Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan overreaches and underdelivers

Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Photo / Universal Pictures

Movie reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch the second-most-hyped movie of the year.

SHE SAW

Of course Hollywood had to balance out the overtly feminine energy that the Barbie movie has been sending out into the universe with the giant ejaculating atomic bomb that is Oppenheimer. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, would someone please stop these ageing white men from making preposterously long movies? Not two weeks ago it was Cruise/McQuarrie’s two hour and 43 minute chase sequence (Mission Impossible 7), this week it’s three hours of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, and soon it will be Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which tops them all at three hours and 26 minutes. We hear you, you’re feeling silenced and you’d like us all to know that you’ve still got lots - and lots - to say.

Oppenheimer is a detailed retelling of the story behind the physicist tasked with setting up and overseeing the secret lab in Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was designed. It’s based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird and it feels like Nolan may have included every one of the 700 pages of that book in his script, because this is a dense film. There are a lot of characters to keep track of and while I’m flattered that Nolan thinks that I could keep up with that number of players, I couldn’t.

However, while the film is long, it isn’t boring. It’s often compelling, quite complicated and jumps around timelines so frequently you cannot afford to wonder what you’re having for dinner tonight, even for a minute. Cillian Murphy is formidable as Oppenheimer, a man who is hard to know. He’s grappling with the morality of creating a weapon of mass destruction, though not entirely a good man doing what he thinks is right for his country. He wasn’t afraid of killing, having attempted to poison his tutor as a young man at Cambridge University.

The film acknowledges the devastation the US would inflict, juxtaposing scenes of celebratory triumph with Oppenheimer’s visions of terror, but still clings firmly to the American ideal that an atomic bomb was a necessary means to an end: the end of war forever. It’s an American story, told from an American perspective. There isn’t a Japanese person on the cast and, when Oppenheimer watches footage of the aftermath of the explosion, we don’t ever see the real horror, only the wincing of Murphy. Understandably, it will likely never open in Japan.

You can’t spoil this movie, we all know what happens with their invention, so I highly recommend doing some background reading before heading into the cinema. Pay particular attention to the story of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey jnr), on whom there are already countless explainer articles. Bring hydration and snacks and maybe even a bedpan, because you’re in for the long haul.

HE SAW

I’m morally opposed to three-hour-long films. If you’re going to make something so long that half the audience members are engaged in all-out war with their bladders for much of the second half, you’d better have a powerful argument as to why.

If I had to guess at Christopher Nolan’s explanation, I would say he felt it necessary to include story arcs for every one of the men even tangentially connected to the Manhattan Project, along with verbatim recreations of every conversation they ever had, with just enough time left over for a scene in which a woman has a meaningful conversation, albeit with her boobs out.

If Nolan’s aim was to make us understand how long it takes to develop a working atomic bomb, this film was a triumph. We moved towards the movie’s climax in what felt like real time. By the third hour, I increasingly found myself wondering who all these characters were and what they - and I - were still doing there.

A cult of genius has grown around Nolan over the last decade or two. Part of this is because dudes love Batman, but an even bigger part of it is that his films are often narratively complex and are therefore seen as “intelligent”.

Because of this, he has entered the pantheon of directors revered as geniuses, but we should always be wary of revering people as geniuses - there’s a reason we have so often ended up in thrall to demagogues and the products of Steve Jobs.

Making a complex movie is a good way to make people think you’re smart, but it actually requires much more intelligence to tell a complex story simply. While the real-life political machinations around Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project were no doubt also quite complex, at least you didn’t have to pay $24 to be bored by them while feeling increasingly hungry.

There are many films that could have been made about this man and his bomb, and Nolan has here tried to make all of them. In doing so, he overreaches and underdelivers. To take just the most important example, the film only briefly and roughly explores the edges of the moral conundrum of the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki – sacrificing some lives in order to save others – but in doing so it fails to adequately capture the horror. That was perhaps best done, in print, in 1956, when Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe wrote:

“Come now: if you had to choose between boiling one baby and letting some frightful disaster befall a thousand people — or a million people, if a thousand is not enough — what would you do?”

Whatever you believe about the relative entertainment value of Anscombe’s moral philosophy and Nolan’s films, you can’t deny that, in the case of the work of Oppenheimer, she, and she alone, got to the point.

Oppenheimer is in cinemas now.