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Director / Screenwriter: Christopher Nolan

By Roderick Heath

The other half of a one-time-only marketing synergy event that drove both it and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to vast profitability in mid-2023, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has an aura of special aptness, even  inevitability, as an extension of Nolan’s oeuvre. Oppenheimer sees Nolan delving back into the same epic World War II climes as Dunkirk (2017), safe grist for prestige filmmaking whilst allowing Nolan to apply his particular branded aesthetic to material pitched right at a particular cusp, still powerful enough to be common folklore, whilst also taking on the lustre of an immediate past slipping into legend, ripe for the benefits from being defamiliarised with his specific style. With Oppenheimer Nolan swaps out the survivalist exigencies of Dunkirk’s focal point, on the common-as-muck soldier’s perspective on events of grand magnitude, for one that feels closer to Nolan’s heart as a filmmaker so often concerned with conceptual largesse and variably antiheroic protagonists whose drives and distorted perspectives can scarcely be understood by the world and its whims, and whose solutions to problems often beget new problems. For Nolan Oppenheimer’s success was a particular vindication after he broke with his former stalwart backers at Warner Bros., following his anger at their treatment of his 2020 film Tenet, an absurd if mildly enjoyable sci-fi thriller hodgepodge.

Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), held by many fans to be perhaps his best film, is indeed his only movie to completely dovetail the aspects of his creative mind – the historian battling with the modernist, the fabulist with the realist, moralist and systemic analyst, the conceptual artist with the clever showman. But Oppenheimer’s subject matter also comes close in its way to offering a unified field for Nolan’s preoccupations. The Prestige’s idealised, fictionalised vision of Nikolai Tesla as a man opening up frontiers of reality-reshaping technology gives way to Julius Robert Oppenheimer as a figure guarding another frontier, the stropped and chagrined prophet of the atomic age contrasting the much-beatified, grandfatherly eccentricity of Albert Einstein. Aware of this disparity, Nolan makes conversations between Oppenheimer and Einstein (Tom Conti) dramatic linchpins, including providing the very end: early in the film Oppenheimer dismisses Einstein as a genius who nonetheless shrank back for the implications of his discovery and so long outlasted his worth, only to find himself in a similar state by tale’s end, both men cringing before the fruits of their intellectual efforts and the dubiety of the world’s reception of them. Oppenheimer is also, as tacky as the comparison threatens to sound, an extension and variation on Nolan’s take on both Batman and the Joker, living out the arc summarised by the famous line from The Dark Knight (2008), “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” illustrated, or so Nolan plainly feels, this time with direct, drawn-from-life acuteness.

A brief biography of Oppenheimer could also serve as a synopsis of the movie, but there’s a lot about the man we don’t learn at all during its three-hour runtime. Oppenheimer was the son of a German-Jewish father who migrated to the United States and made a fortune as a textile importer, and a mother who was a painter – the practical and the artistic were to remain poles of Oppenheimer’s rarefied genius in rich and contradictory ways. Oppenheimer, born in 1904, proved a gifted student with talent in many fields, and after recovering from a bout of colitis as a teenager – which, to recover from, he and his family visited New Mexico for the first time, giving him a love of the region and of horseback riding – he studied chemistry at Harvard. Through the 1920s and ‘30s Oppenheimer was a prodigious student and teacher shuttling between Europe and the US in various scientific fields until he latched onto the emerging field of quantum physics, a period in which he met with many leading figures of physics and some future collaborators and rivals, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller. Nolan’s vision of Oppenheimer carving paths through the illusions of physical reality through to its inner mechanics rhymes with his own approach to storytelling, seeking out new substructures to weave the essential melodrama cues around.

