"Now I am become Death. The destroyer of worlds."
J. Robert Oppenheimer uttered these famous words when asked to describe his feelings seeing the first test of the atomic bomb which he played no small part in creating.
The events leading up to and following that test are the subject of the latest film from Christopher Nolan.
While there are brief glimpses into Oppenheimer's earlier life and studies, his time working on The Manhattan Project make up the bulk of the film. If you don't know what The Manhattan Project was, the gist of it is that at the tail end of World War II a small village was built in the middle of the New Mexico desert for scientists to live with their families while they worked in secret on the first nuclear weapons.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the project and often referred to as "the father of the atomic bomb".
He famously felt great remorse in the years after the project was deemed a success and that's the emotional core of this story.
The three-hour epic was partially shot using IMAX cameras and according to Nolan himself, contains no CGI shots. The IMAX in Oppenheimer is used in a way I've never seen before. Generally speaking, the larger frame is used to accentuate scale or for big action scenes. In Oppenheimer, which is very much a character study, the IMAX framing and scale is used to highlight emotion.
Nolan is the big scale guy. In recent years he's become known for essentially receiving a blank check to blow up whatever the hell he wants. Oppenheimer is certainly large in scale and features probably the best explosion he's ever done in his career, but it also contains probably the best character work he's ever done.
Cillian Murphy has been a longtime collaborator of Nolan's and one of those reliable character actors who pops up in films every now and then and you always know you're going to see a great, albeit usually brief performance. Murphy's performance as Oppenheimer is a star-making turn for the Irish actor who will likely become a household name in years to come.
A lot of his best work is silent, staring off into the distance, reckoning with the decisions that led him to where he is, but I never got sick of it or really even noticed how much of the film consists of that until writing about it right now.
He's of course supported by a cast filled with just about every actor in Hollywood. Everyone from Robert Downey Jr. to Josh from Drake & Josh or from Matt Damon to Roderick from Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules is in this film.
By the third act you have been introduced to dozens of characters and boy howdy you better remember their names or you are gonna be lost.
If you're a Nolan fan you've probably complained about the sound mixing of his last few films, or if you're a MASSIVE Nolan fan, you've probably had to defend the sound mixing of his last few films. Starting with The Dark Knight Rises and getting worse with each film, Nolan has for some reason been insistent on drowning out the dialogue with sound effects or the musical score. This works for a film like Dunkirk which you could follow on mute, but not so much for a film like Tenet where the film is entirely expositional dialogue (or at least what I could make out of it).
Well I'm pleased to report that not only is this not an issue in Oppenheimer, the sound mixing is actually one of the best parts of the film! The way that silence is used to juxtapose the massive explosions and overwhelming attention Oppenheimer receives from the press is some of the best stuff I've seen from Christopher Nolan.
Oppenheimer is a film that gets the better the longer you let it sit with you as well. After three hours it's understandable that you'll want to rush straight to the bathroom, but on the drive home or while lying in bed or while watching Barbie in your Barbenheimer double feature, be prepared to have Oppie pop up in your thoughts and evolve what you thought of the film.
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