REVIEW
Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ is blindingly brilliant
Cillian Murphy brilliantly plays the eponymous tortured genius, delivering a film that lives up to the “Barbenheimer” hype.
5
By SANYA VERMA
Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” isn’t merely about the chain reaction that takes place within neutrons and nuclei, but rather a metaphorical chain reaction, which occurs when science and ingenuity falls into greedy political hands.
Nolan’s protagonists are of a very specific type: an obsessed man, usually a tortured artist or academic, someone suave and charming but fiercely and neurotically committed to their mission — space travel, dream invading, stage magic and making the unseen seen. With the titular J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by the exceptional Cillian Murphy, more haunting and angular than ever before), Nolan continues to write men wracked with guilt due to the weight of their genius. It’s no surprise that Nolan, when tackling the biopic, would settle on a scale and protagonist so massive and significant to human history it feels like unthinkable science fiction. It’s rare that a real life historical figure and event speak so clearly to a filmmaker’s voice, as though it were an original work, turning it into an operatic epic.
“Oppenheimer” plays out on three parallel tracks, almost giving the impression of separate films that intertwine at the end. In the first, the audience follows Oppenheimer as a student in Europe studying under the rockstars of theoretical quantum physics, Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer) and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) to teaching at University of California, Berkeley. This leads to him getting recruited to lead the Manhattan Project, where top scientists would develop an atomic bomb for the Allies during World War II.
The next track is set in a cramped room years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and is a trial-style interrogation of Oppenheimer for his left-wing Communist ties in his young adulthood and his sudden development of a moral conscience for the deaths caused by these weapons of mass destruction, despite being aware that these bombs were created for war the entire time.
The final track is a Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a senior member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, with Strauss fielding questions about his relationships with Oppenheimer.Despite being the latest chronologically, the sequence appears, in black-and-white — which, Nolan explains in the production notes for the film, was to differentiate between Oppenheimer’s (color) and Strauss’s (black-and-white) perspectives. This choice makes the third thread of political drama feel antiquated, while the scientific vitality of Oppenheimer’s youth was much more futuristic and forward-looking. These flourishes of timelines and interspersed lights and sounds, meant to give the audience a deeper look into the quantum world Oppenheimer can visualize, are to be expected from Nolan’s directing and require the kind of focus from audiences for which few popular blockbuster filmmakers are well known.
The rest of the cast is also performing at the top of their game. Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt, both romantic interests of serial womanizer Oppenheimer, are complex individual beings, both with indispensable scenes in the movie. Pugh’s signature frown and ability to balance immaturity and poignancy are key sections of Oppenheimer’s journey, while Blunt who plays Oppenheimer’s wife, has a compelling scene in the interview room of the second track where she stands up to Openheimer’s interviewers with a resolute determination. Matt Damon also plays a significant role as a war general with an almost unwavering conviction in Oppenheimer, bringing talk of war to their remote laboratory in Los Alamos.
Perhaps the biggest credit to “Oppenheimer” is that it is clever without ever making the audience feel stupid. It’s meant to be watched with awe, especially if you are fortunate enough to watch it exactly as Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan’s longtime cinematographer, had shot it: on IMAX 65-millimeter film. And despite the grandeur of the scale of events happening on screen — enormous mushroom clouds emanating from detonated bombs, mathematical formulae cramping chalkboards — perhaps the most epic thing to have happened in the film is Oppenheimer himself. Murphy glowers with the intensity of an arrogant, obsessive, guilt-ridden man, and the film doesn’t hesitate to keep him as the focus of almost every single scene of the feature.
Despite running for a full three hours, the movie is so immersive that it feels compact. Especially for people interested in science and mathematics, the saga of Oppenheimer dealing with the tragic fallout of where his curiosity and ambition has led him will likely hit pretty close to home. Even for most viewers, however — irrespective of their interest in quantum physics and the like — it’s a nuanced and complex enough film that it leaves them shell-shocked as they leave theaters. With all the hype from its perfectly timed release and the “Barbenheimer” mania, “Oppenheimer” delivers on every single front and makes it well worth the trip to the cinema.
Out of the man who famously called himself “Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Nolan has created something legendary and relevant in a way that it may very well be 2023’s finest.