Nolan adopts an initially odd framing device to delve into Oppenheimer’s life, recounting it partly from the perspective of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), a former head of the Atomic Energy Commission angling for a place on President Eisenhower’s cabinet in the late 1950s, but who finds his thorny relationship with Oppenheimer coming back to haunt him. Nolan differentiates between past and present and also Strauss’s perspective and a more neutral one by swapping between black-and-white and colour, in a manner reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s J.F.K. (1991) and Nixon (1995) (and Stone was briefly interested in filming this movie’s official source material, the biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin). But where Stone used his stock shifts to render his sense of perspective unstable, with fried-in-cocaine-batter impact, chaotic and palpitating in aesthetic effect, Nolan is for better or worse more methodical and prosaic in intent. Eventually it becomes clear that Strauss is highly paranoid about Oppenheimer and bears him a deep-seated grudge stemming back to various slights, including mocking issues he raised during a Senate testimony, and for allegedly turning Einstein against him when both men were working for Strauss in the late 1940s. The viewpoint shifts to Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) to recount his excitable student days at Cambridge, when his perverse, tunnel-visioned streak led him to try poisoning his teacher at the time, Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcy) by injecting an apple with cyanide, only narrowly avoiding a calamity when Blackett introduces him to Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and he pretends to see a worm hole in the apple.

Later Oppenheimer encounters Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), later to be charged with heading the Nazi atomic bomb effort, and strikes up a friendship with fellow American physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz), who, at least in Nolan’s portrait, practically incarnates the more earthy and Jewish side of himself Oppenheimer denies as suave man of the world. Oppenheimer returns to the US and splits his time between teaching at Caltech and Berkeley, working at the latter alongside the Nobel Prize-winner Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett). Lawrence’s cagey sense of politics contrasts Oppenheimer’s embrace of left-wing causes, even as he’s criticised by many in his social circle for remaining aloof from the Communist Party, unlike his brother and fellow physicist Frank (Dylan Arnold), psychologist lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), his eventual wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), and friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall). As nuclear fission abruptly becomes a practical reality, as well as the notion it can be used to make bombs, Oppenheimer is initially excluded from Lawrence’s circle discussing the matter with intent, but is later approached by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), an army engineer who recently completed building the Pentagon, as he looks for a scientific leader for the Manhattan Project, the US effort to build an atomic bomb in urgent rivalry with Nazi Germany. Groves quickly realises Oppenheimer has just the right mind and personality to oversee the project, and at Oppenheimer’s suggestion, the Project sets up shop in the sparse surrounds of Los Alamos, a part of New Mexico he knows well.

Nolan takes pains to capture something of Oppenheimer’s mercurial brilliance, as well as a sadomasochistic streak suggested by the poisoned apple episode, an inchoate need for punishment that he later turns on himself, with vignettes that confirm his unexpected gift with language, able to learn enough Dutch to give an entire lecture in it in a few weeks when visiting the Netherlands, and to read one of the defining texts of his life, the Bhagavad-Gita, in the Sanskrit. We get snapshots of the heady climes of academia in the 1930s, a hotbed of both radical sympathies and, well, hot beds: Oppenheimer and future wife Kitty flirt up a storm even as she professes to being still married. Oppenheimer’s passions converge as Tatlock gets him to read a passage of the Bhagavad-Gita whilst she screws him – and, of course, it’s the “I am become Death” passage he picks out. This moment is peculiar, and crucial for the way Oppenheimer sees Nolan trying to open up new ground for himself, and the ways he fails it at. Nolan lets some adult sexuality into his oft-airless and emotionally sublimated creative palette – this is, after all, the guy who explored a dream realm without any hint of the erotic in Inception (2010) – and affects to set in motion a motif that sees a connection between the creative and destructive urges manifest in Oppenheimer’s work, although really he goes nowhere with that motif. On another level, it’s a bit silly, making me think of Young Frankenstein (1974) when a bit of good rogering wrings pristine operatic arias out of Madeline Khan. Nolan’s touch of the erotic is also stilted and carefully posed – dear lord, Florence Pugh’s breasts! – as well as the attempt to humanise these people, considering he’s dealing here with two randy, messy, nonconformist intellectuals who share, in their different fashions, a self-immolating streak.

Also, Oppenheimer and Tatlock’s relationship proves to be an exact model for Nolan’s recurring conceit of man haunted by a former lover whose death he feels complicit in, as previously described in Memento (2001), The Dark Knight, and Inception. But the real meat of Oppenheimer as a narrative is Nolan’s preoccupation with the tension between Oppenheimer’s stature as leader of a great national mission of war and the mistrust turned on people like him – those with a confluence of progressive political opinions and Jewish names – held in check in a marriage of political convenience but soon enough allowed to play out as the Cold War takes hold. Oppenheimer can be characterised in this theme, and in common concern with winning award season favour, as a kind of spiritual sequel to Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game (2014), and whilst Oppenheimer’s personal peccadilloes didn’t let the establishment destroy him as thoroughly as Alan Turing’s did, there was a similar logic to both men’s careers, as savants whose talents were utilised and then cast aside once they weren’t needed any more and the communal action of the war gave way to new fiefdoms of the square insiders re-erecting fences against the unruly outsiders.

