My review of Oppenheimer
The beauty of Nolan's masterpiece and why it's worth watching for three hours
I’ve always been a fan of Christopher Nolan’s films. Dark Knight is my number one favorite film of all time and I could watch it again and again countless times without ever getting bored (and I have). Inception was a thriller, Interstellar a masterpiece. I even rewatched Dunkirk recently and realized I had previously overlooked the greatness of that film. Tenet was fascinating and required the most brain cells and effort to understand but I loved it regardless. And now Oppenheimer. I had to sit with myself and just ponder over it after watching this magnificent film which captivated my attention from start to finish without pause.
Oppenheimer is a fascinating character to build a movie around. He was, without a doubt, a genius. He brought quantum physics to America, learned from some of the greats in Europe, and eventually became director of the Manhattan Project which enabled America to build an atom bomb before Nazi Germany. He changed the world from that point onwards and subsequently became a changed man himself. The catastrophic nature of the bomb, the devastation it caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nuclear arms race that began following its use in Japan disturbed Oppenheimer. Soon thereafter he became an advocate for nuclear arms talks between the Soviet Union and America, taking a stance that posed a threat to the political and military establishment in Washington. By then he was one of the most famous people in the world, the ‘father of the atom bomb’, and his notoriety enabled him to exert considerable political influence. He was admired by the scientific community, who saw the baseless political assassination executed upon him years later as a vengeful attack by a jealous rival. His genius and hubris didn’t always rub those he saw as lesser than him the right way and he earned himself a powerful enemy in Lewis Strauss after he publicly mocked his opposition to ship radioactive isotopes to American allies in Europe for medical purposes. In the McCarthyism era known as the ‘Red Scare’, his leftist sympathies from the past were drudged up and used to revoke his security clearance and destroy his credibility, diminishing his ability to speak on nuclear matters. In a small, unremarkable room, Oppenheimer’s entire life was agonizingly scrutinized, every minute detail of his life brought into the light in order to bring his loyalty to the country he loved into question. After a month of fighting to renew his security clearance, he was denied. Though not shown in the film, he died of throat cancer a decade later, resulting from his incessant smoking habit. Decades after his death, the baseless political attacks against him would be publicly acknowledged by the American government, and only then would his name be unequivocally cleared of all suspicion and the injustice done to him in 1954 recognized.
Nolan takes the complicated, contradictory personality of Oppenheimer and crafts a gripping tale that hooks the audience from the very beginning. After watching the movie, my curiosity about Oppenheimer piqued. I ordered the book, “American Prometheus”, that same night to learn more about the man. In many ways, his story intertwines with some of the topics I am most interested in: nature, physics, politics, WW2, Congress, national security, the Cold War, and so much more. Nolan’s interplay between Oppenheimer and Strauss throughout the film as well as the outstanding performances by Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. brought the personal tensions of the two characters to life on screen. I was awestruck by how the color scenes and the black and white scenes complimented each other and the ending of the movie gave the film the bow that it deserved. Nolan is known for his unique narrative structures and liberal manipulation of time and chronology, so I was pleased to see the interplay between the different stages of Oppenheimer’s life. By the end of the film, I felt fulfilled and could hardly believe that three hours had passed. I felt a sense of completeness with the film even as my hunger to learn more about the title character grew intensely.
The cast was perfect for the movie, as well as the soundtrack, cinematography, and dialogue. I was astonished to learn later that Nolan does not own a smartphone, have access to social media, and writes his scripts on a computer that lacks an internet connection. He says that this is what enables him to create such original works. He was certainly correct about watching the movie in IMAX. You truly felt the explosions and sound effects when you were watching on a big screen and the visuals were terrifyingly detailed.
While the visuals and audio in the movie are stunning, Nolan forces the viewer to wrestle with the moral questions American scientists and policymakers struggled to answer in 1945 and onwards. Was the rationale for making the atom bomb sound? Is Oppenheimer responsible for how his creation was used by the U.S. military? To dig deeper into these questions and more, I decided to buy the book and learn more about the man. It’s 700 pages long but a fascinating read that dives deep into the details that the movie introduces us to. I highly recommend it for those who are as interested in the man as I am, but if not, the movie is very true to the source material and a great introduction to the aforementioned topics. I would give it a 10/10 and it is definitely a new addition to my Top 5 movies of all-time.