This movie critic went looking for the biggest, best way to see ‘Oppenheimer.’ Here’s what I found.

We’re about to begin week three of “Oppenheimer” bombarding audiences with writer-director Christopher Nolan’s dramatization of how theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project’s nuclear bomb test at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945. The planet has white-knuckled it ever since.

For Chicago and its environs, the “Oppenheimer” success — already it has outgrossed Nolan’s own “Batman Begins” with a global box office take of more than $400 million — comes with a bewildering and wholly subjective question.

Where should you see the thing?

Well, I’m going to see it at an IMAX theater, you say. But this can mean different things and different theatrical experiences.

There’s 2D digital projection IMAX, which you can get at the AMC Showplace Village Crossing in Skokie or the Regal City North in Logan Square. Or the IMAX 2D at Cinemark in Woodridge. Or several others.

OK. Is that “real IMAX”?

Funny word, “real.” It can mean different things to different eyes. To you, “real” might mean a supertall IMAX screen such as the one that, until 2021, AMC Theatres operated on Navy Pier. Well, that one is gone. AMC gave up the lease. Next year the Navy Pier space will be a FlyOver immersive attraction.

There are no more full-on, supertall, 1.43:1 aspect ratio IMAX venues capable of showing anything on film in Chicago. None in Illinois, period. Or in Wisconsin. Or Minnesota. Or a lot of other states.

So. I had to drive to Indianapolis — twice; we’ll get to that part shortly — to see “Oppenheimer” in what filmmaker Nolan has deemed the finest possible version of his movie: on IMAX 70 millimeter film.

Was he lying? No, reader, he was not.

But first: Let’s go through some of your Chicago area “Oppenheimer” options.

The majority of Chicago theaters showing “Oppenheimer” are showing it in conventional and, in many cases, crisp and worthwhile 2D digital multiplex or single-screen presentations.

The largest-screen venue in that category opened July 11: The Emagine Batavia “Super EMX” auditorium, one of 12 screens. Walk into the Super EMX for “Oppenheimer,” and it looks like a nice, new multiplex venue, wider than usual. Then you notice that the screen really is, as Jane Russell said in “The French Line,” e-long-gated! It’s 96 feet wide and 53 feet tall. Widest in Illinois.

For “Oppenheimer,” it made for a very good viewing experience, with 4k laser-projected digital images plumped up and swaddled in an imposing blanket of Dolby Atmos sound.

Other “Opp”-tions? Well, you can see “Oppenheimer” in a few theaters on actual, gorgeous film-y film, including 35 millimeter projection at the Logan Theatre in Logan Square.

You can also catch Nolan’s movie on 70MM film, non-IMAX division, which is quite the treat. The AMC River East 21 and the AMC Crestwood 18 in Crestwood offer it in that rarely revived but eternally supple format. So does the ShowPlace ICON Theatre in the Roosevelt Collection.

Then there’s the Music Box Theatre in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood. The Music Box has been into 70MM for years, with its annual or semi-annual 70MM Film Festival screenings. This summer’s 70MM fest culminated in a preview of “Oppenheimer,” which then phased into a longer run, recently extended through Aug. 20, on the theater’s 37-foot screen. The first three rows at the Music Box have been removed for the “Oppenheimer” run, leaving the theater with 640 seats to sell. Roughly half the Music Box’s “Oppenheimer” screenings have sold out, and the other half have come close. After Aug. 20, the movie will continue in a digital projection format, as long as the public wants it.

As with all single-screen movie palaces nearing the age of 100 — the Music Box opened in 1929 — the theater’s acoustics can be difficult, and bouncy. Good news though: Music Box technical director Julian Antos credits the theater’s recently upgraded acoustic sound treatment and new surround speakers for the substantially improved sound and clarity that my ears heard the other night.

From “The Dark Knight” to “Interstellar” to “Tenet,” Nolan’s films favor a dense, tricky sound mix of effects, music and dialogue, usually at the expense of the dialogue. When backed by a musical score by Hans Zimmer or, in the case of “Oppenheimer,” Ludwig Göransson, Nolan’s results can be aurally relentless.

But having seen “Oppenheimer” in three different theaters in three different formats by way of three different sound systems, Nolan apparently at long last has taken some of the sound-mix criticisms to heart. In a quite-perfect 70MM film presentation at the Music Box, with the theater’s recent anti-bounce sound improvements (”basically, expensive fiberglass,” according to Antos), all that furtive academic and scientific and political murmuring behind closed doors came through, crisply.

“I hesitate to say we’re playing any tricks,” Antos says. “But because we know how demanding Nolan’s movies can be for dialogue, we made sure the coverage was as good as possible.” Chicago-based Threshold Acoustics handled the latest round of acoustic treatment; another Chicago company, Kinora AV, provided the rest of the sound system upgrades. “We’re doing everything we can to battle any excessive reverberations in the house,” says Antos.