What’s most telling about this film’s approach to that idea is however the lengths it goes to to deny the similarity. Nolan charts in incessant, frenetic detail Oppenheimer’s grazes with security protocols and enforcers, like Boris Pash (Casey Affleck), a serpentine army intelligence officer with a perfect, personal hatred of Communists, to whom Oppenheimer lies in an effort to cover for his friend Chevalier, in the kind of stumble his foes make the most of in his efforts post-war to destroy him. Hysteria kicks in once the Soviets start detonating their own bombs, and one member of the Los Alamos team, Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham), is revealed to have been funnelling secrets to them. The film eventually draws out Teller (Bennie Safdie) as a particular Judas figure, with his greater interest in developing the hydrogen bomb, or the ‘Super’ as the Manhattan Project honchos start to call the idea: Oppenheimer goes out of his way to accommodate Teller in letting him pursue the idea to avoid having him walk out. But when Oppenheimer starts resisting actually building it as needless and dangerous escalation after the Soviets develop their own bomb, Teller’s frustration, a frustration Strauss shares as head of the AEC, as they see a need for a new edge over the Soviets, is eventually expressed before a review board looking at cancelling Oppenheimer’s security clearance.

When I was a small boy my father had some reprinted front page editions of old newspapers including one reporting the ‘Trinity’ test, featuring the famous images of the test captured in fractions of seconds I poured over with deep fascination and disquiet – those protoplasmic bulges of energy expanding and congealing in the initial phase of ignition, captured in strangely textured black-and-white, a medium I associated as most of us do when young with things that are antique and safely bygone, but yet with colour seeming to want to burst out along with the atomic hellfire that would within moments of the photos being taken plume high into the sky. Those images capture an event at once awe-inspiring and terrifying, as, for the first time, human ingenuity worried around the very edges of stable reality and physical existence – and, indeed, as the film dedicates some time to noting, the possibility that the fission process might just keep going and fry up the entire planet’s atmosphere wasn’t entirely discounted up until the ignition of the Trinity bomb. Nolan bends the historical record a tad by having Oppenheimer take Teller’s calculations which suggest that possibility to Einstein – he showed them to someone else, but Nolan can’t resist the idea of Oppenheimer, for all his bravura as the next generational chieftain, running back to daddy Albert for reassurance.

Other films and TV series have tackled this material before, of course. The mystique of the Manhattan Project and its leader permeated 1950s science fiction. For instance, Gene Barry’s Dr Clayton Forrester in Byron Haskin’s The War of the Worlds (1953) is a thinly veiled version of Oppenheimer, complete with similar biographical details and stature as scientific hero, and a figure who is finally left roaming around shattered cities amidst an apocalypse, desperately seeking spiritual and romantic recourse as the age of “super-science” brings down deadly rain, in what amounts to the most ingenious and vivid picturing of the mental landscape of those who lived through the birth of the atomic age. More directly, the 1980 BBC series Oppenheimer and two rival productions from 1989, the feature film Fat Man and Little Boy and the telemovie Day One, depicted Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project in varying levels of depth. Fat Man and Little Boy featured Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer and Paul Newman as Groves, and was directed by Roland Joffé, then still riding high as the maker of the prestigious hits The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986). His film actually went into a lot more depth and effort to make the problems of building the bomb coherent than Nolan’s does, as well as considering the culture and ethical arguments of the team of scientists who worked on it. But that movie had its own serious problems, including an awkward attempt to personalise the danger of the bomb for the project team by casting John Cusack as an everyman scientist who gets fatally irradiated, based on events that happened well after the bomb’s first uses.

