A biopic of masterful craft and heavy emotion, Oppenheimer is a high stakes story of war, politics, and the inner battle of a complicated mind who changed the world with fire and fury.
“Now I am become death. The destroyer of worlds”. This line from the Bhagavad-Gita - a 700-verse Hindu scripture - was famously quoted by Robert J. Oppenheimer during an NBC documentary that aired in 1965. Oppenheimer, known universally as the “father of the atomic bomb”, is also the subject of Christopher Nolan’s latest film and it is one of the revered director’s best yet.
Intellectually engaging, visually and sonically stimulating, and packing an emotional wallop, Oppenheimer further cements Nolan’s standing as the thinking mans blockbuster filmmaker, while placing the spotlight on one of the 21st centuries most brilliant minds and his most infamous achievement: the creation of the atomic bomb that decimated the Japanese islands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus ending World War II.
Skipping back and forth between different time periods, as well as black and white and colour photography, Nolan knocks the dust off the stuffy biopic formula and delivers a movie that is pulsating with energy and epic in scope. He also does so without losing the intimacy of retracing the peaks and valleys in the life of a giant in the science community, a man whose logic driven approach to his work is often upended by the unconventional and even egotistical blunders made in his personal life.
Cillian Murphy delivers perhaps his best feature film performance yet as Oppenheimer, portraying the eccentricities and fragilities of this brilliant mind with an impressive restraint as the guilt that consumes Oppenheimer slowing eats him up inside. Great too are the films numerous supporting performances: Robert Downey Jr. delivers one of his best turns as Lewis Strauss, the bitter and shrewd head of the Atomic Energy Commission; Matt Damon brings his magnetic movie star charisma to the role of General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project; and Emily Blunt brings both fragility and strength as Oppenheimer’s put upon wife Kitty.
When Oppenheimer focuses on the witch hunt against the famed scientist who was accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union, the film shifts from a story about the fight within the soul of a man to the fight for the soul of a nation, as swampy figures within US government bureaucracy and intelligence conspire to drag Oppenheimer down into the thick stench of accusation and character assassination.
While much has been made about the frightening nature of Oppenheimer regarding the danger of nuclear war (and rightfully so), perhaps the biggest takeaway from the film is how, almost 80 years later, duplicitous figures within the US government still utilise the same old tricks to usurp their enemies.
The technical craft in Oppenheimer is fantastic. Shot on IMAX film, the photography by Hoyte Van Hoytema (Dunkirk) is rich and dense; the sound design by Richard King (Inception) and his team is an immersive sonic journey; and the editing by Jennifer Lame (Hereditary) is a masterclass in non-linear structure.
It all culminates in the Trinity Test – one of the best sequences in a Nolan film – in which Oppenheimer and his team of scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, undertake the first test of an atomic bomb they have spent four years and $2 billion creating. The recreation of this significant moment in science is as awe-inspiring as it is frightening. It is also a reminder of how mankind, unfortunately, continuous to use its God given intelligence and ingenuity to create weapons of mass destruction while lost in the fog of war.
