Movie Review : Oppenheimer (2023)
Christopher Nolan's career is in an interesting, somewhat uncharted place. He's been an indie darling, he ran arguably the best superhero film trilogy that ever was, he did the Spielberg thing and also missed the mark with a big budget movie. There were so many questions about Nolan’s new project Oppenheimer and almost none of them had to do with the movie itself. Everyone understood that he was making a movie about the inventor of the atomic bomb, but why and how it would turn out was still a mystery.
Well, I'm happy to report Oppenheimer isn't a "slick-ass fiasco" like I called his previous movie Tenet! It's actually great in the way Christopher Nolan movies usually are.
Oppenheimer tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (interpreted by the immortal Cillian Murphy), a renowned theoretical physicist and director of the Manhattan Project. The titular theoretical physicist was also kind of a communist (but only kind of) who was at odds with the way America was conducting itself in the midst of WWII. How is that a good or even original story? Well, designing the biggest mass destruction weapon in the history of science for people you fundamentally disagree with is a complicated life to live.
Dudes and The Limits of Science
So, Oppenheimer is a historical movie, but it isn't a biopic. The difference between both is simple : a historical movie is reading history in order to explore a greater point about human nature. It's concerned with telling the story of the people involved, but that story is instrumental to whatever point the movie is trying to make. I don't believe Oppenheimer lies or misrepresents anything, but it is mainly concerned about what happens when you reach the limits of science. In order words, when science might just kill everybody.
What makes Oppenheimer riveting is that no one had ever even considered making an atomic bomb before the geopolitical conflict leading to WWII and it was difficult to understand at the beginning how potent it could actually be. J. Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist. He could do maths with the best of them, but when the data indicated an atomic bomb may or may not set the atmosphere on fire, it traced a line on what actually science could do and where it could lead from an evolutionary standpoint.
When the knowable world reaches a hard theoretical limit like this, we become governed my non scientific concepts like intuition, instinct and moral principles. There's a fascinating scene in Oppenheimer where Henry Stimson (played by Dexter’s dad James Remar) discards launching the atomic bomb on Kyoto because he honeymooned there. It's the kind of arbitrariness that made this situation so insane an idiosyncratic. It's the story about men trying not to blow up the worlds using only their best judgement.
I mean, it is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer AND the story on how we almost blew up the world trying to accomplish something crazy and unheard of. The magic of cinema can do that and Christopher Nolan sure can pull it off.
The Atomic Science of Christopher Nolan
With that said, Oppenheimer is a somewhat difficult film to get into for the first hour or so and it's almost solely Christopher Nolan's fault. This is an artistically ambitious movie and sometimes it gets in its own way. Nolan and his editor Jennifer Lame chose to narrate the story from a series of flashbacks and anecdotes in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s mind as he's testifying at his own security hearing, framing the man as the undoubtedly hyperintelligent person that he was, with this complicated, fractal understanding of the world.
But it takes time to put together this series of related and unrelated scenes. Oppenheimer starts shining as he gets hired to teach at Berkley and the conflict between the bright eyed scientist that he is and the petulant asshole he is portrayed to become later (but that asshole is presented earlier in the film, see what I mean?) and that intelligent that made him special gets in the way of his own ethics. Once the movie gets there, it reveals its sweet core after you've peeled its hard and bitter rind.
Christopher Nolan's ambitions don't always get in the way, though. There's a lot of fun, conceptual symbolism that enriches the movie and betrays its director's adorable nerdiness. My favorite example might be the actual bomb that looks like a planet while they put it together after two hours of men in suit saying making that bomb would be the equivalent of "ushering a new world". It's that type of smart, but accessible winks that make Christopher Nolan so badass. His movies can make anyone feel smart.
*
I'm not gonna lie. Although it was undoubtedly uplifted in popular culture by the Barbenheimer phenomenon, Oppenheimer was kind of great. Perhaps my favourite Christopher Nolan movie along with Dunkirk. It's not who Nolan chooses to talk about that makes him a brilliant filmmaker, but how and why he decides to talk about them and his exploration of the limits of science and the ego of men was riveting in its own convoluted way. I would 100% rewatch even if I understood pretty much everything the first time.