Not many people remember the 1952 film Above and Beyond, a biopic directed by Melvin Frank and based on the memoirs of Paul Tibbets and likely the first film to actually depict the Manhattan Project. Robert Taylor played Tibbets, the US Army Air Force pilot whose job it became to actually drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In the film, Tibbets is ushered into a meeting with a superior, handed a disconnected bombsight button, and presented with an question that is supposedly abstract, but both men know very well that given the job they’re doing and the age they live in, surely is anything but: would he push the button if he understood that by doing so he could end the war, but at the cost of killing 50,000 people. Tibbets, after musing for a moment on the question, decisively presses the button. That scene often jumps back into my thoughts, not least as the most potent possible real-world example of the kind of “trolley problem” moral question that’s usually presented to us in far more benign terms – in some classroom, or even in an online meme, but which more usually we tend to skate around in the name of a more free-floating humanism. What’s most striking from today’s perspective about this scene from Frank’s film of Tibbets’ story is the complete lack of conscientious handwringing, sourced it feels in the far greater proximity, culturally, historically, and philosophically to the war that produced it. Tibbets, in short, chose his side, come what may.

That can of course be seen as stemming from the way the film obviously was made in the afterglow by the victorious, but there’s something truly galvanising and perturbing there, reflecting the way war, much like a black hole, distorts all moral gravity, but a certain calculus remains in play. Things that would seem utterly unthinkable to an ordinary person at other times seem entirely natural, even inevitable. And war is another country, unknowable and scarcely mappable for those living outside its borders of imperative. That’s an idea Oppenheimer tries to engage with, but finishes up fumbling timidly, much as it does with Oppenheimer himself and his plainly complex feelings about his great achievement. Nolan, to his credit, does try to get at some disparity in our way of thinking about those things, when Strauss accuses Oppenheimer of manoeuvring so his name would be associated with Trinity, great moment in science, and not Hiroshima, terrible moment in history. One of Nolan’s more coherent and pervasive points iterated through the film comes as Oppenheimer and his fellows repeatedly confront the problem of not being able to predict everything, such as the possibility of unstoppable chain reaction: the only real proof, the only way of knowing, can come through the successful detonation of atomic bombs, both in test and in war. And this is bound up with the way the bomb is as much a weapon of spectacle, the ultimate blockbuster attraction, to instil fear and caution in the enemy, as it is one of actual military application – perhaps really far more so.

Nolan quickly puts in motion his by-now very familiar stylistic ploy of trying to relentlessly push his narrative forward with a combination of fast editing and high-pressure music scoring, as if, in much the same way Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project weaponises theoretical physics, he’s weaponised the artistic style of Godfrey Reggio’s poetic documentary Koyaanisqatsi (1983), in mimicking the way its propulsive Philip Glass score entwines with visual flourishes, mimicked here in shots like surveying a row of jutting nuclear missiles in quasi-abstract profile. Although this time his regular collaborator Hans Zimmer has been replaced by Ludwig Göransson, the score still comes in the same constantly ratcheting style that gives the impression we’re reaching the end of some ticking bomb countdown with every few minutes of screen time, even if we’ve only been watching a bunch of scientists talking. It’s this ploy that’s key to both Nolan’s success and my own deep distrust of it: Nolan’s films so often feel like extremely long trailers advertising themselves, and Oppenheimer is no exception even with its more measured qualities. Breaking down the elements of Oppenheimer reveals it as actually a very safe and familiar type of biopic, complete with furnished antagonist in a manner that reveals not much has changed in this realm of award bait since William Dieterle’s The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). That film pitted Paul Muni’s heroic, visionary Pasteur against a fictional antagonist meant to represent the hidebound medical establishment of the day and general resistance to changed thinking. Strauss serves basically the same function here, but reiterated in a manner closer to Nolan’s take on the Joker as a vengeful schemer playing multidimensional chess, working to destroy Oppenheimer with backroom machinations. Strauss is also used to introduce more accusatory comments on Oppenheimer, as exemplified by that line about being remembered for Trinity and not Hiroshima, but on the proviso that they’re emerging from a poisoned well.

