Oppenheimer is a Masterpiece | Review

The Escapist Oppenheimer is the film of the year so far. Christopher Nolan’s three-hour epic tells the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who famously oversaw the development of the atomic bomb, is a compelling character study of a man caught in the midst of revolution, scientific, cultural, and political, and his shifting relationship to the United States and the people around him. The film has a fairly straightforward three-act structure, charting Oppenheimer’s early life, his work on the Manhattan Project, and the political and personal aftermath of that. However, re-teaming with editor Jennifer Lame from Tenet, Nolan

adopts a decidedly expressionistic approach to storytelling. The film jumps backwards and forwards in time, shifting perspectives, and occasionally revisiting key scenes to the point of view of various different characters. Nolan is a director who has always been fascinated by the idea of subjectivity, the construction of narratives and stories that people tell themselves and each other. Indeed, Oppenheimer is perhaps best understood as a deconstruction of the Great Man theory of history and of the conventional biopic structure. There’s no single narrative to be constructive, Oppenheimer or the development of the atomic bomb, instead just different perspectives. Reality

itself buckles under such weight. Oppenheimer is a movie about the folly of ego and the arrogance of assuming that history bends to the whims of an individual, no matter how smart or

how powerful. Oddly enough, Oppenheimer feels close to something like the prestige, a staking narrative of two competing contradictory counts of history, built on the idea that even as man comes to understand atomic physics, people remain a mystery to one another. However, this is also something grander. For the first time since Memento and Insomnia, Nolan draws overtly from the iconography of the Western, that foundational

American myth. Deserts, ranches, hats and horses. Oppenheimer is a movie about how history marches on and how it ultimately leaves behind those people who thought they were shaping it. It’s a story about how creation, destruction are often intertwined, the gulf between theory and practice, and the way that ideas manifest themselves upon the world. It’s powerful, evocative, compelling, heady stuff. It’s great to see all this in a summer blockbuster, a $100 million sweeping epic that charts a key moment in global history. A movie aimed squarely at adults with an all-star cast, with extended sequences in black

and white, grappling with big and complicated ideas. It’s a wonder that Oppenheimer exists at all, particularly in this modern movie landscape. There were very few filmmakers who could accomplish something like this, and it stands to Nolan’s credit that he could guide it to fruition. In terms of production, Oppenheimer’s a masterclass. Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is beautiful and breathtaking, particularly when projected on 70 mil. Ludwig Göransson’s score is pulsing and pounding, the sound of history trundling towards inevitability. The cast is, frankly, astonishing, an ensemble of Nolan newcomers and regulars, with actors like Casey Affleck, Rami Malek,

and Kenneth Branagh only appearing in a couple of scenes each. At times, Oppenheimer feels like three hours of that scene from Wayne’s World 2, you know the one with Charlton Heston. “Gordon Street?” “Oh, yes. Gordon Street.” Oppenheimer is a showcase for Nolan veteran Cillian Murphy, who is fantastic in the lead role, offering a compelling portrait of a complicated and contradictory figure. Matt Damon shows up to lend some star power as the general task with corralling these scientists. However, the movie’s most surprising performance comes from Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss with the actor stretching muscles

that he hasn’t really used since David Fincher’s Zodiac. Downey has always been incredibly charismatic, but Oppenheimer’s a reminder that he was once considered one of the most promising and interesting actors in Hollywood. He brings genuine movie star power wattage to Strauss, a career politician resentful of the prestige that he feels denied him. Downey has described Oppenheimer as the best movie he’s ever been in, while it’s too early to say that, this may be the best that Downey has ever been in a movie. Ultimately, it’s hard to single out any individual aspect of Oppenheimer as the

best part of the film, because it is a perfectly engineered machine. While the film itself grapples with the question as it relates to the man himself, there’s no denying that the film itself is the bomb. Oppenheimer is releasing in theaters on Friday, 21st July, see it on as big a screen as possible, preferably in 70mm IMAX. THIS VIDEO WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY Closed Captions by @willcblogs