Review - Oppenheimer
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh
Running Time: 180 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
I won’t live my life afraid to make a mistake.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is capital C Cinema. Effortlessly carried by an overdue Cillian Murphy in the spotlight, the supporting roles of Emily Blunt and Robert Downey Jr. are masterful and likely to stay in the award conversation for the rest of the year. The screenplay efficiently pushes and pulls at the exact right times, mirrored by the scoring by Swedish Ludwig Gorransen, who has been able to pick up where Zimmer left off in the Nolan Cinematic Universe since Tenet. Overall, the pieces come together in this explosive tale of the world’s biggest mistake and the consequences shortly thereafter.
In an early meeting between Oppenheimer and his soon to be wife Kitty, the latter talks about a paramour who got himself killed in a war, ending their future foolishly. “Reductive,” Oppenheimer accuses. “Pragmatic,” she concedes. It’s a perspective she has thanks to her distance from war; she can tally the losses on a ledger without an emotional connection. It’s in that small nuance that Nolan centres most of his characters: in the difference between reductive and pragmatic. As the movie starts, Nolan chooses to portray a young Oppenheimer as a man haunted by his potential, by his admiration of the constructive and destructive power of the natural world, a plane he communes with through his fluency in physics. As we see him take his spot in the complex and dark story of the Manhattan Project, the supporting cast of legendary physicists are introduced one after the other. Hearing names like Bohr or Heisenberg, you start to feel the certainty that they will return at some other time or place, to join Oppenheimer in the history books.
Where Nolan’s script shines the brightest is in the buildup to the Trinity test, with Oppenheimer and Nolan himself working in perfect parallel, pulling together the right elements, taking steps back to appreciate the wider context of the decisions being made. The contrasts between fission and fusion seem clearer at first, before the third act shows us that the consequences of both will stick around far beyond their inception. Did we know war was bad before Oppenheimer? Of course. But being reminded of that darkness in 70 mm IMAX can have its own impact. Reductive. Sure. Pragmatic. Of course.
Still thinking about this icon.
And just like the Trinity test was the culmination of the work done in Los Alamos, Nolan’s experiments with sounds finally come to a climax with this latest film. Sure, in the first five minutes of the film I was ready to complain that once again Nolan was back with his delinquent level sound mixing, but he’s able to overcome and bounce back quickly. What’s more, he’s having a good time here. He knows the sound you’re expecting. He holds it back so you fill in the blank. He lets you become complicit in the shared moment. And then he hits you when you’ve let your guard down. The violence of sound. The sound of violence.
If there is a place where some of the audience might be left behind, it is in the interesting choice of centering the third act after what feels like the climactic moment. Like Oppenheimer, Nolan centres the audience in the consequences of his actions. In the natural denouement of Prometheus bringing fire to the humans, the punishment that naturally follows when men and their egos pretend to be gods. As satisfying as it is to see Robert Downey Jr. be given so much space to stretch his acting muscles (in a way we haven’t seen in more than a decade), it is, of course, where one could make the pitch that some time could have been shaved off. The three hour runtime requires a strong argument. Is Nolan able to land it? Your mileage may vary.
And yet, in its three hours of film, the silent voice that screams the loudest is the side of those impacted by the cruel bombings. They are numbers mentioned in a scene. They are acknowledged in passing. It gives us, the audience, a pass. The ability to continue pleading ignorance and like Kitty, remove emotion from the ledger of war. “A necessary act to end the war,” some might think but Oppenheimer’s trauma is not the biggest tragedy after that day, even if that’s where the movie chooses to remain.
Overall, Oppenheimer feels like the natural next step in Nolan’s filmography. It perfectly brings in his tension building skills from Dunkirk, and streamlines the scattered and divided storytelling we’ve seen with movies like Tenet. It’s a war movie, but it’s a film less interested in who won and more interested in how and what we’ve lost since that day.
Pragmatic. Maybe. Reductive. Never.
