Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)
Oppenheimer is one of the year’s best movies. It sees Christopher Nolan firing on all cylinders and making a big splash at the box office to boot.
I thought Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 was going to be the peak of the Summer Season, but I was dead wrong. It has now been surpassed by both Barbie and Oppenheimer.
I didn’t get to see ‘Barbenheimer’ in one day, as intended, but I’m not complaining. It’s rare that big movies of this quality come along, so having a week in between them actually felt like a luxury.
Oppenheimer is based on the 2005 book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin and tells the story of American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his crucial role in the development of the atomic bomb, which led to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent ending of World War II.
The movie is 180 minutes long and the only complaint I have about is, yeah, it does feel like that. In places it drags a little bit, but the rest of the movie is outstanding.
Was it necessary to build the atomic bomb? Well, the Germans were a year ahead of the Americans at one point and if the Nazi’s had gotten there first, I shudder to think how the war would have ended.
Was it necessary to use the bomb against Japan? Maybe not, but one of the points the movie makes, is that once the bomb was there, it was always going to be used, and once it was, it was too late to turn back the clock.
That was also the personal dilemma for Oppenheimer, played brilliantly by Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders), who at first had no moral scruples in building the bomb with his team, but who developed a conscience after the war. After he became acutely aware of the immense destruction his creation had caused. As witnessed by his immortal words: ‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’
Nolan uses all his usual tricks: the different timelines, the various visual styles, the use of both colour and black & white - the latter being a first for IMAX. But fortunately for us he uses them to great effect, with all the storylines coming together in the end in a satisfying way.
And of course there is the murderers row of acting talent that he has assembled, which includes Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh, Jason Clarke and Josh Hartnett. An obvious standout being Robert Downey Jr, as the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), who over the years became one of Oppenheimers most formidable opponents.
One storyline takes place in Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was developed. Another important one concerns itself with the 1954 hearing about the possible renewal of Oppenheimers security clearance. By that time the Father of the Atomic Bomb had started to lobby for international control of nuclear power and the government didn’t trust him anymore.
But as his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) assumed, her husband was prepared to allow himself be run out of town with tar and feathers, to secure a more honorable place in history as someone who advocated peace instead of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
The first two hours of Oppenheimer are the most thrilling, but the last one is equally important, dealing with the fall-out of everything that has gone before.
The final scene between Albert Einstein (Gary Oldman) and Oppenheimer near the end of the movie is worth the price admission of alone. It takes place by the pond in Princeton, where Oppenheimer accepted a position after the war - and circles back to the same scene in the beginning of the movie which kicked the plot in motion.
I’ve always admired Nolan - I had the pleasure of interviewing him when Memento came out - and Oppenheimer could well be his magnum opus. Go see it!