There’s a moment early on in Oppenheimer when a buttonhole is stitched in the narrative fabric as the titular scientist shares a private moment with a figure we recognize as Albert Einstein. Filmed from a distance, their conversation is inaudible, but its repercussions proceed in a chain reaction that spans the rest of the film’s runtime, until, late in the third act, the button slides into place. That’s not a spoiler, just an acknowledgement of what audiences have come to expect from Christopher Nolan films: narrative complexity wrapped around cinematic payoff. Talky, dense and time-jumpy, Oppenheimer rewards close attention with a devastating final act that manages to raise the stakes a notch higher in the final moments.
Based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and written for the screen by Nolan himself, Oppenheimer is about the man. Not the Bomb, not the Manhattan Project, not World War II or the Red Scare that followed, but just the guy—the physicist who led the project to develop an atomic weapon before the Germans could do it. Those other elements provide backdrop and context, but Nolan’s script crosscuts between different decades to touch on key moments both before and after the Bomb. Its eye-searing explosion provides a pivot point in the narrative. Before it goes off, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is singularly focused on delivering a product that proves his theory. Afterwards, moral doubts creep in, and that’s where the real drama is concentrated.
In the same way that Nolan brought his sensibility and gravity to superhero films with The Dark Knight trilogy, he puts his imprint on the biopic genre with a story that both manipulates and discards convention. Murphy’s performance is remarkable, moving from swagger and sarcasm to something like shell-shock, with a glint of haunting in the eyes all the way through. By the end, we feel we understand something essential about the man, even if we haven’t been marched through the standard chronology. We glimpse him as a grim has-been being grilled by a government prosecutor, as a young professor seducing someone else’s wife at a cocktail party, as a strutting sheriff in the doomsday laboratory he built in the desert, and as a young physics student impulsively deciding to murder his professor. They’re all Oppenheimer, but they’re each vastly different from one another. This would make for a fascinating story even if it were all made up.
But the man really did lead the team that built the bomb that put the human race on the brink of extinction, where we still dangle. On the morning of the first nuclear test at the Trinity site, General Grove (Matt Damon) asks about the risk factor of the atom bomb setting off an uncontrolled chain-reaction that could ignite the atmosphere and incinerate the entire planet. Oppenheimer assures him that the chances of that happening are “near zero.” The moment is played for comedy—and Damon is outstanding in bringing both levity and gravity to the performance—but the danger registers. In this story, theory is always being outdone by reality. Contradictions abound. Oppenheimer’s past as a communist-curious intellectual would seem to preclude him from running America’s most top-secret military program, and yet that very past makes him manipulable by higher-ups. Even though we know the broad outlines of this story from popular history, the script’s nested timelines pivot on multiple layers of paradoxes, betrayals, misunderstandings and unintended consequences. Like a shockwave lagging behind the initial flash of an explosion, the dramatic payoff sometimes hits long after the inciting incident.
Eschewing action for abstraction, Nolan puts us in the troubled scientist’s head space. Here’s Oppenheimer staring at ripples spreading across a puddle in the rain, and we can see his mind turning. There’s very little math or physics in the movie, and not even very many explosions, but there is a lot of talking about those things. There’s also a lot of political maneuvering, centered around a slippery bureaucrat, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who witnessed that meeting between Oppenheimer and Einstein (Tom Conti) without understanding its implications. Like many other participants in this complex equation of a story, his theory fails to align with reality, with far-reaching consequences.
Nolan’s penchant for scrambled timelines and swift pacing keeps scenes shifting at a confident clip. Jennifer Lame’s fluid editing not only sets the pace but serves a narrative function as the storylines crosscut through Oppenheimer’s life, eliding key information until just the right moment to make it land. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s sophisticated use of color and black-and-white film differentiates points of view and suggests subjective versus objective perspectives. The familiar faces of the actors, variously de-aged and extra-aged, act as touchstones for orientation within these shuffling chronologies. In fact, the cast is stacked to an almost ridiculous degree, with small parts for Florence Pugh, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Clarke, and a deviously disguised Gary Oldman, among many others. Each of them is given a moment in the spotlight, and each makes a meal of it, particularly Pugh, whose intensity rivals that of the Bomb.
The film doesn’t flinch from recording Oppenheimer’s hubris and naiveté. He understood that he wasn’t just creating a new weapon, he was creating a new world. While that insight sounded manageable in theory, it ended up proving horrifying in reality. In the years following the successful completion of the Manhattan Project, the screen at times goes nearly white as if the scene were illuminated by the glow of an atomic explosion. We hear discordant strings and thumping feet on bleacher benches in Ludwig Göransson’s superb score, which seems to channel Oppenheimer’s mind, veering from classical theory to savage application as he grapples with what’s he’s done. There was a time when people worried that a chain-reaction could end the world on a single day, and that threat proved unfounded. And yet, a larger chain-reaction might have been ignited that day at Trinity when the first bomb blew up, and we don’t yet know what will happen at the end of the chain. The ripples in the pond are still spreading. But take a look at Oppenheimer’s face in the final frames of the movie: he knows.
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