this movie is da bomb
Is Chris Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' As Incandescent As The Marketing Suggests? Here's What The Reviews Say
Christopher Nolan has been on a career-long tear, making some of the most successful original blockbusters and most beloved action films of the modern age. The man behind the rise in 70mm IMAX cameras, the "Dark Knight" trilogy, and other Academy Award-worthy work like "Dunkirk," "Inception" and "The Prestige" is back with his latest. This is a three hour long biopic about the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, who helped end World War II.
And from what we're reading, this might be the movie of the year. Look out "Barbie."
The film releases on July 21, 2023, and stars Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Matthew Modine, Jack Quaid, Dane DeHaan, Jason Clarke, James Remar, James Urbaniak, Josh Peck and Gary Oldman. This is what critics have to say.
The premise
One of the most significant events of the 20th century — arguably one of the most significant events in human history — was America dropping two nuclear bombs on two cities in Japan, which decisively ended World War II. While many men and women helped to create said bombs, it's Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) who history declared to be "the father of the atomic bomb." And thus it’s his story which writer/director Christopher Nolan has chosen to tell, with the support of a $100 million budget and what feels like every white male actor working today.
Cillian Murphy might win an Oscar
Murphy's line reading is perfect. He makes Oppenheimer seem not so much boastful as just aware of his gifts and what they let him get away with. This is an amazing performance. Nolan's signature jumps through time require Murphy to portray Oppenheimer at different stages of his life. Each is convincing.
Murphy's performance is every bit as inspired as his casting. He plays Oppenheimer as more of an artist than a physicist — as the rare man of science who God could mistake for a prophet — and the opening passages of Nolan's film twitch and fulminate in response to that creative temperament. That effect is most palpable in the way that Murphy appears to dance on the bow tip of Ludwig Göransson’s Zimmer-worthy score, which is all mercurial violins and spooky action at a distance before that delicate touch is replaced by the cacophonous layers of sound that every Nolan film relies upon when its parallel storylines converge in the third act.
Cillian Murphy is an eerily close lookalike for Oppenheimer with his trademark hat and pipe, and is very good at capturing his sense of solitude and emotional imprisonment, giving us the Oppenheimer million-yard stare, eyeballs set in a gaunt skull, seeing and foreseeing things he cannot process.
The supporting cast is fantastic
Like the rest of the large cast, Pugh is impressive in a small role. Even Emily Blunt, who plays Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, spends most of the time in the background. Late in the film, in a couple of major scenes she displays why Kitty was a force of her own. Matt Damon is Leslie Groves, the down-to-earth army general who shepherds the Manhattan Project. Kenneth Branagh is the physicist Niels Bohr, Oppenheimer's sometime mentor and conscience. But Downey is the crucial supporting player, and he gives a shrewd, dynamic performance as the wily, insecure, powerful Strauss.
Nolan has cast the movie beautifully, including a tiny role that makes a big impact because of the actor he chose — and, especially, including Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's brilliant wife Kitty. Hers could be one of those thankless, you-were-so-busy-saving-the-world-that-my-pot-roast-burned roles (see Sissy Spacek in "JFK") but Blunt's career-redefining performance hints at what Kitty contributed to her husband's success, and what it cost her.
Murphy's brooding, titular physicist is charged with running the wartime Manhattan Project, assembling a team of boffins to [weaponize] new-found discoveries in the realm of nuclear physics, initially against the Nazis, but ultimately and controversially unleashed on Japan. An enjoyably gruff Damon is well [utilized] as the lieutenant general who oversees the mission in the New Mexico desert and punctuates the gravitas. Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt are both terrific as the women who coax out Oppenheimer's humanity in Nolan's most romantic film to date (albeit, still not massively romantic).
It's another twisty Nolan script that plays with both time and color
As with so much of Nolan's prior work, "Oppenheimer" is chronologically fractured, recounting its tale from two perspectives: that of Oppenheimer, in color, and of Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), in black-and-white. In accordance with that structure, the film casts its dual strands as flashbacks told by these characters during, respectively, the secret, Red Scare-driven 1954 hearing that cost Oppenheimer his security clearance and the 1959 Senate hearing that denied Strauss the Secretary of Commerce position he coveted. Throughout, Nolan narratively and formally intertwines Oppenheimer and Strauss' fates, juxtaposing them in order to highlight the story's fundamental honesty and duplicity — what with its clandestine military operation in the Los Alamos desert, pervasive paranoia about Soviet spies stealing secrets from the Americans, and marital infidelities.
Like "The Prestige," "Dunkirk," and "Memento," the story of "Oppenheimer" is conveyed via multiple intersecting temporalities. Nolan is kind enough to label the film's two narrative spines for us: "Fission," a recollection of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and career based on his testimony to a security clearance council in 1954, and "Fusion," a counterpoint from the perspective of Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) during his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Commerce in 1959. Despite not always moving in a linear fashion, the interwoven accounts remain both logically and emotionally coherent, painting a portrait of a controversial figure that is both sympathetic and damning. The two framing devices are not the only courtroom dramas at hand here. The film itself is a trial, and just like the interrogations of Oppenheimer and Strauss, there is no real burden of proof. Nolan is playing both the prosecution and the defense. The trial isn't fair, he knows it, and he wants you to know.
Adapted by Nolan from the book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, "Oppenheimer" is a sprawling story that hops along the timeline and introduces so many characters I'll admit I wouldn't have minded some title cards introducing them as they come and go. Nolan, however, opts to plunge us into events in sometimes chaotic fashion and invites us to hold on for the ride, mirroring the thrilling and yet terrifying and politically charged atmosphere of the world of physics in the early and mid-20th century, when some of the brightest scientific minds in history were making discoveries and advancements that would change the world forever — and possibly end the world as we know it.
TL;DR
The movie around Murphy is simultaneously breathtaking and mind-melding.
"Oppenheimer" is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan's filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.
Nolan demonstrates his usual prowess for impeccable visuals and stunning craftsmanship within a deeply despairing portrait of an arrogant genius who, too late, [realized] the impact of his monstrous creation.
[An] often laborious yet genuinely strange and gripping movie — a grand spectacle inspired by some of the grimmest events in human history, and itself an invention meant to blow us all away.
Nolan taps the full sensory potential of moviemaking, pushing picture and sound to meet the scale of the story: clever lines dot the script; the whole project is admirably willing to wrestle with matters of great weight through cinema.