So, much of the film, particularly the last, post-Trinity third, is dedicated to portraying the method of that destruction, mostly played out in a security review hearing in 1954 that resulted in Oppenheimer losing his security clearance, with Oppenheimer sitting through a relentless process of humiliation and disavowal, some of it delivered however guiltily or conditionally by colleagues like Groves and Teller, and the aggressively slanted grilling of prosecutor Roger Robb (Jason Clarke). Nolan strongly hints that all of this can be seen as Oppenheimer’s personal, endured punishment, a caning he takes to expiate his own lingering feelings of distress and guilt, a process that will one day lead back to renewed stature as a maltreated hero: Oppenheimer’s multidimensional chess is better than Strauss’s. This is easily the worst part of Oppenheimer, grinding on and on for little actual result and using up a great hunk of screen time, coming on with Nolan’s stylistic cues assuring us constantly that we’re watching some kind of taut and compelling political drama here, with secrets within secrets to be uncovered when really we’re seeing the writer-director doing his absolute level best to win an Oscar by marrying biopic conventions with his own method for making everything play like a high-pressure thriller.

The standard critical phraseology for Nolan’s storytelling method here is to say it’s like a mosaic, accumulating piece by piece into a finished picture. But Nolan’s choices, as I often find with his films, often strikes me more like an act of covering over than revelation; Nolan deploys detail in a way that feels like an avoidance of meditation, and he’s a filmmaker who somehow manages something entirely counterintuitive in the way he constantly chases pace and snappiness but at the cost of genuine efficiency. The choice of telling a chunk of the story through Strauss’s eyes also allows Nolan to deliver a great deal of exposition under the guise of one character’s slanted opining, particularly in Strauss’s laboured exchanges drawing out details with a fictional staffer played by Alden Ehrenreich, who gradually realises what a shit Strauss is. The emphasis on Strauss’s conniving also gives Nolan an excuse, firstly, to avoid more generally reckoning with the way the 1950s government establishment turned on Oppenheimer and his ilk as part of the general Red Scare moment, and also to not otherwise devote his copious running time to offering a more in-depth portrait of the Los Alamos scene and its players. The startling roster of familiar and talented actors trudges by in blink-and-miss parts, names out of scientific legend like Heisenberg and Bohr and Fermi (Danny Deferrari) and Einstein, and other, less famous but historical interesting personages like Lilli Hornig (Olivia Thirlby) and J. Ernest Wilkins Jr (Ronald Auguste), filling out the margins and given one or two lines of dialogue.

At least one of these slightly bewildering semi-cameos proves germane: Rami Malek as David Hill, one of Fermi’s colleagues glimpsed hovering wordlessly around Fermi when he shows Oppenheimer his atomic pile and later when he tries to get him to sign a petition against the bomb’s use. This proves to be another cheap suspense-generating device, as Hill’s name is mentioned because of that context as a likely witness for Strauss’s benefit during his confirmation hearing, only for Hill to testify with brutal directness about how the scientific community came to despise Strauss for his vindictiveness: we know it’s serious when Freddy Mercury comes to the rescue. Another use Nolan has for the emphasis on Strauss’s plotting and Oppenheimer’s masochism is to avoid engaging too deeply with the protagonist’s psychological reaction to his accomplishment and new discovery of moral terror, a burden indeed for a man who previously looked upon his own brilliance and fascination with the most elusive textures of existence as both equally benign. Surely Oppenheimer must have been in a unique position as the man who feels a touch of the godlike in his act of creation, an emotion implicit in his legendary private quoting of the Bhagavad-Gita when the Trinity bomb was ignited, but which saw him rather shrink back from that horizon, his humanity instead forced as new truth upon him.

But as with Dunkirk’s fussed-over recreations of a historical moment defined by chaotically unmoored humanity, Nolan works around having to engage convincingly with any sense of milieu: only men in suits standing around hashing out big issues interests him as focal points for his fast, fleeting exposition. To be fair, Nolan tries to stretch the limits of his usual veneer of clipped, chic, slightly abstracted imagery with some expressive risks – indeed, arguably the best, or at least the most arresting moments in the film spring from this. The first comes when Oppenheimer, trying to deliver a victorious speech to the Los Alamos crew after the Hiroshima bombing, starts imagining in the results of the bombing as impacting upon the people around him – brilliant light scorching the skin from a young woman’s face, the cheers of the crowd becoming Jovian thunder ringing in his ears, and everyone present vanishing as if scorched from existence. The second is a similar but far more intimate moment of conjured envisioning, as Oppenheimer is forced to speak about his sporadic affair with Tetlock in front of Kitty to the security tribunal, and the image of Tetlock welded naked to his lap momentarily fills everyone’s mind. Both of these moments wield flashes of the hallucinatory to tray and convey the headspace of the characters, with the former particularly vital given the earlier musings upon the gap between theory and reality: Oppenheimer has more than a little notion of what exactly an atomic bomb going off over a city entails, and he can apply that to his surrounds with a sense of horror, but still only abstractly, an anxious clawing at the mask of things.

