As the Ukraine War reignites anxieties about nuclear warfare, Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer, about the so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” emerges from the cinematic zeitgeist. Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography about the theoretical physicist, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nolan’s three-hour epic opens with a quote about the Greek god being eternally punished for stealing fire from the gods to bring light to humanity.
Universal Pictures
This is a big budget production with an A-list cast about genius, science, communism, and other complex subjects, with an elaborate film form to match. Although Oppenheimer, co-written by Nolan, has a largely linear arc, it jumps back and forth in time and space, punctuated by spectacular imagery that evokes physics, the cosmos, nuclear power, and more. Probably best known for his Dark Knight Batman trilogy, Nolan is clearly striving to attain the cinematic heights of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane-like virtuoso filmmaking, seeking to make a classic for the ages.
This film follows Julius Robert Oppenheimer (played by Irish actor Cillian Murphy) as he studies and teaches quantum mechanics and theoretical physics at various prestigious U.S. and European universities. Oppenheimer’s open involvement in leftwing causes, from supporting antifascists during the Spanish Civil War to unionizing academics, plus his hobnobbing with Communist Party members, is also chronicled.
US Govt. Defense Threat Reduction Agency/Public domain
Albert Einstein (left) and J. Robert Oppenheimer in a posed photograph at the Institute for Advanced Study, circa 1950
Oppenheimer’s travels in rarefied scientific circles brought him into contact with top scientists, including: Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Enrico Fermi (Danny Deferrari), Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham), Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer). This plays a significant role during World War II, when the physicist is tapped by hard-nosed General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to head the Manhattan Project, the United States government’s top secret program to invent an atom bomb during World War II. Familiar with New Mexico, where he has a ranch, Oppenheimer suggests locating the clandestine research and development effort far from prying eyes out at Los Alamos. He recruits his personal contacts to uproot their lives to go work at the remote, secluded site (where Nolan shot much of his movie on location).
The crusade to build the bomb before the Nazis could produce atomic weapons is intercut with two proceedings that seem like trials. Despite the success of the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, with the detonation of the first atom bomb—which enables President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) to outmaneuver wartime Soviet ally Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, followed by the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan—Oppenheimer’s leftist links prove to be his undoing.
Once the Cold War begins, Oppenheimer, who had been proclaimed a national hero, is not shielded from being targeted by McCarthyites for his ties to the Communist Party—including the past membership of his brother Frank, his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), and his previous lover, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh).
Once the Cold War begins, Oppenheimer, who had been proclaimed a national hero, is not shielded from being targeted by McCarthyites.
Oppenheimer insists on screen that he’s not a Communist, but rather, “a New Deal Democrat.” Nevertheless, his mixed feelings about the Manhattan Project, combined with his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb, casts suspicion on him. He’s tailed by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI agents, who write down the license plate numbers of parked cars and other potentially incriminating details.
The movie’s sequences that resemble trials are actually hearings, not courtrooms. One depicts the 1958 Senate confirmation hearings for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), nominated to be appointed as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Strauss was a former Atomic Energy Commission chairman, and much of those Senate sessions revolved around his dealings with Oppenheimer. Strauss helped instigate the movie’s other trial-like scenes, which portray the Atomic Energy Commission Personnel Security Board’s 1954 hearings regarding Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Politically aware viewers can’t miss the analogy to those persecuted today for being “woke.”
In scenes depicting Strauss’s Senate hearings, I suspect Nolan chose to shoot in black and white because audiences are conditioned to seeing footage from 1940s and 1950s newsreels and television broadcasts during that era of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. This choice enhances a sense of historical verisimilitude for the movie, which was otherwise shot in stunning color, employing both new 65mm and IMAX technologies, by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (who also worked with Nolan on the 2014 science-fiction epic Interstellar, the 2017 World War II drama Dunkirk, and 2020’s futuristic espionage film Tenet).
The film’s editing, classical music, and acting are also top notch; Murphy is completely convincing as the reticent physicist hounded by the government he’d served so brilliantly, ably, and loyally. But while Nolan’s Oppenheimer may be a cinematic tour-de-force, it fails to deliver a coup-de-grace.
Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
J. Robert Oppenheimer (left) and General Leslie Groves (right) at Ground Zero of the nuclear bomb test site, September 1945.
Shortly after the successful detonations in Japan of the weapons of mass destruction that he’d helped invent, a hubristic Oppenheimer addresses a pep rally at the Los Alamos facility attended by jubilant, cheering scientists. The Manhattan Project’s director says it’s too early to know details about the effects of the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but callously quips: “I’ll bet the Japanese didn’t like it.”
Oppenheimer and his acolytes may not have known then all that their terrifying creation wreaked, but we do today, including the fact that, according to journalist John Hershey’s 1946 nonfiction account, Hiroshima, shadows were literally blasted from presumably incinerated human beings and imprinted on walls, like ghostly murals. Unfortunately, Nolan pulls his punches and cops out by never explicitly showing what the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cost in human terms. Unlike the Trinity test in the empty desert, the horrifying explosions in Japan are alluded to but never depicted per se in this movie.
As the specter of nuclear war rears its ugly head once again, seventy-eight years later, we’re all in dire need of a reminder of the threat posed by Oppenheimer’s invention.
As the specter of nuclear war rears its ugly head once again, seventy-eight years later, we’re all in dire need of a reminder of the threat posed by Oppenheimer’s invention. Imagine if Nolan had used his finely honed cinematic skill to show us the horrors of nuclear war, up close and personal. That would have provided apocalyptic food for thought, from the Kremlin to the White House, where Oppenheimer once lamented to President Truman that he had “blood on my hands.”
Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a gripping, absorbing, and never boring plea for peace, as summed up by Oppenheimer’s private conversation with Einstein that is only revealed in the chilling finale.
Veteran screenwriter and director Paul Schrader (1976’s Taxi Driver, 1980’s American Gigolo) has pronounced it “the best, most important film of this century . . . . If you see one film in cinemas this year it should be Oppenheimer . . . this one blows the door off the hinges.” It’s too bad that Christopher Nolan didn’t go for broke and blow the roof off, too.
Oppenheimer opens in theaters on July 21.