‘Oppenheimer’: Christopher Nolan’s Starry Biopic Is Big, Loud, and a Must-See

In the beginning, there were simply explosions. Smaller bangs — the big one would come much later, in the New Mexico desert. But for J. Robert Oppenheimer, the quantum physicist who would guide the greatest scientific minds of his generation toward creating a doomsday device, it was all just a constant collision and coming apart of matter in his head. Put the man in a lab, and he’s hopeless. Let him roam in the world of theories, and Oppenheimer could hear what a mentor dubbed “the music of science.” Those symphonies gave him visions of black holes, collapsing stars, developing nebulae, gaseous eruptions, particles moving at the speed of light, molecules spinning, atoms splitting. He sees these things, and then we see these things, rendered in 70mm IMAX. Any filmmaker can create a cinematic universe. (Many have. Too many, some might say.) Very few can show you how a genius perceives the building blocks of our universe, right before that same person imagines something that threatens our existence in it.

This is what Christopher Nolan does in Oppenheimer, a biopic on the “father of the atomic bomb,” and in terms of getting you into the mindset of its subject, these bursts of abstract imagery are a brilliant move on his part. It’s not the only ace the writer-director has up his well-tailored sleeve, mind you — there are somewhere between four to five timelines bumping against each other at any given moment, it’s shot in both saturated color and stark black & white, its sound design equally prizes dead silence and deafening booms, and the cast is comprised of seemingly every third actor with a SAG card. Not to mention a depth-charge performance by Cillian Murphy as the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds, one that allows the tiniest surface ripples to communicate the agony and the ecstasy of changing the world.

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But those interspersed shots of cosmic debris and microscopic detonations, some of which abruptly interrupt exchanges and others that smoothly transition viewers from one scene to the next, are perfect examples of how to let you experience someone like Oppenheimer’s perspective by showing, rather than telling. And it sometimes feels like those two camps — the cinematic and the chatty-to-a-fault — are fighting it out on Nolan’s massive canvas in a way that resembles nuclear fission minus the energy release.

Taking its cues from the exhaustive, Pulitzer-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer seeks to cram as much of the man’s life, his work, his elevation to national hero, his eventual persecution, and his personal demons into three hours. Just for good measure, Nolan throws in not one but two competing courtroom dramas as well. There’s a roll-the-dice sensation throughout: Scenes of people sitting in rooms talking can seem thrilling or plodding, clarify historical conflicts and complicated concepts or confuse the hell out of you. Set pieces feel sweeping one second, and like they’re sucking the oxygen out of the room the next. Then, suddenly, the movie cuts to a huge close-up of Murphy, his eyes suggesting a man wrestling for his soul, and you’re transfixed. As with so much of Nolan’s work, you can feel a truly great film peeking out in fits and spurts within a longer, slightly uneven one.

It’s a tough thing to admit, given that Nolan is one of Hollywood’s few name-above-the-title auteurs left standing. He can still get an original mega-budgeted film greenlit, and has taken on the mantle of keeping alive not just film as a medium but film as a physical means of storytelling. His work is intellectual yet visceral, philosophical yet pulse-pounding; he’s always managed to smuggle big ideas into multiplexes via blockbuster templates, even in genres he hasn’t completely terraformed. Like its better half in the joint entity now known as “Barbenheimer,” Oppenheimer isn’t afraid to talk up to an audience (although in Barbie‘s case, the degree of difficulty in doing that via a decades-old brand of dolls feels damn near revolutionary). And along with that shiny happy toy story, Nolan’s biography of a key figure of the 20th century has been burdened with the responsibility of saving motion pictures from financial instability and existential free fall. Heavy are the heads that wear the crown, etc.

So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on, as evidenced by the early scenes of Oppenheimer and his military liaison, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon, all mustache and bluster), assembling the eggheads. Their plan is to turn the small New Mexico burg of Los Alamos into a self-sufficient, family-friendly town for a group of scientists and a top-secret think tank for a weapon of mass destruction. The military need the end result of the Manhattan Project to win WWII, preferably before the Germans develop their own version of “the gadget.” Oppenheimer, both compelled by and wary of the opportunity, wants them to maintain the “moral advantage” after the world sees what this thing can do.

