J. Robert Oppenheimer wasn’t killed by his creation in the same way that Marie Curie and Victor Frankenstein were, but he was irrevocably altered by it. How could he not have been? The atomic bomb is one of science’s greatest achievements, which isn’t necessarily to say that it was a good thing. Oppenheimer was well aware of that paradox, as evidenced by the Bhagavad Gita passage he thought of after the successful Trinity test on July 16, 1945: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Less than a month later, as many as 200,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and World War II was over.
Oppenheimer himself may not have needed 80 years of hindsight to reach insightful conclusions about what he’d wrought, but Oppenheimer certainly benefits from it. That it’s being presented as anything resembling a traditional summer blockbuster is a choice, as the kids say, as Christopher Nolan’s three-hour slow burn is much closer in scope, tone, and dramatic heft to an autumnal prestige picture. It’s also even more of a wall-to-wall ensemble than Asteroid City, with Cillian Murphy’s performance in the title role complemented by those of Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Matthew Modine, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, and Gary Oldman. That many of their appearances amount to glorified cameos is, one assumes, a testament to how eager everyone involved was to, well, be involved, but it also underscores the fact that the scientists and government officials working with Oppenheimer were more than just bit players in this chapter of history.
While all of this is obviously building to the successful Trinity test, both in terms of its narrative crescendo and what an awe-inspiring sensory experience it promises to be, it’s something of a false climax. Fallout comes in many forms, and for Oppenheimer it was a postwar reckoning with not only what he’d done but how his left-wing beliefs would come to be weaponized against him in a closed-door hearing concerning his security clearance. That hearing and the circumstances surrounding it make up the lion’s share of the third act, which proves to be no less riveting than the splitting of the atom. That’s thanks in no small part to Downey Jr., now out of the iron suit and delivering his best performance in ages as Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Which isn’t to say that the explosion isn’t one of the most intense visual spectacles this side of The Tree of Life’s birth-of-the-universe sequence or a certain episode of Twin Peaks: The Return. You can feel the world changing forever as you see it, terrible in its wrath and unfathomable in its implications — a birth and a death all at once, and perhaps the most breathtaking sequence of Nolan’s career.
To be clear, none of the men who interrogated Oppenheimer in 1954 were the least bit troubled by the death and destruction wrought by his creation. (To extend the Frankenstein metaphor a bit, Oppenheimer is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography American Prometheus and the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s novel is The Modern Prometheus.) What they were really interested in was whether he was then, or had ever been, a member of the Communist Party of the United States. Member? No. Fellow traveler? Yes. Oppenheimer was even more intensely intellectual than you might imagine, and while he was decidedly left wing, his prewar interest in communism, at least as portrayed here, appears to have been largely academic. This being the 1950s and his usefulness to the military-industrial complex having diminished, however, such nuances are of little concern to the men who hold his fate in their hands.
Nolan cuts between this hearing and what you might call the main action almost constantly. Though this initially lends the film a disjointed quality — especially since Nolan, who has a habit of over-explaining his wonkier narratives like Inception and Interstellar via expository dialogue, goes the opposite route here and never deigns to have his characters describe the intricacies of nuclear fission in layman’s terms — the structural gambit plays off in the final hour. It’s only once the fog of war has cleared that people truly reveal themselves.
Murphy, who’s ranked among our finest actors for decades but rarely had more high-profile leading roles than those in 28 Days Later and The Wind That Shakes the Barley to complement his acclaimed supporting performances (a few of which were also directed by Nolan), brings a tortured brilliance to his performance that wholly befits his subject. Anyone concerned that Nolan set out to create a rah-rah glorification of atomic weapons that doesn’t grapple with the morality of both their invention and implementation will have their fears more than assuaged. You see it etched on Oppenheimer’s face, to say nothing of his fleeting visions of disintegrated bodies and flashes of blinding light that plague him years after Fat Man and Little Boy are dropped from nearly six miles above the earth they changed forever. There’s more than one way to lose your life to a bomb.
"There’s more than one way to lose your life to a bomb." Nice. Thanks and I look forward to seeing this one.
Thanks for this. I'm really looking forward to seeing this in 70mm IMAX soon.