Oppenheimer Review
Movies are back! They are so back! I have not seen the parking lot as full as it was ever for the theater my wife and I went to do a double feature of Oppenheimer and Barbie.
It was magical to see people coming out to the theater to see films of original IP. Sure, Barbie is a brand, but the story is not based on an existing property.
Yes, Oppenheimer is adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.
It tells of a snapshot in Oppenheimer’s life when he helped/led the development of the atomic bomb. We see snippets before this and before the war and a time after, but the main focus is the A-Bomb.
Nolan for some time has had the tendency to go bigger and bigger in his films, convoluting plots and storylines to the point that he is like a snake eating his own tail.
Tenet is the biggest example of this, it was a divisive film that many Nolan heads loved and others were left perplexed and wondering if Nolan had lost his magic (Me).
I loved Dunkirk, it was a personal story in which he used his tropes of time manipulation to great effect. Tenet was like he read every criticism about him and doubled down on everything just as a middle finger to those detractors.
Oppenheimer is a return to form for Mr. Nolan. He’s gotten so big that his stories have become behemoths to match. Here he goes back to his Momento and The Prestige days. A scaled-back story, but still told on a massive scale.
It’s the perfect amalgamation of Nolan’s strengths as a filmmaker. Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet have to be explained so much that a lot of his movie becomes exposition dumps and not in a clever way.
Here, we don’t have men in rooms explaining quantum theory to the audience, instead, we get a better feeling of what these men, especially Oppenheimer, are going through mentally while having to plan this.
His Subjective/Objective perspective is expertly deployed here as he did in Momento. Some scenes in particular put us in the horrifying headspace of Oppenheimer after the Bombs are dropped.
Cillian Murphy has never been better than he is in this film. He is riveting for three hours as we stare into his icy blue eyes while he has an existential crisis on camera.
It was a difficult role that Cillian pulls off and makes it look easy and should be a lock for Best Actor at the Oscars. Another lock will like be in Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr.
Downey plays Lewis Strauss whose character motivations remain unclear until the third act when Downey really flies off the screen. In fact, the entire cast is brilliant.
Where I struggle with the film is with Florence Pugh’s character and Emily Blunt’s as well. Nolan doesn’t have a great track record of writing women in his films and he misses the mark once again here.
Both characters are half-baked and their stories don’t feel fully realized. Emily and Florence are great with the material they’re given but it is an issue with the script.
Lastly, the Score by Ludwig Goransson is brilliant, being operatic and propulsive, and Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography is breathtaking, he is one of the best DPs we have working today.
Oppenheimer is a technical masterwork led by a brilliant performance from Cillian Murphy. It’s easily one of Christopher Nolan’s best films, even though he continues to struggle in the same areas as he always has.
It is a dense and immersive film that I cannot wait to see again.
4.5/5 Stars
