I finally did it. I watched all three hours of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, one half of the biggest movie-going event of 2023, and arguably the most smarty-pants movie to ever gross a billion dollars. It was a critical darling all year long, sailed through its awards season, and racked up seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director for Nolan, a coronation for one of Hollywood’s biggest artists whose name alone is each new project’s biggest selling point. I’ve had friends falling over themselves with rapturous praise, and I’m sure you have too, dear reader, so the danger becomes raising your expectations to a level that no movie could ever meet. As I watched all 180 lugubrious minutes of this somber contemplation of man’s hubris, I kept thinking, “All right, this is good, but is it all-time-amazing good?” I can’t fully board the Oppenheimer hype train, and while I respect the movie and its exceptional artistry, I also question some of the key creative decision-making that made this movie exactly what it is, bladder-busting length and all.
As per Nolan’s non-linear preferences, we’re bouncing back and forth between different timelines. The main story follows Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as an upstart theoretical physicist creating his own academic foothold and then being courted to join the Manhattan Project to beat the Nazis in the formation of a nuclear bomb. The other timeline concerns the Senate approval hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) with a checkered history with Oppenheimer after the war. A third timeline, serving as a connecting point, involves Oppenheimer undergoing a closed-door questioning over the approval of his security clearance, which brings to light his life of choices and conundrums.
If I was going to be my most glib, I would characterize Oppenheimer in summary as, “Man creates bomb. Man is then sad.” There’s much more to it, obviously, and Nolan is at his most giddy when he’s diving into the heavy minutia of how the project came about, the many brilliant minds working in tandem, and sometimes in conflict, to usher in a new era of science and energy. Of course it also has radical implications for the world outside of academic theory. The world will never be the same because of Oppenheimer dramatically upgrading man’s self-destructive power. The accessible cautionary tale reminds me of a Patton Oswalt stand-up line: “We’re science: all about ‘coulda,’ no about ‘shoulda.’” Oh the folly of man and how it endures.
For the first two hours, the focus is the secretive Manhattan Project out in the New Mexico desert and its myriad logistical challenges, all with the urgency of being in a race with the Nazis who already have a head start (their break is Hitler’s antisemitism pushing out brilliant Jewish minds). That urgency to beat Hitler is a key motivator that allows many of the more hand-wringing members to absolve those pesky worries; Oppenheimer says their mission is to create the bomb and not to determine who or when it is used. That’s true, but it’s also convenient moral relativism, essentially saying America needs to do bad things so that the Germans don’t do worse things, a line of adversarial thinking that hasn’t gone away, only the name of the next competitor adjusts. This portion of the movie works because it adopts a similarly streamlined focus of smart people working together against a tight deadline. Looking at it as a problem needing to surmount allows for an engaging ensemble drama complete with satisfying steps toward solutions and breakthroughs. It makes you root for the all-star team and excitedly follow different elements relating to nuclear fusion and fission that you would have had no real bearing before Nolan’s intellectual epic. For those two galloping hours, the movie plays almost like a brainy heist team trying to pull together the ultimate job.
It’s the time afterwards where Oppenheimer expands upon the lasting consequences where the movie finds its real meaning as well as loses me as a viewer. The legacy of the bomb is one that modern audiences are going to be readily familiar with 80 years after the events that precipitated their arrival, and they haven’t exactly been shelved or become the world war deterrent hoped for. As one of Oppenheimer’s physicists says, a big bomb only works until someone creates a bigger bomb, and then the arms race starts all over again fighting for incremental supremacy when it comes to whether one’s military might could destroy the world ten times or twelve times over. When Oppenheimer begins having reservations of what he has brought into this world is when his character starts becoming more dynamic, but it’s also too late. He can’t undo what he’s done, the world isn’t going back to a safer existence before nuclear arms, so his tears and fears come as short shrift. There’s a scene where Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), castigates him and says, “You don’t get to commit the sin and then make all of us to feel sorry for you when there are consequences.” Now this is in reference to a different personal failing of our protagonist, but the message resonates; however, I don’t know if this is Nolan’s grand takeaway. The movie in scope and ambition wants to set up this man as a tragic figure that gave birth to our modern world, but like President Truman says, it’s not about who created the bomb but who uses it. Oppenheimer is treated like a harbinger of regret, but I don’t think the story has enough to merit this examination, which is why Oppenheimer peters out after the bomb’s immediate aftermath.
It reminded me of an Oscar favorite from 2015, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, a true-ish account of real people profiting off the worldwide financial meltdown from 2008. It fools you into taking on the perspective of its main characters who present themselves as underdogs, keepers of a secret knowledge that they are trying to benefit from before an impending deadline. Likewise, the conclusion also makes you question whether you should have been rooting for this scheme all along since it was predicated on the economy crashing; these guys got their money but how many lives were irrevocably ruined to make their big score? With The Big Short, the movie-ness of its telling is part of McKay’s trickery, to ingratiate you in this clandestine financial world and to treat it like a heist or a con, and then to reckon whether you should have ever been rooting for such an adventure. Oppenheimer has a similar effect, lulling you with its admitted entertainment factor and beat-the-deadline structure. Once the mission is over, once the heroes have “won,” now the game doesn’t seem as fun or as justifiable. Except Oppenheimer could have achieved this effect with a judicious resolution rather than an entire third hour of movie shuffled throughout the other two like a mismatched deck of cards.
