From Jeremy Kibler

Writer-director Christopher Nolan doesn’t make small or linear films, nor are they always complex puzzle boxes. His latest opus, Oppenheimer, is monumental in scale but actually quite intimate. In telling the comprehensive story of J. Robert Oppenheimer—“the father of the atomic bomb”—Nolan doesn’t require audiences to have any expertise in quantum mechanics, but he does expect you to keep up. A daunting three hours of risk-taking, moral injury, and consequence, Oppenheimer is impressively crafted and almost always engrossing.

Cillian Murphy, forever a striking presence with his intense blue eyes and enviable cheekbones, is riveting as the titular physicist. Known to be egotistical and a little unstable with questionable ties to the communist party, Oppenheimer was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico on a mesa called Los Alamos. From the time he injected his Cambridge teacher’s apple with potassium cyanide but felt conflicted about it, he was always a man of contradictions. Working as a professor at Berkeley, he was soon selected by Lieutenant General Leslie Groves Jr. (a brusque but very funny Matt Damon) to head the operation. The rest is history.

Based on Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus, the film plays out in three differentiated timeframes. There’s the tense security hearing in 1954, where Oppenheimer is indicted and endlessly interrogated by a board from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Another ongoing section, shot in black and white, involves Lewis Strauss (a tremendous, note-perfect Robert Downey Jr.), a chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission who pursued Oppenheimer. He would end up being the driving force of the hearing that would revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance and ultimately be the villain in this story. The last section, of course, is everything leading up to and following Oppenheimer’s development of the hydrogen bomb, beating Nazi Germany to the punch but feeling the blood on his hands. 

Oppenheimer may be Nolan’s most propulsive film, remarkably pieced together with technical mastery and no need for audience hand-holding. Whether it’s because there’s a lot to cover in Oppie’s life, or that’s just the director’s approach to the material, the film is always propelling forward with a restless precision and even a rat-a-tat rhythm in several of the dialogue-heavy exchanges. A successful Trinity Test of the first atomic bomb does not come until the two-hour mark, but so much apprehension has been built before the actual detonation that it’s well worth the anxiety-ridden wait. The last hour is arguably the most thrilling, remaining mostly in the hearing room but furiously volleying back and forth between Dr. Oppenheimer and his kangaroo court judges. 

Every property in Nolan’s filmmaking is operating at a virtuoso level, finding a cinematic alchemy between performance, sound, image, and narrative structure in the editing process. Shooting on 70 mm film, Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography is richly textured and does wonders in high-contrast scenes and when holding on actors’ faces in a hearing room. Ludwig Göransson’s insistent, portent-heavy score and the sound design are flawlessly matched with choices in editing and sound editing to startling and alive effect. A scene with a crowd rapturously cheering and stomping on bleachers for Oppenheimer’s achievement is just one example that takes a chilling, overwhelming turn and acts as a shorthand to depict the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

There are no small parts here, just a wide net of recognizable faces in one of three large ensembles this year (hi Barbie and Asteroid City!). It’s a tantalizing revolving door of perfectly chosen actors—Alden Ehrenreich, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Matthew Moline, Jason Clarke, Dane DeHaan, Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck, Tony Goldwyn, Rami Malek, and even Gary Oldman as President Harry Truman in one scene—making one say to themselves, “Oh, it’s that guy!” and “I didn’t know he was in this!” Even the real Albert Einstein is here; kidding aside, he’s played convincingly by Tom Conti.

In really just a handful of scenes, Florence Pugh manages to bring devastating depth to Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s communist, flower-hating lover with clinical depression. As Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, Emily Blunt refuses to just be The Wife with a drinking problem, commanding her scenes and sharing crackling chemistry whenever she goes toe to toe with another actor.

If one is expecting a dry, standard cradle-to-grave biopic, Christopher Nolan did not make that film. Evoking the moral compass and essence of a historical man of science, Oppenheimer is a film to greatly respect, not to love, that’s possibly held back by a slight degree of detachment. But in moments of haunting transcendence and cumulatively, you feel it in your bones that Nolan has made a stone-cold masterwork.

Oppenheimer hits theaters this Friday.

Rating: 4/5

Follow Jeremy at @JKiblerFilm