So here’s my Indianapolis story, which ends happily. And bigly.

Now that the largest-format IMAX 70MM film projection in Illinois is gone, gone, gone, I had two options for seeing “Oppenheimer” the way I really wanted to. One: Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the Celebration Cinema North IMAX. Two: the Indianapolis IMAX Theatre, part of the Indiana State Museum campus. I chose Indy, and on a recent weekday, leaving Chicago shortly after 6 a.m., Chicago film critic, sportswriter and fellow format geek Patrick Z. McGavin and I hit the road for a sold-out screening — the Indy run added a final week of screenings, by the way, Aug. 10-17 — of “Oppenheimer.”

IMAX 70MM film statistics: “Oppenheimer,” a three-hour affair, comprises 53 reels of film. Eleven miles, if you laid it out along I-65.

The Indy IMAX screen is 84 feet wide and 60 feet tall, with the auditorium seating 357.

Five minutes into the 11:30 a.m. July 26 screening, the screen went dark, along with the sound. Twenty minutes later, theater manager Neale Johantgen, looking a mite ashen, addressed the crowd. Problem with the projector, he said. Some damage to one of the 53 film reels.

Minutes later, the screening was canceled, and the theater switched to digital projection for the afternoon and evening screenings. The culprit: a surge-y type power interruption all around the museum campus fritzed out the projector in the booth. The projector and the damaged reel were fixed, more or less, by 1:30 a.m. Meantime IMAX shipped a replacement reel. By the weekend’s end, things were back to normal.

Stories of projection troubles with “Oppenheimer”'s 70MM film presentations, IMAX or otherwise, have popped up here and there since the film opened in late July. IMAX 70 film projection demands a lot of its projectionists, just as 70MM non-IMAX screenings do. If you Google “Grand Rapids IMAX damage,” you’ll get a slew of panicky news stories about a little problem the Grand Rapids Celebration Cinema North theater had the day after things temporarily went flooey in Indianapolis.

The Oppen-fuss over which format offers what aspect ratios, and screen widths, and screen heights, and sound quality, and shadow detail — it can get a little ridiculous.

It’s also a sign. Moviegoing is alive. And the film wonks are kicking, in the middle of a uniquely weird public-gathering phenomenon known as “Barbenheimer.”

The other morning, I drove back down again to the Indiana State Museum IMAX Theatre and saw “Oppenheimer” projected, flawlessly this time, on 70MM film. It was a sight, all right. With surprising subtlety, Nolan’s aesthetic choices in toggling between full-height imagery and the more typical movie-screen rectangle (what many would know by the term “letterbox format”) yielded complex and often surprising results.

In action movies, many directed by Nolan, an IMAX 70MM presentation expands and contracts as dictated by the crucial action sequences. In true IMAX 70, “Oppenheimer” follows that template, more or less, expanding to full height and impact for scenes such as the Trinity atomic test, with its staggering pillar of fire, or simpler, quieter vertical compositions featuring a windmill. Or Cillian Murphy, as Oppenheimer, climbing the tower, atop which sits his paradoxical creation: the bomb that promises to save the world, while threatening to erase it.

But in true 70MM, Nolan doesn’t save the fullest-screen IMAX imagery for the obvious moments. Throughout “Oppenheimer,” in IMAX 70 presentations, you’ll see (for example) Robert Downey Jr. as Oppenheimer’s adversary Lewis Strauss in close-up, in a car, in the massive full frame. This is followed by a full-frame shot of Strauss striding down a hallway into a meeting with the Atomic Energy Commission advisors.

Then, in the more stationary and verbally driven shots that follow, Nolan switches to the more rectangular aspect ratio. This imparts a tightness and confinement, and the toggling back and forth, which manages to never feel arbitrary or gimmicky, gives the film a unique spatial dimension.

In every other type of presentation available of “Oppenheimer,” you get all you need from a single, familiar, rectangular frame. Nolan knew the truth: Only a tiny, tiny fraction of his film’s worldwide audience would see it any other way.

On the other hand: Having driven round-trip to Indy, twice in one week, 749 miles in all, to see “Oppenheimer” in IMAX 70, I can tell you that it was worth every mile. And I was driving a Honda Fit.

As for saner moviegoers than me? Even without a “real” IMAX theater of its own, Chicago’s “Oppenheimer” options are plentiful and varied enough to make a filmgoer feel pretty fortunate. See it in 70MM film where you can, starting with the Music Box.

And Illinois’ widest screen, at the Emagine Batavia, a few hundred yards past the automated player piano in the theater lobby — that’s a welcome addition to your slate of prospects for maximum Oppenheimering.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune