During THE scene in Oppenheimer, when the Trinity nuclear test is successfully conducted, the only sound you can hear is of Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer breathing, witnessing the terrible beauty of what he has created. There’s numbing silence, until the sound abruptly floods back into the scene, as if a terrifying secret has finally been screamed out into the world… Christopher Nolan’s first biographical film, about the Father Of the Atomic Bomb, based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography American Prometheus, is simultaneously paralysing and mind-whirring, just as this moment.
Oppenheimer is a character study, a thriller, a tragedy, a courtroom drama, and depending on your views on war, a chilling horror too. It chronicles the life of Oppenheimer, from his early days as a student dallying with the Communist Party in the United States, right up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and his post-WW II security hearing. Nolan uses everything at his disposal to craft a cinematic experience that is intimate while tackling themes that dwarf you with their gravity and relevance to our world today.
He deftly moves between timelines and switches from colour to gray to reflect shifting perspectives. The awe-inspiring skills of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, in framing the characters intimately, both in the vast desert of Los Alamos and the constricted room where Oppenheimer faces an inquiry committee, and in capturing the other world of atoms and molecules that the protagonist sees (visual effects by Andrew Jackson), create a spectacle of epic proportions. But it is the sound design, coupled with the cuts of editor Jennifer Lame, and a brilliant score by Ludwig Göransson that truly elevate the visuals and infuse the thrill and tight tension that each of these scenes is loaded with. They make the intimate, even further intimate, and engross you into the story Nolan really wants to tell.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have ‘ended’ the war, but it began a nuclear arms race that has turned into a Cold War, that to this day, hovers like a cloud over our heads. It foreshadows what the fate of our world would be as we continue to develop science and technology to one-up each other.
But what particularly drew me in is Nolan’s tackling of the haunting moral dilemma and the tragedy of a creator who can no longer control what form their creation takes. Oppenheimer was one of the many victims of what you’d call cancel culture today; a man of science hyped up because his knowledge was valuable and then pulled down with a carefully crafted smear campaign that was a norm in the McCarthy Era. His losing his security clearance feels like someone losing their verified badge or a suspended account after a social post gone wrong.
We see Oppenheimer from his early years at Cambridge, played brilliantly by a frail Cillian Murphy who I wanted to give food to throughout the film. Robert is troubled by his visions of a world beyond the one we all see, and the destruction that he perhaps already presumed to be inevitable if he ever explored those ideas further. Oppenheimer’s life plays out as some self-fulfilling prophecy, and Nolan carefully handpicks instances that tell you more about the man he is so it doesn’t become a checklist of life events.
As Robert moves from Cambridge to Gottingen for his PhD and returns to the United States to teach, before being recruited for The Manhattan Project by Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), there’s a parade of famous, Nobel Prize-winning names in science that he encounters, that might thrill someone who’s done their research—Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), Neils Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), Hans Bethe (Gustaf Skarsgård. If you’re a movie geek, even better. Because the casting of Oppenheimer is explosive. You turn a corner, a scene, and a familiar actor’s face pops up (David Krumholtz, Dane DeHaan, David Dastmalchian, Casey Affleck, Alden Ehreinreich, Rami Malek, Jack Quaid, Josh Peck, James D’Arcy, Matthew Modine, Tim DeKay, and more); an actor you liked from a movie or show you loved and might not have seen in a while (I’m speaking to you, Josh Hartnett, we need to see more of this man!). And you feel like a kid opening presents.
Also Read: Did You Know Dimple Kapadia Dropped A Major Hint About Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer In Tenet?
The film moves unbridled, like the mind of its protagonist, and at a fast, relentless pace, in what could easily be described as Nolan’s most “verbose” film yet, ensuring comparisons with Aaron Sorkin’s style and The Social Network. To me and my tired brain that had to wait 3 hours at a delayed screening to watch the film, it was an assault on multiple senses, wringing every ounce of energy to keep up, particularly in the first half, until the Trinity test. It was only in the second half, when Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss’s Senate hearing (to be on the Eisenhower cabinet) substantially unfolds, that I was at the edge of my seat, wide awake.
And suddenly it all came beautifully together. This felt much like how the rise and fall of hubris play out in a Greek tragedy, so fast that you barely have time to register until it’s too late. As if pausing for even a second would fester introspection that might derail the inevitable collision course.
A scene where Oppenheimer almost poisons his Cambridge professor but has time to think about his actions sees him course correct, foreshadowing his future, where post Hiroshima Nagasaki, he strongly advocates for nuclear disarmament. Oppie (as his students began calling him fondly) was charming, a womaniser, and would play the game, as long as he could keep his reputation up and his name clear. In a powerful scene, Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, a woman who sees her husband for who he truly is, calls him out for not doing what is needed and playing right into the hands of those trying to bring him down, simply trying to fake it till he makes it out rather than get angry and fight.
Oppenheimer’s deep interest in spirituality and art reflects the desire for men like him to seek a sort of justification and reassurance for their deeds, what little beauty they might find in the science they love. And that’s where his obsession with Hindu scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita comes in. The book tells him, like Lord Krishna told Arjun, that he needs to keep doing his karma as a man of science, for it’s not him but God who is executing His will through him. “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of worlds,” the famous quote from the Gita that he utters further tells you how he could’ve tried to make sense of the responsibility of te destruction his creation will wreak eventually, the chain reaction he would set off with it. And the shift in his visions post the bombings tell you how he might have failed.
The hubris that comes with such brilliance can be blinding. And cleverly enough, Nolan, who wrote this script in first person, never shows us the unspeakable evils that the bomb has wrought. No clips of the actual bombing or its victims are shown; we only see it in its theory, then as a lab experiment in Trinity, and through Oppenheimer’s guilt-ridden hallucinations. Never its practical application and resulting horrors in the real world. The scenes that speak of his complex psyche are some of the most powerful, chilling scenes in the film, capable of rendering you numb. In fact, in one of the film’s final scenes, Murphy looks so haunted, that you can’t help but carry the weight of the world that he has dumped on your shoulders with that one dialogue, that one look, home with you.
Also Read: What To Watch This Week Of July 17 To July 23: Barbie, Oppenheimer, Bawaal, And More
Cillian Murphy is a revelation in and as Oppenheimer, but not in a way that surprises you about his talents. No, in a way that it makes you feel for a complicated historic personality because the actor playing the part can shine each layer in their psyche so well, while also physically adapting to the role’s demands. Those cheekbones deserve an Oscar of their own.
A tragedy must be wrought with a tale of two clashing hubris. After Cillian, this movie hands down belongs to Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, in a shattering performance we haven’t seen from him in a while. Ironic that his character is juxtaposed with a man that Tony Stark could be a bleak imitation of. The scene where RDJ utters the line, “Amateurs chase the sun and get burned. Power stays in the shadows” will send literal chills down your spine.
We’d be here a while recounting how every actor brought a distinct note to their, sometimes single-scene performance. Like Gary Oldman, who plays President Harry S. Truman, who famously disliked Oppenheimer for his “blood on my hands” statement. Or a brilliant Benny Safdie, as Edward Teller, and his testimony at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, delivered verbatim. And Matt Damon delivers yet another passionate performance after Air, this time as Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the man who brought Oppenheimer onto the Manhattan Project. Emily Blunt as the volatile Kitty Oppenheimer is perfectly smarting; her scene at the security hearing had me hooting for the woman! David Krumholtz as Isador Rabi, Robert’s friend, was a heartwarming act. Unsure if it was the censoring of the sex scenes involving Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock—a psychiatrist, a Communist, and Oppenheimer’s lover who had a profound impact on him—but I wanted more from her character. It felt like a blink-and-miss appearance.
Also Read: Fan Merges Barbie And Oppenheimer Worlds Together As Barbieheimer, Twitter Is Loving It
Verdict
There’s a scene with Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein that I’d pay repeatedly to watch because nothing has left me with cold, existential dread as that one scene, near the end of the film.
We all know Nolan films are a Mensa challenge for your brain. I still don’t completely understand Tenet. But trust the man to find a way to do the same thing in a different way. Oppenheimer is an unlikely Nolan film that excels because he was the one making it. He assembles an Avengers-level of crew, cast, and historic characters, and turns what could’ve been a simple biopic into a brilliantly performed sound and light spectacle that thrills you, terrifies you, gives you an existential crisis, and brings you to the edge of your seat, trying to understand the paralysing dilemma of a creator who wants to create, because that is his karma, but cannot control how it affects the world.
Nolan makes it so personal that you can’t help but put yourself in the shoes of the man who made the atomic bomb, and wonder, would you do it differently?
Goosebumps.
Oppenheimer releases in theatres in India on July 21, 2023, and deserves to be watched on the biggest, IMAX screens possible.