Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan’s most powerful, human movie

Christopher Nolan loves making films about the immense forces and abstract concepts that shape our understanding of the world, such as time, gravity, and perception. Even as he turns his gaze to the human mind, in a cinematic psychologically scrambled film, Memento or a dreamy thriller Inceptionhis exploration of the metaphysical realm has a rigorous architectural design that tends to confine and dwarf the characters within it. InceptionEscher staircase.

He is often accused of being ruthless, which I think is unfair. The director struggles to find a sympathetic, emotional, and sometimes sentimental way in his awe-inspiring enormity. But those emotional hooks often feel more like entrances than destinations to his story.of interstellarMatthew McConaughey travels to the center of a black hole to discover that the secret of the universe is love. But is it really love that sucks him in, or is it the unrelenting gravity that can bend time itself? Big wins.

Until then oppenheimer. The paradox of this movie — unleash the terrifying power of the quantum realm,father of the atomic bomb– It’s less about science and mechanics than most of Nolan’s previous films, and more about humans. It’s still wide-ranging and meticulous in design. But this is a movie in which Nolan ponders the frightening question of what is the most powerful force in the universe. we.

The film differs in texture and tempo from Nolan’s previous work, perhaps because he is working from a very rich source text. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Acclaimed biography by scientists Kai Byrd and Martin J. Sherwin, who led America’s nuclear weapons development during World War II. There is an enormous amount of material for Director Nolan to unravel: pivotal scientific concepts, political and military intrigues, enormous moral questions, and the not-so-small problems of one man’s complicated life.

As a screenwriter, Nolan has taken on this terrifying task, and his work as an adaptation has inspired some of his best screenplays to date. Broadly speaking, oppenheimerThe running time of is divided into three distinct acts. The first is a sensational biography of a mercury physicist played by Cillian Murphy. The second is a fascinating scientific procedure that follows the construction and first testing of an atomic bomb at a Manhattan Project remote facility in New Mexico. And his third, woven through his first two, is a political and legal thriller about an attempt to dismantle Oppenheimer’s postwar reputation and legacy.

It’s not like Nolan to tell this story straight. He sets multiple timeframes from the start. Ostensibly, it’s a full-color chronology of Oppenheimer’s life and a black-and-white framing device featuring nuclear broker Louis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) whose ties to Oppenheimer come under scrutiny as Strauss seeks a cabinet post in Washington in the 1950s. Even this isn’t complicated enough for Nolan, who regularly blurs the lines as he tries to organize his torrent of information, bouncing between multiple narrative layers, film stocks, and screen proportions. This is evidence of his structural fluency that all this is no more confusing. And it’s evidence of his storytelling that everything works to serve the narrative, rather than drawing attention to its own tricky ingenuity, as his scripts sometimes do.

Image: Universal Pictures

Even more remarkable is how the chaos of the characters and their lives is brought to the surface through Nolan’s grand design.Nolan has a habit of over-explaining everything – if Dunkirk It’s still his best movie, because it’s the only one where he speaks great images. oppenheimer is a very talkative movie, with quite a few scenes of people joining forces while pointing to equations on a blackboard. But it’s too complicated here to rely on images or stare at a particular moment for too long, so Nolan has to keep moving. There is a very human warmth, unease, and even wit through the cracks. (If he likes a physicist joke or two, I’m sure he’ll be pleased.)

The cast’s credit for discovering and emphasizing its humanity, especially Murphy, who hypnotically plays a very difficult role as a charismatic, aloof egotist whose desire to dominate pushes him to a moral breaking point that he dares not express. His haggard, sculptural face fills the frame for much of the film, his translucent cold eyes staring into reality and beyond. Oppenheimer sees everything, but does not see what is in front of him.

Among the vast star cast, Downey gives revelations in the nuanced, elusive, yet pivotal character part. Matt Damon, with his peppery hair and tasteful mustache, helps anchor the film as Maj. Gen. Leslie Grove, Oppenheimer’s down-to-earth military boss. Benny Safdie plays the young physicist Edward Teller who joins the project, adding a striking dose of sweaty unease. He became the father of the more destructive hydrogen bomb.. Gary Oldman makes an amazing and chilling cameo as President Harry Truman. And while Tom Conti plays the surly Albert Einstein, Nolan’s script reduces the great thinker to a rather basic and symbolic role, either an angel on Oppenheimer’s shoulder or a Greek choir who shakes his head at human stupidity.

Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

Women, As expected for Nolan, the fare is not so good. Florence Pugh, as Oppenheimer’s lover Gene Tatlock, navigated through a deeply embarrassing conceptual sex scene and inevitable creepiness, was the central figure in the Communist Party engagement that stretched Oppenheimer’s arm before the war, which he would later exploit against Oppenheimer. And Emily Blunt, who plays Kitty Oppenheimer, is far too eager and determined to play the great man’s miserable, alcoholic wife, but at least Nolan hands her a late peach of a scene featuring some of the best lines ever written, which she read with relish.

Despite being an intellectualist, Nolan is also an out-and-out populist, and as always, these clashes of instincts result in some gorgeous, goofy moments, like an early scene with Oppenheimer intently reading a T.S. Eliot novel. wasteland And think about Picasso. Nolan can sometimes be uncomfortable working outside of his usual thriller mode. Ludwig Goransson’s relentless, unnerving music is used extensively throughout, almost comically obscuring Oppenheimer’s dizzying montage of life when the drama could have better come to life.

But when the film reaches the secret Los Alamos lab, where bombs were developed and tested, Nolan and his team come into their own. Hoyte van Hoytema’s majestic photographs are engulfed in a ruthless desert that sets the stage for wartime triumphs and terrible human tragedies: bomb experiments. There could have never been a more serious explosion. Nolan probably put together the set pieces and filmed the explosions in too much excitement, but he compensates by emphasizing the disorienting and inhuman speed of the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nolan wisely turns the camera away from that atrocity, instead rendering it a terrifying metaphorical hallucination of Oppenheimer’s inner world reduced to ashes.

In that final stage, oppenheimer Use political campaigns to discredit a physicist and take his legacy as a means to skin a man who will not change his stance on his terrifying creation. contradictory and enigmatic. After an overwhelming bombshell sequence, this is a surprisingly subtle and complex technique for Nolan, but it works because the narrative is driven by historical record and characters rather than dogma, and horrific moral consequences emerge naturally from the details. Director Nolan is a person who does not allow anyone in the audience to miss his point, and the final scene of the movie makes a strong impression. But first, he builds a web of ambition, compromise, dreams, politics, jealousy, and inspiration—humanity—that unleashes a force that he reveres.of oppenheimerhumans are the most fearsome machines of all.

oppenheimer It will be released in theaters on July 21st.