Oppenheimer review – Christopher Nolan’s volatile biopic is a towering achievement

As the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, Cillian Murphy is a 20th-century Frankenstein whose catastrophic creation unravels across a tangle of timelines in Nolan’s expansive drama
It’s billed as a biopic of theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, dubbed the “father of the atomic bomb”. But “biopic” seems too small a word to contain the ambition and scope of Christopher Nolan’s formidable if occasionally unwieldy latest. Oppenheimer is a dense and intricate period piece, playing out in a tangle of timelines. It weaves together courtroom drama, romantic liaisons, laboratory epiphanies and lecture hall personality cults. But perhaps more than all of this, Oppenheimer is the ultimate monster movie. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is an atomic-age Frankenstein, a man captivated by the boundless possibilities of science, realising too late that his creation has a limitless capacity for destruction. Ultimately, however, the monster in this story is not Oppenheimer’s invention but the appetite for annihilation that it unleashes in mankind. It’s a realisation that plays out, inexorably, in Oppenheimer’s hollow, haunted face as the film unfolds. Murphy’s far-seeing ice-chip eyes have never been put to better use. In fact, Murphy’s physicality as a whole is one of the most potent weapons at the film’s disposal. He seems

Cast List

impossibly slight, a theoretical idea of a man in contrast to the robust certainties of the military figures he works alongside (Matt Damon’s Lt Gen Leslie Groves, for example, is bullish and solid, a clenched fist looking for something to punch). In one shot we see Oppenheimer hauling an armful of books into a new classroom, and it looks as though he’s buckling under the weight of his accumulated knowledge. At other times he’s calm and glassily composed, somehow removed from jostling egos and the fusion of ideas that will take shape into the ultimate weapon.
The version of Oppenheimer that we see on screen at any given time is a marker, an indication of which timeline we are currently inhabiting. Insights into his stellar early academic career are punctuated by glimpses of a later humiliating security clearance hearing that picked over every aspect of his life; the development of the bomb – the so-called Manhattan Project – is cut together with another hearing, this time in the Senate, to establish whether Oppenheimer’s former colleague Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr, excellent) should be appointed in a federal government role. It’s a knotty mesh of a structure. Time in Oppenheimer doesn’t feel entirely linear – there are moments, in particular a pivotal encounter with Albert Einstein, that seem unmoored from the rest of the film. Nolan’s films frequently require a couple of viewings to unravel fully, and while it lacks the baffle-factor of Tenet, Oppenheimer is no exception. There are other problems: the cursory treatment of the female characters is one. Florence Pugh, as Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock, gets short shrift. And Emily Blunt, as J Robert’s wife Kitty Oppenheimer, spends much of the first two hours mutinously clutching a martini on the edge of the frame. She does, however, claim a couple of terrific moments later on: a skin-flaying interrogation scene; a wordless glare that conveys the full nuclear winter of her animosity towards a disloyal colleague. But, for the most part, the film is a towering achievement. Not surprisingly, given Nolan’s preference for shooting on Imax 70mm film, the picture has a depth of detail you could drown in. There’s no shortage of scenes of furious blackboard scribbling, the accepted cinematic signifier of scientific genius. But more interesting are the abstract moments; it’s as though we are venturing into the heart of the atom itself.

Cillian Murphy Films

Equally inventive is the way the sets seem to quake at moments of tension. Oppenheimer’s world is literally rocked by the shockwaves of the reaction that has been set in motion. Most effective, however, is the use of sound and music. Like Jonathan Glazer’s upcoming The Zone of Interest, this is a film in which the horrors of war are not shown but conveyed inescapably through what we hear. Ludwig Göransson’s score is masterful and mercurial, surely one of the finest of the year. And there’s a recurring motif in the soundscape, a crescendo of thunderously stamping feet. It’s taken from a moment of triumph and glory, the high point of Oppenheimer’s career. But it takes on a mounting sense of threat with each use, as the catastrophic potential of the physicist’s work becomes clear.

Other Film Reviews

  1. Rotten Tomatoes
    2. "During World War II, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. appoints physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer and a team of scientists spend years developing and designing the atomic bomb. Their work comes to fruition on July 16, 1945, as they witness the world's first nuclear explosion, forever changing the course of history."

  2. Roger Ebert
    3. "For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face."

  3. EEVblog
    4. "I was SO looking forward to this, being a big nuclear history buff. And, well, I've got to say I’m disappointed and kinda annoyed. Not in the visuals, they were great. Not in the performances, they were great. Not in the lack of ANY special effects, that was great (everything was done in camera, wow!). But I’m disappointed because the trailer makes you expect something totally different. Or at least it did for me. I had to rewatch the trailer just now to confirm I wasn’t imagining that."

  4. IMDb
    5. "You'll have to have your wits about you and your brain fully switched on watching Oppenheimer as it could easily get away from a nonattentive viewer. This is intelligent filmmaking which shows it's audience great respect. It fires dialogue packed with information at a relentless pace and jumps to very different times in Oppenheimer's life continuously through it's 3 hour runtime. There are visual clues to guide the viewer through these times but again you'll have to get to grips with these quite quickly."

  5. Ars Technica
    6. "I'll admit I had my doubts when I first heard that director Christopher Nolan was planning to make a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the research effort to develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. This is one of the most well-documented periods of 20th-century American history, after all, and there have already been so many books, films, and TV series about the race for the bomb, of varying quality. (As always, let me give a shout-out to Manhattan, a stellar fictional series that was tragically canceled after just two seasons.) How would Nolan make this very well-trodden material his own?"

  6. The New Yorker
    7. "Leaving the theatre after seeing “Oppenheimer,” I was tempted to call it a movie-length Wikipedia article. But, after a look online, I realized I was giving Wikipedia too little credit—or Christopher Nolan, the movie’s writer and director, too much. A simple fact-heavy article about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist whose leadership of the Manhattan Project, during the Second World War, produced the atom bomb, turns out to offer more complexity and more enticing detail than Nolan’s script does. And it has more to say about the movie’s essential themes—the ironies and perils that arise when science, ambition, and political power mix—than the movie itself does."