Oppenheimer Is More Than a Creation Myth About the Atomic Bomb
Christopher Nolan’s ambitious film explores the heated conversations and private anxieties that led to the unleashing of a terrible power.
Almost all of Oppenheimer is composed of conversation. There’s academic back-and-forth among theoretical physicists as they scribble nuclear equations on chalkboards; heated conversations between American politicians and military leaders about World War II and the fate of the country should the Nazis win; terse, loaded exchanges at panels and congressional hearings, with investigations sifting through rumors and conjecture in an effort to determine these scientists’ loyalty to the United States. The director Christopher Nolan rarely slows down to let his protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), actually think. When he does, the audience sees particles swirling in Oppenheimer’s mind, neutrons smashing and sparking, elemental forces being harnessed through intelligence and will.
It’s mesmerizing but also quite inscrutable—a beautiful representation of the terrible power Oppenheimer channeled in his involvement with the Manhattan Project, which created (and detonated) the first nuclear weapons. Nolan’s film encompasses far more than that, cramming almost all of the doorstop-size biography American Prometheus into a three-hour running time by moving at breakneck speed. It covers Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a student and his postwar battles with the government over his alleged Communist past. The result is a talky biopic with the intensity of an action movie, a series of meetings in offices and bunkers that somehow drives the planet to the brink of apocalypse. Although the visual scale is smaller than the many widescreen epics Nolan has made—save for the part where the bomb goes off—Oppenheimer might be his most ambitious work as a filmmaker to date.
It’s also a fascinating companion piece to the only other Nolan movie that’s rooted in real-life events: 2017’s Dunkirk. That film, which depicted the evacuation of Allied troops during World War II, was light on dialogue and heavy on complex action set pieces, bombarding the viewer’s eyes and ears with the fury of the front lines. Much of Oppenheimer is set during the same war, but it focuses on the behind-the-scenes figures who sought to end the war without firing a bullet. Nolan’s chief fascination, of course, is Oppenheimer himself, whom Murphy plays as a grand enigma—icy at times and effortlessly charming at others, sympathetic to leftist revolutionary causes but happy to bury those sympathies as he begins steering the Manhattan Project.
The film’s first hour barrels through his student years and his early days as a physicist in England and Germany; Oppenheimer crosses paths with legends in his field such as Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer). Their energetic discussions of quantum mechanics and atomic theory are difficult to keep up with, but as the plot thundered on, I realized that was part of the point: Even these esteemed men of science can’t quite grasp what they’re dealing with. The viewer knows where things are headed—the total success of the Manhattan Project, and the consequences of the weapons it produced—but there’s a frightening lack of awareness as, spurred by a fear of the Nazis reaching the same consequential milestone first, the development of the bomb is set in motion.
Throughout the action, Nolan ping-pongs between timelines, as he has in many films past. In painstaking detail, he depicts the humiliating 1954 hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance and dredged up both his past associations with Communists and his overactive love life. A more daring element, told in black and white, follows the former Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (a tremendous Robert Downey Jr.) as he undergoes a Senate confirmation hearing for a Cabinet post, digging through the politician’s tense relationship and eventual enmity with Oppenheimer. The majority of the story, shown in color and centered on Oppenheimer, fizzes with energy and possibility; the Strauss-centric sequences are slow, seething, and obsessed with the past, representative of the conservatism and paranoia that calcified around the atomic society Oppenheimer helped to create.
Nolan’s ambition is to intertwine multiple biographical threads about his subject and his historical context. There’s the mad dash to create nuclear weapons, a thrilling race against time with an explosive conclusion: the Trinity bomb test that proved their theories correct. There’s the larger moral conflict that emerged especially after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as scientists such as Oppenheimer started begging governments to back away from the deadly arms race that politicians like Strauss were effectively pushing for. And then there are the deepest mysteries of Oppenheimer himself, a man who pleaded for peace later in life but who never fully held himself publicly accountable for the hundreds of thousands left dead by his invention.
As Oppenheimer zips toward its conclusion and switches perspectives with increasing mania, it becomes clear how carefully Nolan is working to keep the audience’s attention on his story’s lofty scope without losing sight of its cryptic protagonist. Murphy, with his frost-blue eyes fixed in a permanent thousand-yard stare, keeps the viewer (and the people around him) at arm’s length. But as the years pile on, it’s obvious how the guilt has stacked up too. The film lets reality start to crack around Oppenheimer as a result, turning the Trinity test into a haunting, invasive specter he can never quite shake.
Nolan is best known for spectacle, and some viewers will be able to see Oppenheimer in bone-rattling IMAX, projected on a skyscraper-size screen. But it’s more impressive for how the director has made such a personal narrative feel epic, not just in visual breadth but in dramatic sweep, presenting a story from the past that feels knotted to so many present anxieties about nuclear annihilation. After racing his way to scientific progress and achievement, Oppenheimer is confronted with an amoral world he had previously ignored; that existential horror, and the way it echoed into the 21st century, is the real hammer wielded by this tale.
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