Oppenheimer (2023)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Bomb Before the Storm

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Dense, three full hours long, and filled with dozens of characters, it takes a little work to unpack Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer . To start, I liked it better than his last three films ( Interstellar , Dunkirk , and Tenet ), but not as well as my favorite Nolan, Memento . It has many passages that are truly transporting. But it also has its share of flaws and dead spots. I'm certain that, like all of Nolan's other films, it will be enthusiastically overrated by his cult-like fan base, but at least this time I can add my cautious recommendation to their unadulterated praise.

Nolan adapted the screenplay from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's 2005 biography American Prometheus . An opening crawl teaches us that Prometheus was a Greek god who stole fire and gave it to humanity, thereby creating modern civilization. He was punished for this deed (and probably rightly so). Then we meet J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), a brilliant physicist who has visions of stars and molecules dancing in his head. He develops a theory that, when stars begin to die, their gravity begins to outweigh their energy, engulfing more energy, and becoming a nonstop cycle. Murphy's excitement in these scenes is certainly more infectious than what follows.

Soon, though, at UC Berkeley, he becomes involved studying atomic energy and the possibility of making a bomb, via fission, or the splitting of the nuclei of plutonium or uranium atoms. As WWII gets underway, he is tapped to actually build one, preferably before the Russians do. He chooses a midway spot between the homes of four essential scientists, and the town of Los Alamos is built, complete with railroads, with the sole purpose of building and testing the bomb. They discover that there's a "near zero" — but not actually zero — chance that the bomb could set off a chain reaction, igniting the atmosphere on fire, and destroying the world.

After some time, the bomb is ready for testing. This may be the most enthralling sequence in the film. Before it, most of the scenes consisted of white men in rooms, talking, even if Nolan is very, very good at shooting talking scenes. The scientists have only a small window of time to test, and they must wait out a storm. Then those that want to watch must take precautions, not only to protect their eyes, but also to protect their skin from UV rays. We see all these details, mounting up to the final countdown, monitored by a nervous scientist whose job is to watch the voltage and abort if it goes too high.

The test itself is sublime, and, oddly, the quietest moment in the film. We of course know that the atmosphere did not catch on fire and the world did not end (at least not yet), but we hold our breath anyway, just in case. The other strange part is that the test takes place at around the end of the two-hour mark. The next step, the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to definitively end WWII, is reported via a radio. And then there's an hour left to go. Where do we go from here?

Throughout Oppenheimer , we are treated to two flash-forwards. One is in black-and-white and concerns Lewis Strauss (a heavily made-up Robert Downey Jr.), who was once the head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and, in the 1950s, is being considered for Secretary of Commerce under President Eisenhower. He sits through a long hearing in which his merits are debated. Secondly, we have a smaller hearing, taking place in a smaller room in 1954, and concerning Oppenheimer's attempt to get his security clearance reinstated. This one concerns several powerful lawyers, a series of witnesses, and cards very much stacked against our hero. Both of these flash-forwards help to propel the story forward by providing narration and context.

However, after the atom bomb test, it becomes apparent that some shady dealings have taken place behind-the-scenes. It involves a perceived slight by one party, and an actual attempt to smear Oppenheimer's reputation. The reason for this is that, after the war, he became a proponent for not using the bomb. (A scene in which Oppenheimer has a vision of the consequences of his actions is powerfully haunting.) His rationale is that the existence of the bomb should be the very reason to have no more war. This, obviously, does not sit well with certain Americans. The reveal of the perpetrator of the shady dealings is supposed to be a big surprise, like the solving of a murder mystery, but because of the density of the story, and the 80 or so characters, we really never had an idea of what to look for, or whom to suspect.

As the movie winds down, Nolan pats himself on the back at least a couple of times with dialogue about how someday, someone will understand and appreciate what really happened here. With this movie, that someone, apparently, is Nolan. Nolan strikes me as a modern-day Erich von Stroheim or Stanley Kubrick, certain of his own genius and protective of his power. He continues here with his usual, stubbornly rumbling sound design that, for some reason, is used to drown out about a third of the dialogue, as if he alone is privy to the movie's innermost secrets. (This goes back to The Dark Knight Rises , wherein viewers made many jokes about Bane's unintelligible grumbles.)

The other thing I can't get out of my head is that the film is exactly three hours long, and the reason for that is that — and this is something I only recently learned from a projectionist friend — the IMAX platter cannot physically hold anything longer. There isn't room. Because Nolan insists on shooting on film and screening in IMAX, he was limited to three hours, and he used up every second of it. Had he been unconcerned about format and playback, I believe he would have gone on longer... a lot longer.

Additionally, for all its Nolan-esque showmanship, Oppenheimer is really, at its core, only a biopic. And like almost all biopics, it makes the same two mistakes. It touches on what its main character did , rather than who they were, and it fails to flesh out any of the other characters in his periphery. I had flashbacks to Damien Chazelle's snoozer First Man as I watched roomfuls of white men doing cool stuff while the women waited at home and raised the kids. Other than the prestige of Nolan's name, I can't imagine why genuine talents like Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh would sign on to this.

Nonetheless, I found Murphy's performance continuously compelling. (This is his sixth film with Nolan, but his first time in the lead role.) What wasn't necessarily there in the script, Murphy finds ways to sneak into the character, including but not limited to his bad boy behavior, his guilt, his selfishness, his enthusiasm, and his humor. In one especially great scene that comes toward the end, Oppenheimer is summoned to meet with President Truman (Gary Oldman). His body language is unusually tight, nervous, troubled. As Oppenheimer leaves, Truman warns an assistant never to "let that crybaby back in here."

Oldman is likewise great in that scene, and even if we have no idea who the characters are, there's a galaxy of star players here who do good work in just minutes, within the limitations of the movie. Downey (could he snag a third Oscar nomination?) is also great in a part that is almost all dialogue and very little movement. Kenneth Branagh melts into the role of Danish scientist Niels Bohr. I also spotted Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Clarke, Tony Goldwyn, Macon Blair, David Krumholtz, Josh Hartnett, Alex Wolff, Matthew Modine, Matt Damon, Dane DeHaan, Benny Safdie, James Urbaniak, Rami Malek, Olivia Thirlby, Casey Affleck, James Remar, and one-time Oscar nominee Tom Conti as Albert Einstein.

It may help to actually be Einstein to fully get this movie, or it may help to wait until DVD/Blu-ray/4K or streaming, where viewers can turn on subtitles. But I feel I got something out of it on a first viewing, especially given that I have — for whatever reason — spent next to no time in my life learning about J. Robert Oppenheimer. From this film, I learned a little bit about fission and fusion, sure, but I learned quite a bit more about human guilt and how much power it carries. At one point a character reminds Oppenheimer that they did not, in fact destroy the world with their experiment, to which Oppenheimer responds, "I believe we did."