“Brilliance,” says J Robert Oppenheimer early in this epic film about his place in history, “makes up for a lot.”
Cillian Murphy, who plays Oppenheimer, well, brilliantly delivers the line with a wry smile. Being the father of the atomic bomb, as this ballistic boffin biopic reminds us, didn’t make him too great at life above sub-atomic level.
Brilliance at some things also makes up for a lot in writer-director Christopher Nolan’s approach. He’s done blockbuster science lectures before in fictional settings, with the theoretical astrophysics of Interstellar and quantum physics in time-bending spy thriller Tenet, his 2020 previous film. That said, they were also his dullest works.
Here, he’s adapted the definitive biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, a book that took its two writers, Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, nearly 30 years to complete but which still reads like a thriller.
Here, those 700 pages become a three-hour movie that can feel like three films in one, which could be titled “fuse”, “fission” and “fallout”. How Nolan wrestles cinematically with the complexities of Oppenheimer’s work and the mind and morality behind it displays plenty of Nolan’s own particular brilliance. But likewise, the people stuff, things like how they talk to each other, isn’t quite so good.
In that first hour, it can feel like you’re being read the Oppenheimer Wikipedia page, a series of exposition explosions risking its own chain reaction. There is anachronistic dialogue too, such as when politician and Oppenheimer’s benefactor-turned-nemesis Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr in top form) talks about having to “pivot”. The film’s scenes in postwar Washington when Oppenheimer was sidelined by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations after campaigning on putting the nuclear weapon genie back in the bottle, aren’t exactly models of clarity.
Up the front of the film, its relentless pace can feel like a trailer for the next two, as Nolan interweaves images of buzzing particles between Oppenheimer’s undergraduate life.
There are also some odd moments involving, well, a naked Florence Pugh playing his younger lover Jean Tatlock. One is when she is an imagined figure in a Washington committee hearing. The other is when Oppenheimer first utters his famous quote, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” taken from the Bhagavad Gita. It’s not a reaction to seeing his first atomic explosion but in a sex scene with Tatlock. Has Nolan mixed up one sacred Hindu text with the kama sutra?
As well as his libido, the movie goes hard on Oppenheimer’s voracious intellect outside physics to establish his place among 20th-century geniuses. In one sequence he’s reading TS Eliot’s The Waste Land between admiring Picassos while Stravinsky is on the gramophone. He debates Marx with Tatlock based on having read Das Kapital in the original German.
It is well established that Oppenheimer was a man with a very big brain in a very shaky marriage to Katherine (Emily Blunt) by the time we get to Los Alamos in his beloved New Mexico.
The central chapter is both enthralling and terrifying. Especially with its reminder that Oppenheimer’s team thought there was a small possibility that pressing the button would ignite the entire atmosphere but did it anyway.
It’s a movie of a vast supporting cast of big names including Matt Damon as Manhattan Project boss General Leslie Groves, with brief appearances by Tom Conti as Albert Einstein and Gary Oldman as Truman. Oldman, after playing Churchill, now only needs a Stalin to collect the set.
The film belongs to Murphy’s mesmerising portrayal of Oppenheimer, a man who changed history and then tried to deal with the consequences. But even he is eclipsed by a brighter star, the one he unleashed in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. It’s not just any old movie explosion. In Nolan’s hands, it’s brilliant and devastating.
Rating out of 5 stars: ★★★★
Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan is in cinemas now.
