This essay was written by Anthony Miglieri.
The first teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer set off a literal countdown to shave away the moments until the film arrived in theaters in July 2023. Twelve months, seven Oscars, and nearly a billion dollars in revenue later, it feels as though another timer has been running ever since: How long until we get another movie so sprawling, so grim, yet so popular? It will be a while, not only due to the technical prowess of Nolan’s film, but because of its intellectual hook. Oppenheimer paints a portrait of great minds and cosmic responsibility.
The lucky ones hear a tune, a melody beamed from the clouds down between their ears. As the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) explains early in the film, “Algebra's like sheet music; the important thing isn't ‘can you read music?’, it's ‘can you hear it?’” This is to say that some sciences and crafts call for something more than just doing; they require an innate understanding. Those with such a gift are born with it programmed right into their hard drives.
As portrayed by Cillian Murphy, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s music is made up of the particles and waves of quantum physics, allowing him to unweave the invisible forces that hold the world together. The symphony in his head rings so loudly that he becomes the person to follow this study to its ultimate conclusion: the atomic bomb, and by effect, potential global annihilation.
In this story, Nolan finds a real-life subject that necessitates his filmmaking gifts. More than any other modern filmmaker, he makes his spectacles feel truly spectacular—no one conveys sheer size as well as he does. The moment Oppenheimer begins, a wall of nuclear fire and dread greets us. Nolan forces us to lean forward even as our faces blister and sweat.
The director’s nonlinear script and Jennifer Lame’s editing create a slipstream to hook us into Oppenheimer’s wavelength. The film cycles between Oppenheimer’s rise in the ‘20s to the Manhattan Project in the ‘40s to his legal reckoning in the ‘50s. Each jump follows a stream-of-conscious logic, spun together with Ludwig Goransson’s strings-and-synth score. The structure also brings a quality that many great films have—at any moment, we may not remember what comes next, but it feels just right when it arrives.
However, no element of Oppenheimer is more important than Cillian Murphy’s face, a weary vista that withers over the course of the film’s three hours. With hands on hips, porkpie hat on head, and pipe between teeth, the “Oppie” silhouette has already been fire-branded onto the collective filmgoing consciousness. Even Murphy’s voice, equal parts gravel and cream, conveys the character’s 15-kiloton mental load.
Whirling atoms and other submicroscopic visions—courtesy of Andrew Jackson’s VFX team—give us another avenue into the physicist’s head. These visuals also lend the film a sort of nonfiction mysticism that I can only compare to Jordan Belson’s starlight dreams in The Right Stuff (1983), another study of mankind’s sprint toward eternity.
Even the film’s minor shortcomings stem from its obsession with Oppenheimer’s mind. Nolan takes pains to tee up the scientist’s famous checkpoints like the “destroyer of worlds” quote and the reveals of the “Los Alamos” and “Trinity” names. More unfortunately, the laser focus on the protagonist steals nuance from the main female characters. As Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty Oppenheimer and his mistress Jean Tatlock, respectively, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh have little to wring from the script.
We learn of these women’s impressive professions through brief dialogue, but the film does not show us their abilities. Tatlock, a psychiatrist, exists as a symbol of Oppenheimer’s relationship to Communism. Kitty, a physicist, struggles to become a stay-at-home mother in a string of scenes that fail to form a full picture. We expect a bit more from a film so curious about brilliant people.
Despite its stumbles, though, Oppenheimer triumphs on its own terms. This is no standard biopic nor a documentary—it’s pop art magnified to the largest possible size, as if blasted from the face of a mountain. Nolan lifts a vital truth from J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of history’s great minds whose greatness led to disaster. Someone had to be responsible for mankind’s darkest creation; Oppenheimer just happened to fulfill the promise of his talent right on time to earn this honor and shame.
When questioned about his motives in the development of the weapon, Murphy’s Oppenheimer cites the US’s need to beat the Nazis…but to see the glee on his face as he watches the Manhattan Project progress, we know this professional achievement means everything to him. Sadly, his career peaks on the back of a 40,000-foot mushroom cloud and 100,000 civilian deaths. The real Oppenheimer wore the burden of his success for the rest of his life.
After the film’s concluding moments, we feel as though we’ve just dunked our heads into the abyss, bobbing for meaning among the black. Maybe humanity’s ultimate flaw is our need to listen to the music in our heads, to reach our potential at all costs, even if it means destroying ourselves. Like so many terrible creations, the atomic bomb became inevitable the instant it became possible; humanity would never let such an advantage go to waste.
One way or another, Oppenheimer knows, our race will someday end. How long we stick around is up to us.
Oppenheimer is streaming on Amazon Prime and available to buy and rent everywhere.