Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan is the masterful conductor of nuclear drama with thrills and scares
Starring Cillian Murphy and a host of supporting actors, Oppenheimer lets you in the moral dilemma that the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’ faced.
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Robert Downey Jr, Emily Blunt, Benny Safdie
J. Robert Oppenheimer is often called ‘one of the most important people in living memory,’ and for good reason. History would have charted a different course had it not been for his efforts to build one of the most destructive things humans ever created.
It takes a certain madness to build a weapon of mass destruction that can’t just end a war but also a planet. It also takes certain madness to make a movie on him that can make the viewer empathise with the ‘Father of the Atomic Bomb’.
But Christopher Nolan does just that in Oppenheimer—and how.
The movie begins with swirling clouds of gas and fire engulfing the screen, putting one right in the midst of a nuclear explosion. Whether that explosion belongs to the Trinity test—the culmination of The Manhattan Project led by the theoretical physicist to put the US at an advantage during World War II—or from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is anyone’s guess. Nolan's Oppie (as Oppenheimer is called by his students) is short of a madman seeing such visions of a hidden universe—electron clouds and nuclear fission, m-strings and collapsing stars, war and carnage.
These visions are Nolan's way of telling what resides at the core of the movie, which is an adaptation of the theoretical physicist’s biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. While his triumphs and trials make your blood rush to the head, the story also leaves you with a warning and a sense of fear about the end of the world, something not unknown to those who grew up during the Cold War.
Poster of Oppenheimer (2023)- Source-IMBD
The movie doesn't shy away from telling Oppenheimer’s truth. A genius physicist who held an intellectual interest in communism at a time when the idea was pitching the US against the largest country in the world, Soviet Russia. It was an era of McCarthyism when communists, or anyone remotely holding socialist beliefs, were hunted down in the country like deer in a forest.
The narrative isn’t linear; it jumps from the lead character growing into The Manhattan Project to Oppenheimer’s private and public trial, and back. It works well for the movie. Nolan, also the scriptwriter, doesn’t let the viewer slide back into their seat at all, not even for a moment.
Such a command of the narrative wouldn’t have been possible without Ludwig Göransson’s stirring score that scratches at the heart. He makes use of the classic Nolan device—the Shepard tones—to build up the tension without actually raising the octaves, and letting it go at once. The soundscape matches Oppenheimer’s nuclear theme, whether by making music out of a Geiger counter’s (used to detect radiation) measurements or introducing the music suddenly, like a bomb exploding.
Cillian Murphy borrows his piercing gaze from Peaky Blinders and adapts it to portray the titular character who is possessed to make a bomb before the Nazis do at the dawn of the nuclear age. The actor is Oppenheimer’s backbone and is a revelation as a physicist with shades of a politician. He invites you into the moral dilemma facing the character, and lets his compass slide just enough to not make you dislike him. Like a chess player living on the edge of madness, Murphy is artfully deceptive and uses restraint to gauge people’s next move, not letting his gentlemanly demeanour slide even when pushed against the wall.
While the portrayal may not help Murphy win an Oscar, it certainly gives him a badge of credibility that has long evaded him from starring in lead roles.
The supporting actors know their job is to help Murphy carry the character into an orbit of his own. Whether it is Florence Pugh’s seduction and heartbreak, Emily Blunt’s endless postpartum depression as Oppenheimer’s wife, or the tiny but impressionable appearances by Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, Casey Affleck, and Kenneth Branagh—the cast consisting of the who’s who of Hollywood act in a symphony that plays just right.
Matt Damon is good as a brutally honest officer who doesn’t let Oppenheimer enjoy too much. But it’s Robert Downey Jr who stands out as the Machiavellian former US Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss, immersing into the character skin deep—not seen since, if you can believe it, Tropic Thunder.
However, Oppenheimer isn’t without its flaws. The dialogue can often feel empty in an American sense. While Nolan knows how to rouse up his audience, his dense script suffers from a problem of plenty that may, if you miss some pivotal moments, give you a headache. While the movie explored Oppenheimer’s bad blood with Edward Teller (portrayed by Benny Safdie), Nolan makes the beef a little too mild.
Oppenheimer succeeds in showing a man in conflict about building nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war, as is the case at present, and creating something that is awesome and bone-chilling at the same time. Nolan borrows from all over the place—taking note from political thrillers like The Ides of March and Good Night, and Good Luck—but just enough to make an ode.
The moment of explosion—the reason why the movie is suited for IMAX screens—seems anticlimactic and small. That’s perhaps because it’s not about that moment itself, it’s about the man who led humanity to that moment in history.
Oppenheimer is Prometheus from Greek mythology who ‘stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humans and he was chained to a rock for eternity’. He once told US President Harry S Truman, “I feel like I have blood on my hands,” when the Americans vapourised the Japanese to end World War II.
The atomic bomb is Oppenheimer’s rock.
Rating: 4/5
Edited by Saheli Sen Gupta