The last hour of the movie features a security clearance interrogation and a Senate confirmation hearing, neither of which have appealing stakes for an audience. After we watch the creation of a bomb, do we really care whether or not this one testy guy gets approved for a cabinet-level position or whether Oppenheimer might get his security clearance back? I understand that these stakes are meaningful for the characters, both essentially on trial for their lives and connections, but Nolan hasn’t made them as necessary for the audience. They’re really systems for exposition and re-examination, to play around with time like it was having a conversation with itself. It’s a neat effect when juggled smoothly, like when Past Oppenheimer is being interviewed by a steely and suspicious military intelligence office (Casey Affleck) while Future Oppenheimer laments to his project superior (Matt Damon) and then Even More Future Oppenheimer regrets his lack of candor to the review board. The shifty wheels-within-wheels nature of it all can be astounding when it’s all firing in alignment, but it can also feel like Nolan having a one-sided conversation with himself too often. It’s another reminder of the layers of narrative trickery and obfuscation that have become staples of a Christopher Nolan movie (I don’t think he could tell a knock-knock joke without making it at least nonlinear). The opposition to Oppenheimer is summarized by Strauss but I would argue the man didn’t need a public witch hunt to rectify what he’s done.
Lest I sound too harsh on Nolan’s latest, there are some virtuoso sequences that are spellbinding with technical artists working to their highest degree of artistry. The speech Oppenheimer gives to his Los Alamos colleagues is a horrifying lurch into a jingoistic pep rally, like he’s the big game coach trying to rally the team. The way the thundering stomps on the bleachers echo the rhythms of a locomotive in motion, driving forward at an alarming rate of acceleration, and then how Nolan drops the background sound so all we hear is Oppenheimer’s disoriented speech while the boisterous applause is muted, it’s all masterful to play with our sense of dread and remorse. This is who this man has become, and his good intentions of scientific discovery will be rendered into easily transmutable us-versus-them fear mongering politics. The ending imagery of Oppenheimer envisioning the world on fire is the exact right ending and hits with the full disquieting force of those three hours. The meeting with Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) is splendid for how undercutting it plays. Kitty’s interview at the hearing is the kind of counter-punching we’ve been waiting for and is an appreciated payoff for an otherwise underwritten character stuck in the Concerned Wife Back at Home role. The best parts are when Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves (Damon) are working in tandem to put together their team and location, as that’s when the movie feels like a well orchestrated buddy movie I didn’t know I wanted. The sterling cinematography, musical score, editing, all of the technical achievements, many of which won Oscars, are sumptuously glorious and immeasurably add to Nolan’s big screen vision.
I think I may understand why the subject of sex is something Nolan has conspicuously avoided before. Much has been made about the sex scenes and nudity in Oppenheimer, which seem to be the crux of Florence Pugh’s performance as Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s communist mistress through the years. The moment of Oppenheimer sitting during his hearing about his sexual tryst with an avowed communist leads to him imagining himself in the nude, exposed and vulnerable to these prying eyes and their judgment. Then Kitty imagines seeing Pugh atop her husband in his hearing seat, staring directly at her, and this sequence communicated both of their internal states well and felt justified. It’s the origin of the famous “I am become death” quote where the movie enters an unexpected level of cringe for a movie this serious. I was not prepared for this, so mild spoilers ahead if you care about such things, curious reader. We’re dropped into a sex scene between Oppenheimer and Jean where she takes a break to peruse his library shelves. She’s impressed that he has a Hindu text and pins it against her naked chest and slides atop Oppenheimer once again, requesting he read it to her rather than summarize it. “I am become death,” he utters, as he reads the Hindu Book of the Dead off Pugh’s breasts while they continue to have sex. Yikes. A big ball of yikes. If this is what’s in store, please go back to a sexless universe of men haunted by their lost women.
It’s easy to be swept away by all the ambition of Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a Great Man of History biopic that I think could have been better by being more judiciously critical of its subject. It’s a thoroughly well-acted movie where part of the fun is seeing known and lesser known name actors populate what would have been, like, Crew Member #8 roles for the sake of being part of this movie (Rami Malek as glorified clipboard-holder). Oppenheimer takes some wild swings, many of them paying off tremendously and also a few that made me scratch my head or reel back. It’s a demonstrably good movie with top-level craft, but I can’t quite shake my misgivings that enough of the movie could have been lost to history as well.
Nate’s Grade: B
