyline (shown in color) that brim with energy and the possibility of discovery.
Nolan’s ambition really comes out in how he features multiple biological storylines as well as historical context of the period. There’s the mad race to create nuclear weapons which plays as a thrilling mad dash with a known but well executed conclusion: the Trinity bomb test that proved this power could be harnessed. There’s the larger moral conflict that emerged during the Manhattan Project but also after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as scientists started begging governments to back away from the deadly arms race that politicians like Strauss were pushing for. Finally, Nolan never loses sight of Oppenheimer himself, a man who pleaded for peace years after the bombings but has never publicly held himself accountable for all the human lives laid at the altar of his creation. Nolan and Murphy both do their part to show Oppenheimer as a man wracked with guilt as the film nears its conclusion, a necessity when your audience knows the horrific result of this story.
Christopher Nolan’s films (The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, to name a few) are known for spectacle and indeed IMAX theaters the world over are nearly sold out while Oppenheimer has residency but what’s really impressive here is how this director has made a personal narrative feel like an epic. Not just in visual scale but in dramatic sweep. Nolan presents a story from the past that feels knotted to so many present anxieties about nuclear annihilation. After racing blindly toward scientific achievement, Oppenheimer (and each of us) is left with a world forever changed. The film opens with a brief telling of the story of Prometheus the being that stole fire from the gods, gave it to humanity, and was subject to eternal torment for his transgression. The difference here Nolan posits, is that our own American Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer isn’t the only one to suffer for his actions. We are victims of his discovery.