Trouble is, one could accuse both of these moments as substituting for dealing more directly with important aspects of the story Nolan is supposedly telling, and highlight something tentative and pretentious in Nolan. He won’t get too violent, too horrible, in conveying Oppenheimer’s imagining of nuclear extermination, lest it violate his aesthetic poise and censorship rating. He drops in the vision of Tetlock screwing Oppenheimer as an adjunct to a more blatantly obvious moment when Oppenheimer is seen as sitting naked before the board during their grilling: get it?! The nudity can be described with that most embarrassing of critical words, “tasteful.” Despite quickly sketching out the free-and-easy quasi-bohemian climes the Oppenheimers met in and belonged to, the film goes out of its way to define them in more traditional, mass audience morality-friendly ways. Nolan nods to Oppenheimer’s louche sex life, which extended to carrying on his affair with the spiky Tetlock after marrying Kitty. That led to him being briefly devastated when she kills herself some time after he breaks off with her, a shock Nolan portrays Kitty as forcefully pulling him out of. Oppenheimer will be punished one way or another for his affairs, and despite the fact that Kitty’s first connection with Oppenheimer is at least nominally adulterous, nonetheless she will be defined as the suffering partner.

Nolan goes out of his way to convince that Kitty is nonetheless a tough and loyal customer watching out for her husband’s back, reacting with blistering anger when she finds her husband still shook Teller’s hand after his testimony to the review board, and alone out of all their friends easily resists and outmanoeuvres Robb. Towards the end, Kitty gets a dose of revenge when she refuses to shake Teller’s hand when everyone’s playing hunky-dory again as Oppenheimer gets a medal from Lyndon Johnson. All well and good, but despite this attempt to portray her vitality, Kitty is actually, barely in the movie, the hymns to her hard-nosed practicality only present as a sidelong affectations: the rhythms and meaning of their relationship remains out of focus. One of the film’s more interesting sidelong moments explores the choice of the Oppenheimers to get Chevalier to look after their infant child as they find they just don’t have the stuff of being parents in them at that point in their lives, a scene that sees Nolan avoiding the usual with surprising felicity.

Meanwhile, Nolan’s emphasis on the distance between the experience of building the atomic bomb and the use of it is an approach that actually makes sense as an extension of the theory-vs-reality disparity that hangs over the enterprise, and with the actual devastation of the blast only recorded for the scientists via documentary footage. Much of the controversy around the film, such as it is, has revolved around the avoidance of showing the atomic bombs exploding, most of it coming from a quarter demanding a sort of atomic blast porn to ensure everyone watching all this knows that, yeah, not cool. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are events that will likely never, and should never, cease to be a topic of argument, standing as they as the most pivotal moments of modern history, when the potential to annihilate our own species and every other suddenly became possible. It exists on a faultline of all moral question, a dark ritual act that cruelly but decisively ended one war and opened the gates to the perpetual fear of another. Most discussions of the bomb want to invoke one, specific viewpoint on its meaning, where Nolan seems to obey Oppenheimer’s own ambivalence: my own problem is that film only investigates that ambivalence in the most skimmed and superficial manner, and nobody ever gets down and dirty in their arguments.

Despite this being a film about extremely intelligent and articulate people, Nolan resists engaging the material on that level. That the scientists who built the bomb, many of them Jewish, did so in a sense of frantic rivalry with the Nazis and an eye to it being used on them, only to find it then used on Japan, is a point raised in Oppenheimer, although again discussed in less depth than in Fat Man and Little Boy, and it raises its own questions: was it better to drop the atomic bomb on German city than a Japanese? Is there a presumption of asymmetry in culpability there – say, the Holocaust versus Imperial Japan’s genocidal rampages in China and treatment of slave labour and POWs, leaving out the question of actually invading Japan? David S. Ward’s excellent 1995 TV movie Truman depicted that President’s weighing of the bomb’s use with one of his friends with a level of attentive seriousness, whereas Nolan only engages with the disparity between Truman and Oppenheimer in an odd scene where the scientist visits the President (Gary Oldman, in one of the film’s more stunt-like bits of casting), only to be quickly shuffled off again when he admits his troubled conscience, with Truman calling him a crybaby behind his back: Truman, like Tibbets, picked his side (for an interesting flipside to all this, I recommend Kihachi Okamoto’s Japan’s Longest Day, 1967, a film that depicts the crucial moment when those shocked out of all patriotic daydreams by the bombings looked on beggared by the fanatics who remain unyielding and eventually choose self-immolation over surrender). And, well, perhaps today the thought of nuclear apocalypse now has some flavour of romanticism compared to being slowly starved and parboiled by global warming.

