A review of the new blockbuster film “Oppenheimer”
“Oppenheimer”- or “Symbol Of Pacifism” as it is called in Poland, through which I passed recently – is the 12th film made by British director Christopher Nolan and I’ve seen (and admired) all of them, except the first, very low-budget work which I’ve never caught. Nolan is a director of exceptional talent and originality, every film he makes is a must-see phenomenon, and “Oppenheimer” is no exception.Based on the 2005 biography “American Prometheus”, this is the story of J Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, the brilliant Jewish scientist who determined that the United States would beat Nazi Germany in creating this weapon of mass destruction and was then wracked by guilt about the existential force that he had unleashed.
The wartime building of the first atomic bomb, an operation codenamed the Manhattan Project, was a huge technological and logistical enterprise, perhaps comparable only to the first landing on the moon. But the Apollo 11 project was blatantly public, whereas Manhattan had to be conducted in total secrecy.
Nolan’s three-hour epic has a vast collection of characters, including scientific giants of the time such as – besides Oppenheimer himself, of course – Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman, all of whom have featured in my study and reading of physics, plus many military and political figures.
Most of these characters are played by members of a talented ensemble of well-known actors, starting with Cillian Murphy who is simply outstanding in the eponymous role, capturing wonderfully the intense, gaunt ‘black hole’ at the centre of this universe, and including Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr.
Sadly, I am advised by a half-Danish friend that Kenneth Branagh’s accent as Bohr is pretty terrible and the female roles in this quintessentially male world – Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife and Florence Pugh as his lover – are somewhat underwritten.
The cinematography is splendid: increasingly Nolan’s work demands to be seen in IMAX which how I viewed “Oppenheimer”. And the music by Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson – who also provided the soundtrack to Nolan’s previous work “Tenet” – is urgent and insistent.
Nolan’s trademark as a director is his fascination with playing with timelines, classically in “Dunkirk” where the land, sea and air segments deploy different timescales. Here, in “Oppenheimer”, Nolan uses a triptych of time lines: a chronology of Oppenheimer’s life starting in 1926 and running all the way through to 1963, a review of Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954 and a Congressional hearing in 1959 on a possible cabinet post for Oppenheimer’s one-time boss at the Atomic Energy Commission.
Most of the film is in colour, representing the subjective view of Oppenheimer himself, while the Congressional hearing is in black and white, apparently representing a more objective viewpoint (incidentally this is the first use of black and white film in IMAX).
The problem is that, with so many characters coming and going and this tangle of timelines plus the difficulty in catching some of the dialogue, the viewer is overwhelmed and it is really hard to stay on top of all the activity and intrigue. Also the science is inadequately explained and some scientists have argued that the test explosion does not show the heat and the violet hues that were key characteristics of this gargantuan fireball.
Furthermore, while accepting that this is essentially a bio-pic, I would like to have seen more consideration of the political decision to drop the bomb, which arguably is a greater moral question than the actual building of the bomb, and some representation of the dropping of the bomb and its enormous toll (I have seen the ‘Enola Gay’ B-29 bomber and visited the city of Hiroshima).
In short, “Oppenheimer” is a magnificent production but not without its flaws.