Highlights
- Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a mesmerizing and profound cinematic achievement, showcasing the best parts of his filmography in a mind-blowing celluloid cocktail. It feels like the culmination of Nolan's entire filmmaking career.
- Cillian Murphy delivers a layered and complex performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant but deeply flawed historic figure. The supporting cast, including Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Florence Pugh, also deliver standout performances.
- Oppenheimer combines visually distinctive timelines, explores the psychological toll of nuclear warfare, and delves into the global consequences of entering a new generation of war. Nolan's handpicked cinematic techniques and engaging script bring the story of the atomic bomb to life on the big screen.
Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated biopic of the father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer, has finally arrived in theaters, and it didn’t disappoint. This is a mesmerizing moviegoing experience, a profound cinematic achievement, and one of the greatest films of the year so far. Oppenheimer feels like the culmination of Nolan’s entire filmmaking career. It has the parallel color/black-and-white timelines of Memento, the complex duality of The Dark Knight trilogy, the rich history of Dunkirk, the profundity of Inception and Interstellar, and the engrossing nonlinear storytelling of The Prestige. Oppenheimer cherry-picks all the greatest parts of Nolan’s filmography for a mind-blowing celluloid cocktail.
Cillian Murphy leads the movie with a layered, complex portrait of a brilliant yet deeply flawed historic figure, with standout supporting turns by Robert Downey, Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Florence Pugh. Ludwig Göransson’s musical score switches between sweeping, romantic orchestrations and terrifying stomping sounds. It’s one of Nolan’s most thematically rich films, exploring both the psychological toll of nuclear warfare on the man responsible and the global consequences of entering a whole new generation of war. Oppenheimer isn’t just a great movie; it feels as though Nolan’s whole career has been building to this magnum opus.
Oppenheimer Combines All The Best Parts Of Nolan's Previous Movies
The opening moments of Oppenheimer quickly draw a parallel with the twisty psychological thriller that put Nolan on the map. Memento follows two visually distinctive story timelines: the color segments are edited in chronological order, while the black-and-white segments are ordered in reverse. Oppenheimer similarly takes place across two timelines – dubbed “Fission” and “Fusion” – with one shot in vibrant color to take the subjective perspective of Oppenheimer himself and the other shot in high-contrast black-and-white (on film that had to be invented from scratch for the IMAX cameras) to take the objective perspective of the kangaroo court trying to revoke his security clearance.
The world’s most famous physicist at the heart of Oppenheimer shares the same dual nature as a different Nolan antihero, Bruce Wayne. Whereas Bruce’s personality is split between a brooding, mournful billionaire and a rageful masked vigilante, J. Robert Oppenheimer is split between being a neglectful but caring husband and father, and creating a device that can wipe out entire cities’ worth of human lives. He is become death, the destroyer of worlds, but he’s also just a man. The nonlinear storytelling of Oppenheimer jumps back and forth between Oppie’s early academic career, his creation of the atomic bomb, the guilt that remained for years afterward, and the legal and political consequences of his communist sympathies. This narrative structure is similar to The Prestige, in which intriguing story events are gradually revealed from all over the timeline, carefully piecing together the answers to the audience’s questions.
When he was constructing Oppenheimer, Nolan handpicked all the most effective cinematic techniques he developed for his previous films and used them to bring the story of the atomic bomb to life on the big screen (and even bigger screens at IMAX theaters). Like Memento, Oppenheimer flits between color and black-and-white as it charts two perspectives of the same story. Like Interstellar, it’s a study of scientific innovation and what humanity is capable of. Like Dunkirk, it’s a startlingly accurate retelling of one of the most significant stories from World War II. Like The Dark Knight trilogy, it’s a dark and gritty portrait of a troubled man caught between his humanity and his capacity for destruction.
Is Oppenheimer Nolan's Greatest Film?
Michael Bay never made a better movie than The Rock and Roland Emmerich never made a better movie than Independence Day, so it’s easy to name their best films. But it’s trickier to name the greatest Nolan movie. Like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg, Nolan has a bunch of different movies that could claim to be his best. The Dark Knight is the quintessential post-9/11 neo-noir, using one of the most iconic villains ever put on film – Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning Joker – to explore the societal fears surrounding terrorism. Inception marked the first time that Nolan could really fire on all cylinders, telling a complex original story like Memento with a Batman-sized budget. It’s a director’s vision from beginning to end, immersing viewers in a mind-bending recreation of the dreamscape. The Prestige is a really smart movie that doesn’t just capture the skill and trickery of an old-timey stage magician; structurally, the movie itself unfolds like a magic trick with the pledge, the turn, and the prestige.
It’s a lot easier to name Nolan’s worst film than his best. The Dark Knight Rises is overstuffed and overambitious; Tenet is way too complicated for its own good (although, as usual, both of these movies have some exhilarating IMAX action sequences). It’s too early to determine whether or not Oppenheimer is the new peak of Nolan’s career and the finest film he’s ever directed, but it definitely ranks among his best. The all-star cast brings their A-game, the visuals and musical score breathe life into wartime history, and the movie has one of Nolan’s most engaging scripts (written, unconventionally, in the first person).