Concentrating on the mounting pressure to deliver, the miniature steps forward with each behind-the-scenes breakthrough, and the accountability factor causing friction between the project leader and his patrons, Oppenheimer becomes its own ticking time bomb. All the while, fractures are happening within the team, and the precariousness of the situation, along with Oppenheimer’s willingness to go through with opening this Pandora’s Box, brings things to a tipping point. These scenes remind you of how Nolan understands the use of sound and vision as a means of emotional engagement (helped in no small part by his regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and composer Ludwig Göransson‘s score); how his ability to fold complex ideas into presentations of human behavior, and vice versa, comes through in his writing; how the timing of a cut and the framing of an image can transform a moment from grandiose or mundane to sublime. The gent is a genuine filmmaker. He’s a big-screen artist, the bigger the screens the better.

And these sequences, in particular, reinforce the notion of Nolan as a great director of actors, even if the performances overall are across the board in terms of screen time and effectiveness. Not just Murphy, who’s worked with The Dark Knight director before and delivers an Oppenheimer that goes far beyond the there-goeth-the-great-man clichés associated with many biopics. There’s Damon, whose repartee with Murphy approaches screwball levels. There’s Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who turns a perceived slight into a postwar vendetta against Oppenheimer. (It’s not an exaggeration to say that Downey does some of the best work of his long career here.) There’s Gary Oldman as President Harry S. Truman, who turns a single scene in the Oval Office into a damning portrait of the POTUS as a complete bastard.

There’s Florence Pugh, and Emily Blunt, and Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck, Jason Clarke, Matthew Modine, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich… it’s actually quicker to list who’s not in Oppenheimer. Nolan has said he wanted to cast recognizable faces so that audiences could keep track of who’s who easier, but he also gives them opportunities to flex, whether it’s for a minute or the majority of the running time. And given that there are so many scenes of people conversing, reading, lecturing, interrogating, handwringing and musing over the morality of mass destruction, they have to keep things afloat as much as their ringmaster.

Oppenheimer peaks with the Trinity test, a roughly 10-minute sequence that follows the lead-up to the detonation of the first atomic bomb, its blast, and the sense of shock and awe that greets this game-changing “gadget.” Soon after, we see Oppenheimer addressing his fellow scientists about their victory, and he’s greeted with visions of blinding lights, burnt corpses, and empty bleachers. It’s a climactic gut punch… and there’s still another hour or so to go. Which leads us to the less-than-stellar aspects of Nolan’s A-list A-bomb-creator’s origin story. Threaded in between the race against time to craft this killing machine prototype are recreations of a 1954 tribunal over renewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance, in light of the Soviets now having their own nuclear weapons, and a 1959 congressional hearing on Strauss’s bid to join President Eisenhower’s cabinet. It’s here that we get flashback glimpses of the physicist’s career before Los Alamos, his tenure at UC Berkeley, his marriage to Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer, his attempt to reconcile what he’s unleashed on the world and what turns out to be a contentious relationship with Strauss.

It’s also where the movie starts to waver in terms of storytelling, cutting back and forth to create a tapestry of the 20th century that’s meant to enrich the scenes of science being used and abused in the name of warfare (Nolan’s politics are a moving target in this film, as they are in much of his work, though it’s safe to say he’s solidly anti-nukes here). They end up drawing both the focus and the momentum away from the movie, even if they do flesh some aspects out and give Downey a primo showcase. You suddenly become more aware of Nolan’s tendency to favor giant compositions and conceptual overreaches over connecting narrative dots in certain places, which has been a longstanding criticism. There are some questionable bits of business that play out as well. It’s one thing to let Pugh’s Jean Tatlock, whose Communist affiliation would still haunt J. Robert decades after their torrid affair ended, to be the one who hands him the Sanskrit poem that would be his response to Trinity: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” It’s another to have her do it while she’s writing topless on top of him, which is… a choice. And the less said about her and Murphy getting hot and heavy during an interrogation-session hallucination, the better — we can now say that sex scenes are not Nolan’s forte.

As those two trials intertwine and paint a picture of Oppenheimer as both McCarthy-era martyr and, ultimately, the victor over Strauss’s smear campaign during the movie’s last act, there’s a slight sensation of listening to wind blowing through torn sails. In attempting to get a 360-degree picture of his subject’s life and times on as big a scale as possible, it feels as if Nolan occasionally loses sight of the big picture as a whole. Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens. Nolan has made what can sometimes feel like a maddeningly elusive attempt to make a grand statement about then and now, only to continually drown himself out in the technical equivalent of the Zimmer Honk. He’s also given us one of the only movies of the summer that you really have to see.

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