Nolan feels for Oppenheimer because his own movies often reflect on the ambiguities of heroism, but I’ve often wondered if he has any real idea of the concept, any more than he grasps the nature of terrorism. Nolan’s perspective on sociopolitics has practically inflected an entire era now – such lines from The Dark Knight have sunk into the consciousness of the generation that’s come of age on his movies, and become maxims: oh, how many times people who don’t want to engage with geopolitics have recited that “Some people just want to watch the world burn” line from The Dark Knight in the past 15 years, or that aforementioned “live long enough to become the villain” bit, whilst The Dark Knight Rises (2012) raised the spectacle of the French Revolution redux but copped out of engaging with the political spectres he dredged up. Oppenheimer certainly enlarges upon elements of those films’ concept of strife and terror, but Nolan can’t wheedle his way out of the moral problem he sets himself like he did with the Joker’s bombs. Nolan instead notes Oppenheimer’s opinion that the mere existence of the bomb can be a way of enforcing peace, the notion of nuclear deterrence held in perpetual anxiety by many but also, thus far, one that has arguably had some truth to it: the reality of nuclear weapons undoubtedly helped crank the Cold War to its most perverse and nauseating heights, but also can be argued to have prevented its boilover – a motivating idea ironically shared not just by Oppenheimer in inventing the bomb but by some people who passed on nuclear secrets to the Soviets. The best we get by way of musing on such questions is Oppenheimer mumbling something about hearing Japan was an enemy more or less defeated already. That said, Nolan devotes a chunk of time to depicting Oppenheimer and others arguing the cases for and against the dropping of the bomb with Henry Stimson (James Remar), a scene that tries to fairly encompass the apocalyptic violence already wrought and the politicking involved, including the desire to have tested the bomb by the time of the Potsdam Conference so Truman can warn, and perhaps intimidate, the other Allies with news of the bomb’s imminent tactical use.

Back on the more immediate level, Nolan’s foregrounding of conceptualism in his movies – by which I mean they’re all dominated by some overt gimmick, or concert of gimmicks, based in some scientific or storytelling conceit both within and without the narrative, with perhaps the careful rhyming of the backwards-roving plot and protagonist’s amnesia in Memento is still his most overt example – wields an apparently powerful appeal to an audience reared in an age of being wowed and herded by the products of algorithms. That’s the name he gave to the time-hacking weapon of mass destruction in Tenet perhaps with just that irony in focus, given that film played in large part as Nolan’s sarcastic self-parody under the guise of servicing his brand, with Robert Pattinson’s second-string hero essentially a version of his creator, airily coming up with ideas like using a plane crash to break open a safe. With Oppenheimer the driving concept is more obvious: to play the entire film as a political thriller and dotted with sleight-of-hand flourishes of dramatic emphasis, like the reveal of Malek’s Hill as the man who save the day. And, dare I say it, Nolan’s choice there paid dividends in box office success, as he did succeed in selling the story of a nuclear physicist who died over fifty years ago to a mass audience. He even, in his way, makes Oppenheimer into a sort of superhero: the first time he dons his signature grey suit and flat-crowned hat, after being advised to lose the army uniform Groves makes him wear, is the film’s equivalent of Batman appearing in costume for the first time. There might be some detectable sarcasm in this – some onlookers have taken the film in part to be Nolan’s mea culpa over his role in sparking the superhero movie frenzy, but in this aspect I felt the similarity feels more sourced in a similar sense of a heroic identity being constructed, again with a sense of spectacle as weapon.

