Blown Away
Christopher Nolan finally, mostly, gets the balance right and doesn’t leave the ears bloody. Chef’s kiss.
Oppenheimer
Director: Christopher Nolan • Writer: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke
UK / USA • 3hrs 1min
Opens Hong Kong July 20 • IIB
Grade: A
Too many people don’t know it now, but J Robert Oppenheimer is, effectively, the single person who brought, and has kept, the world on the brink of nuclear war or some version of that, since the 1940s. He’s been held up as a genius physicist who ushered in the nuclear age (newsflash, the world already has a renewable energy source) and the ultimate symbol of scientific arrogance; the picture of human folly. Whatever your thoughts on Oppenheimer, there’s no denying his historical significance.
Based on the biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the great/shameful man himself, and like Baz Luhrmann and Elvis, there couldn’t be a more perfect match for filmmaker and material than the epic Oppenheimer and director Christopher Nolan. Let’s be honest, Nolan has always been a better technician than storyteller; his best work captures the emotional and human reality of a situation by accident, through a filmic alchemy of image, sound and music (Inception, Dunkirk), which, admittedly, can be a huge fail (Tenet, Interstellar). The Dark Knight isn’t pure Nolan. It’s a lot of DC so it doesn’t count. But in Oppenheimer Nolan strikes a balance that synthesises his strengths and glosses over his weaknesses, and makes the birth of the 20th century Cold War a white knuckle entertainment with brains. This is probably his magnum opus.
The destroyer of worlds
Amazing as it is to admit, Oppenheimer’s butt-busting three-hour runtime doesn’t feel close to that long. There’s no phone checking for the time, no fidgeting. Nolan (who also doesn’t rely on his brother Jonathan for the script) deploys (sorry) a swift-moving, mostly linear four-act structure with a black-and-white bookend of sorts to tell the story of the Father of the Atomic Bomb. The film is broken into, basically, an early years greatest hits of Oppie’s bio, complete with fractious lab boss relationships and a rescue of Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), and romantic entanglements with psychiatrist and lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and biologist and communist Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt). Unsurprisingly, the personal sketch of who Oppenheimer was is the weak link; people have always been Nolan’s Achilles heel, but Murphy, Pugh and Blunt are so strong they make up the difference. Then comes the heist-style recruitment segment for building The Manhattan Project and the Los Alamos lab where the Trinity test happens, spearheaded by army veteran Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, firmly entrenched in sceptical middle aged professional mode, but so good at it). Oppie and Groves pull together the A-Bomb team that includes Nobel Prize winning nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), H-bomb advocate Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), Hans Bethe (Gustaf Skarsgård) and Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz). Many are Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe – and that’s important. Finally, the intertwined acts three and four track a 1954 security clearance hearing for Oppie led by attack dog and judge Roger Robb (Jason Clarke), instigated by vindictive career politician Lewis Strauss – played by Robert Downey Jr in a performance that reminds us he’s a serious fucking actor first, Iron Man second – and Strauss’ cabinet nomination hearing, where a senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) gets the last, glorious word.
That’s the tip of a very large iceberg. Miraculously, Nolan holds it all together while building a five-pointed star of tension among science, war, security, ideology and nationalism. That the US relies on Hitler’s hatred of so many of the brightest scientific minds in Germany being Jewish is an interesting grace note. As is their commitment to the A-Bomb as a way to strike at the Nazis. The constant justifications smart people must make for being smart is, sadly, timely.
Though we don’t learn that much about the man, Murphy crushes it as Oppenheimer, exploiting his big, blue, sunken eyes to telegraph what he’s thinking and feeling. You can see the moral and ethical struggle brewing, just as easily as the cool, enigmatic superiority that made him so flawed in his brilliance. And for most of Oppenheimer Blunt seems to be playing the Houseplant Wife (and that’s not saying she isn’t a bit underwritten), but she seems to be storing all her quantum energy for one particularly crucial scene near the end – which she knocks out of the park.
But Oppenheimer scores huge on the tech side. Trinity test day is as tense as any Hitchcock thriller, and the third act Washington backroom wheeling and dealing is utterly mesmerising. Ludwig Göransson’s clockwork score and strategically located silences are the perfect complement to Nolan’s impeccably composed visual and aural voids, and speak volumes; what you don’t see or hear is what’s most impactful – especially when you’re immersed in DOP Hoyte van Hoytema’s (Ad Astra, Nope) large format hellfire images. This is premium commercial filmmaking: polished, epic, and thought-provoking, and it’s the film Nolan non-fanboys have been hoping he’d make one day. This is his best, most mature film to date. And if you have to pick just one IMAX film this summer, make it this one. Sorry, Tom. — DEK
*Oppenheimer was reviewed during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, it wouldn't exist.