Directed by Christopher Nolan
UK and US: On general release from Friday
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At 05:29 hours and 45 seconds on 16 July 1945, in the heart of the Jornada del Muerto desert, New Mexico, an electrical circuit clicks shut and 32 detonators fire, driving a uranium plug into a core of plutonium. The plutonium fissions, each atom splitting into lighter elements, a blast of gamma radiation and two or three more neutrons, which hurtle forth, triggering further reactions.
And so a new world order is born: one in which the human species has the capacity to all but wipe itself off the face of the Earth. The terror of such annihilation helps avert global conflict, unevenly, at great cost, and by no means necessarily forever.
J. Robert Oppenheimer directed atomic bomb development at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, then spent many years arguing for international arms control and against US development of the even more powerful fusion hydrogen bomb. Not only was he the midwife to a new Cold War world, he gave us the vocabulary with which to talk about it, agonise over it and fear it.
It is possible to miss the point of Christopher Nolan’s superb biopic of Oppenheimer. One-and-a-half hours of screen time follow the Trinity test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon. If all that interests you is how Nolan – a film-maker famously wedded to analogue production and real film – conveys the scale of an atomic explosion, you are in for a long haul.
But Oppenheimer is about the war in its hero’s head. It reflects the world in which he operated, even physically. The film is set in lecture rooms and laboratories, living rooms and kitchens, shacks and bunkers. The horror of Hiroshima is conveyed quite simply: Oppenheimer, sat in front of footage of the bombing’s aftermath, can’t stand to watch and looks away.
Following the US’s use of two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, walls shake, exposures wobble, continuity stutters and different film stocks are muddled together to convey °¿±è±è±ð²Ô³ó±ð¾±³¾±ð°ù’s increasingly nightmarish experience of the new reality. If Nolan’s story (drawn from Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus) wasn’t so grippingly told, the film’s unvarying pace, portentous, minimalist musical score and humourlessness would, I suspect, prove unwatchable: like 2020’s Tenet, a film easier to read than to view.
What transforms Oppenheimer and makes it, for my money at any rate, Nolan’s best film since The Prestige is the sheer craftiness of the script. It centres on two official hearings, both of which took place in the 1950s: °¿±è±è±ð²Ô³ó±ð¾±³¾±ð°ù’s appeal against the revocation of his security clearance with the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and former AEC chairman Lewis Strauss’s confirmation hearing as he vied for reappointment as US secretary of commerce.
Those who know about Strauss’s fraught attitudes towards Oppenheimer will relish Robert Downey Jr’s screen-chewing performance as this multi-faceted figure. Those coming to the material fresh have a cracking twist in store, as the pair’s relationship comes to life in the final act of the film.
Fragments of °¿±è±è±ð²Ô³ó±ð¾±³¾±ð°ù’s odyssey — from theoretical astrophysicist to father of the atomic bomb — orbit these two centres of gravity. The narrative surface that results is as complex as anything Nolan has achieved before, but less confusing. Oppenheimer covers a staggering amount of intellectual history and biographical ground, with no trace of ponderous exposition. The script finds room to give Russian physicists their due and very sensitively conveys the internationalist sentiment that dominated research at Los Alamos.
Of course, the physicists and engineers at the laboratory could think what they liked. There was a war on, and a Cold War to follow. °¿±è±è±ð²Ô³ó±ð¾±³¾±ð°ù’s largely fruitless tilts at geopolitical realities after the war was over became emblematic of the plight of the conscience-stricken government scientist. His damaging run-ins with officialdom during the anti-communist scares of the 1950s only confirmed his status as a modern Prometheus, punished for handing atomic fire to humanity.
Strauss had little time for the idea of Oppenheimer as a tragic overreacher, and Nolan, funnily enough, seems to agree. At any rate, he finds no use for his subject’s self-dramatising. (Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, is notorious for banging on about becoming Death, destroyer of worlds; this dark flourish is eliminated early on.)
Nolan is much more interested in °¿±è±è±ð²Ô³ó±ð¾±³¾±ð°ù’s impossible bind: an intelligent man, by no means naive or apolitical, whose background in academia and theory makes him unfit him for the world he helps create. Emily Blunt’s performance as Kitty, °¿±è±è±ð²Ô³ó±ð¾±³¾±ð°ù’s increasingly embittered and partisan wife, is crucial, if almost wordless.
Other big names flourish in supporting roles that allow them unusual freedom. Matt Damon is positively gruff as Leslie Groves, the general in charge of Los Alamos. Dane DeHaan relishes a gratingly unsympathetic portrait of Kenneth Nichols, the director of US Army research and development. Bennie Safdie makes even the peaceniks among us fall in love with Edward Teller, hawkish father of the hydrogen bomb, a straight-shooting adversary Oppenheimer can’t help but shake by the hand, to Kitty’s lip-curling disgust.
Even before he starts acting, Cillian Murphy’s resting demeanour drips a sort of divine cluelessness that makes him a shoo-in for the role of Oppenheimer. He goes on to deliver a shuddering performance that, more than any finely wrought dialogue, conveys the impossible moral quandary of scientists recruited into government service.
To know the world is to change it. On 16 July 1945, knowledge and deed were separated by the press of a single red button. Oppenheimer takes three hours to explain why this moment matters, and there isn’t a second of screen time wasted. It is a rich, strange, compelling film. A tragedy, yes — and a triumph.