The excellence of the film’s cast goes a long way towards making up the dramatic shortcomings. Murphy’s been an actor awaiting his true moment in the sun since his startling emergence in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast On Pluto (2004), although his first work with Nolan, Batman Begins (2005), seemed to stymie his chances as a leading man through playing a fey and creepy villains. He’s entirely convincing recreating Oppenheimer’s burr and mannerisms, easily holding the film together playing a difficult role that doesn’t really have any major cathartic moments and where Nolan never really finds a key to the character, leaving Murphy to instead play like shivering wavelengths on an oscilloscope. Because the film is so utterly determined to keep lunging forward that scarcely any character registers as more than a basic trait, the specifics of the casting mean a lot, and Nolan proves his canniness at that tactic for the most part: Hartnett, for instance, is intriguing playing the kind of role I’d never have expected to see him in, and Safdie, who’s rapidly proving one of the most interesting actors of the age as well as a fine filmmaker, expertly registers Teller’s glum, singleminded gravitas in an almost comical tangent from Oppenheimer’s charismatic zeal. Pugh does a remarkable amount with very little, registering the kind of personality who simultaneously pushes away those who gets close – tossing out Oppenheimer’s gifts of flowers with irritable contempt – but also finds peculiar ways to bind their fates to hers, whilst Blunt, poorly served as she is by the movie, bends it about her regardless. Only Damon felt a bit awkwardly cast to me, making Groves seem like another of Damon’s customary awkward everymen. Downey’s performance as Strauss is well-pitched in the shows of paranoid rage under the surface cool, but I couldn’t separate it from the film’s facetious use of him.

The build-up to the testing of the Trinity bomb and its detonation could well count on many levels as the ultimate Nolan sequence. It’s delivered as an urgent running montage with Göransson’s music ratcheting up the arpeggios, in what has officially become the official movie music for suggesting intellectual and  cultural import and life-on-earth surveys, as if the coils of music are the streams of water and thought driving the turbines of human thought and spirit, etc. Nolan’s filmmaking here actually feels nimble and attentive in ways it’s never been before, rounding up such vignettes that feel absolutely true in their undertones of eccentricity, like Teller slathering himself with sunscreen until he resembles some Lynchian grotesque leering at the blast, and Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid) trusting in his car windshield to shield him from the UV. The bomb goes off and Nolan wrings it for every morsel of epic awe and menace he can, Oppenheimer with his goggles on looking like a budding aviator, still clinging to the Earth but about to be flung into space in mind if not body, all sound cutting out as the explosion climbs and the fire boils in the long, floating moment before the shockwave arrives. It’s a great unit of filmmaking for the most part, even if Nolan’s much-hyped practical effects doesn’t really capture the texture of the real Trinity photos. Joffé in Fat Man and Little Boy might well have been cannier in his handling, only showing the reflection of the blast in Oppenheimer’s goggles, instead registering the infernal power and impact on the scientist.

Hard as it is to believe, Oppenheimer otherwise actually made me pine for the days when somebody like Stone actually had a chance of making this kind of unwieldy, expensive modern historical epic, and to which Nolan pays a certain amount of emulation and tribute: Stone, a far messier filmmaker than Nolan and often deeply aggravating as an artist, nonetheless always came at his subjects with a deeply felt and sensed perspective, a feeling for the immediacy of cause and consequence and the furore of personality engaged with larger reality. Even if you never bought into the conspiracy theories in J.F.K., the film nonetheless articulated something far more nebulous but also urgent, as a spiritual portrait of the craziness that both caused the President’s death and became epidemic after it, and the sense Stone had that something went badly spiritually wrong with his country in that time and expressed itself in destroying leaders and fighting vicious, Sisyphean wars. Nolan, by contrast, doesn’t seem to think much of anything beyond the well-trodden – the way the film zeroes in on Clarke’s Robb grilling Oppenheimer, demanding a clear-cut response from him over matters that roil and churn within, eventually proves not Nolan’s stand-in trying to wring some truth from his subject but instead the reverse, a confession of bewilderment before all such matters. It’s very tempting for me to say that Oppenheimer is the ideal film to represent Nolan’s career and the current age in popular culture – detail without depth, aesthetic without art, context without meaning. And yet it’s trying ever so hard to do more, give more. It’s Nolan’s most controlled film to date and perhaps his best altogether, but it’s also one that ultimately demonstrates why I, like Teller with Oppenheimer, would just rather see someone else in his position.