I Rewatched Oppenheimer and Realized It’s Far More Terrifying Than I Thought

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

Hello dear comrades,

Sometimes I do wonder if we dreamt the whole Barbenheimer thing. I really do. I too felt Dana’s “haze of generalized goodwill” that weekend (and beyond), especially because, as she notes, I was completely wowed by Oppenheimer, which is an easy movie with which to get obsessed. Christopher Nolan understands how to give us just enough information to keep us riveted while also making it clear there’s a whole lot more to see with subsequent viewings.

What I responded to in Oppenheimer initially was the breakneck speed with which Nolan charged through so much history. (“An Action Movie About Scientists Talking” was the title of an article I wrote about the making of the film.) But I was also quite rattled by its portrayal of the cosmic terror that J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team unleashed. I don’t want to call that (already immortal) scene where Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer addresses a Los Alamos audience after the atom bomb is dropped on Japan “subtle” or “understated”; it’s not. But the dreamlike, expressionistic qualities of this scene multiply its impact more than any direct depiction of these horrors would, at least for me. The image of the lone girl, her skin flaking off—played by Nolan’s own daughter, no less. The lone scream on the soundtrack. Oppenheimer stepping into the charred remains of what was once a human being. The couple weeping in the corner. The scientist throwing up. And of course the way the booming sound of the crowd charges in belatedly after a few moments of (imagined) nervous silence; note how the editing mirrors the cutting of the Trinity test bomb sequence. The terror here is existential, raw, but also inexact—which, I think, is why it remains so hard to shake. Something more literal-minded would not be nearly as shattering.

When I first saw Oppenheimer, I thought of this scene and the film’s very end, with Oppenheimer’s chilling final lines (“I believe we did”) and that terrifying montage of nuclear devastation, as outliers from the otherwise straightforward (albeit fast and thrilling) procedural cadence of the rest of the movie. But then I saw the picture again and realized that Nolan was giving us images of the quantum universe all throughout, effectively showing us how Oppenheimer perceived the world. We see how this man was initially terrified of these visions, then began to understand them and realized how beautiful they were. But we also see how the creation of the atom bomb imprisoned him in a reality where he would always be haunted by the logical conclusion of all this experimentation and “progress”: the end of the world. The movie is all about chain reactions, and it’s filmed as a series of chain reactions. And then watching it and thinking about it feels like another chain reaction.

Many films traffic in nostalgia. Oppenheimer isn’t a nostalgic movie, but I do wonder if Gen Xers like me (and Nolan) who remember the onslaught of cultural products about nuclear war in the early 1980s felt a sharper stab of recognition than most while watching this picture. (My pal Tim Grierson wrote a great piece for the Los Angeles Times looking back at three of the more notable titles from that period, including the utterly traumatizing TV movie The Day After, which I saw once when I was 10 and from which I can still vividly remember entire scenes.) Those old atomic fears never really went away. They merely went dormant, plied to slumber by the downfall of the Iron Curtain and maybe also by the fact that our minds became preoccupied by other potential apocalypses.

Of course, nobody was surprised that I loved Oppenheimer, as I am generally a fan of Nolan’s. But I did notice (and have noted elsewhere) that my Top 20 list this year is heavy on big-name auteurs and/or people I might describe as My Guys. At the moment, this is what it looks like:

(You can read some discombobulated thoughts on my Top 10 here.)

I would have loved to include more obscure or left-field titles on this list, but I’m not sure what they would replace. As it is, I already had to sacrifice some important movies from people I adore. Is it weird that Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is not on my list? I bow to no one in my love for Scorsese, and I like Killers very much—but it threatens to fall apart for me in its final hour, and I’m not sure Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance works as well as it should in these later scenes. I also liked Greta Gerwig’s Barbie a lot. (I had to see it later in its run, a few weeks after the whole Barbenheimer phenomenon popped off.) If I had made a Top 25 list, Barbie probably would have been on there. As would All of Us Strangers, a truly great movie with an ending I’m not entirely sold on. One of the reasons I had to drop it was because in the intervening period I discovered that The Teachers’ Lounge, a terrific German film that won big at the Berlin International Film Festival and then played Telluride, was now scheduled for a qualifying release in 2023.

Speaking of which, is it just me or are the year-end one-week qualifying releases totally out of control at this point? I know there have always been Oscar hopefuls that got academy-qualifying releases in New York and/or Los Angeles in December in advance of an expansion early the following year (The Deer Hunter famously did this back in 1978, I believe), but in 2023, it started to feel (for me at least) like an epidemic. Six of the titles in my Top 20 are movies that are getting cursory qualifying releases late this year (a couple have yet to open), with a wider release to follow next year. This is rather annoying because that means I’m putting titles on my list that a lot of readers will be unable to see, and by the time they actually open next year my list will be a distant memory. The issue here, of course, is not my list, but rather whatever potential benefit it could have provided these movies. Still, I am not a distributor or an exhibitor or a publicist or a marketer. They don’t tell me how to do my job, so maybe I shouldn’t tell them how to do theirs.

Of course, we know why they have to do this. It’s because the distribution and marketing ecosystem for smaller films is so thoroughly fucked that, really, your only chance at getting noticed is to be nominated for an Oscar in late January, then to capitalize on that with a February theatrical release. And winding up on Top 10 lists and being in the mix for year-end critics’ awards will presumably help a movie get noticed by academy voters. But how often does this approach actually work? I can’t help but think that this results in a lot of these movies slipping through the cracks. That’s what happened in 2022 with Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s wonderful Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, which I wrote about in this here Movie Club a year ago. Hell, it’s what happened with my beloved Cyrano, which isn’t even a small movie. Remember Cyrano? Yes, Dana, I’m still yelling about Cyrano.

I am generally not pessimistic about the future of movies and/or criticism, but in order for either of them to thrive, we do have to find a way out of the results-based universe we’re currently living in. Lists, awards, ratings, rankings, traffic, box office—everything is metrics, everything is numbers, all the better to be inputted into formulas and algorithms and other exciting, proprietary data-driven solutions. I suppose that’s a problem that reaches well beyond film and criticism and into every form of human interaction, at all levels of society. But I do believe that it’s up to us as individuals—as critics, viewers, thinkers, consumers, people—to find ways to do things differently, to break free of the bubbles techno-feudalism has trapped us in. I sometimes do this by walking into a random bookstore and buying something I’ve never heard of. I try to do this at festivals by wandering into screenings of movies I know nothing about. Does it work? Well, I just created a Top 20 list comprising mostly films by directors who’ve already been on many of my previous Top 20 lists, and the No. 1 movie on said list has made nearly $1 billion worldwide and is probably headed for a Best Picture nomination. So, uh, maybe not! But I’ll keep trying.

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me,

Bilge

Read the next entry in the 2023 Movie Club: One of the Best Movies of 2023 Was the Dungeons & Dragons Comedy (Really!)