You may need a scientific background if you want to know why the words fusion and fission are flashed across the screen, or why large marbles piled up in a fishbowl were chosen to represent uranium.
You’ll need a romantic, imaginative heart if you want to feel deeply enough about the tortured affair between Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy, playing it introspectively) and Jean Tatlock (an under-utilised Florence Pugh) and about what’s behind the scowls of Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty (Emily Blunt).
The crux of the film is in the New Mexico desert, in scenes focusing on the detonation of the first atomic bomb, in the midst of a vast electrical storm, at the specially constructed town, of Los Alamos. Here is filmmaking at its most skilled and Christopher Nolan will probably win an Academy Award for his astounding creativity as a director.
Christopher Nolan also wrote the script, based on the book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. It’s extremely wordy and moves fast, sometimes too fast. For example, why the name “Trinity” was chosen for the bomb test is glossed over. For anyone interested, it’s from John Donne, ”Trinity… Batter my heart, three-person’d God”.
Cillian Murphy, chain-smoking and mostly wearing Oppenheimer’s trademark wide-brimmed porkpie hat, convincingly portrays an extremely complex character. He’s a brilliant science student and tutor at Cambridge University, he’s a social person, mixing with communists, reputedly a womaniser. Then, once he brings the new quantum physics to America, he’s a respected leader in the scientific community. It’s not at all clear, once he’s in charge of the USA’s secret weapons laboratory, how he feels as a scientist, thrust among politicians and the military, but that makes him intriguing.
Matt Damon does a standout job as Lt Gen Leslie Groves, who recruited Oppenheimer to head the laboratory. In tiny roles, several of the enormous cast stand out too: Tom Conti as Albert Einstein, Kenneth Branagh as science guru Niels Bohr, Gary Oldman as president Truman and Rami Malek as a scientist who supported Oppenheimer at security hearings rigged to discredit him.
Robert Downey Jr gives us the film’s best acting, as the character with the biggest ego, the narcissistic, self-serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss. That, and those startling profound scenes at Los Alamos, are two outstanding aspects of Oppenheimer.
Recommended.
The first person to bring an image or hardcopy of this review to Starlight Cinema Taupō qualifies for a free ticket to Oppenheimer.
Movies are rated: Avoid, Recommended, Highly recommended and Must See.
