The Bulletin reviews ‘Oppenheimer’

Writing about Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists requires a few disclosures first. The history of the Bulletin is inseparable from the history of the making of the nuclear bomb, not least because J. Robert Oppenheimer himself was the first chair of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors. Many of the other key scientific figures depicted in the film served as early sponsors of the Bulletin, too (including Albert Einstein and Edward Teller) or were contributors.

“Oppenheimer” is one of the most anticipated movies of the year, and deservedly so. It’s a stunning new approach to historical drama. It’s a film fugue that perfectly matches Nolan’s talent for non-linear narrative with a colossal, decades-long tale of strange new physics and equally enigmatic personalities. It’s a biopic disguised as an action thriller, or the other way around.

For the first half of the film, Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) seems to have a date with destiny, as scenes careen through meetings with scientists, policy debates, security hearings, and intimate closeups, all leading toward the inevitable test of the bomb on July 16, 1945.

It’s a very talky picture, but it stays engrossing—in three hours of conference room and laboratory interiors, things rarely seem to drag. If anything, the film (expertly edited by Jennifer Lame) sets off at a bewildering pace, sometimes introducing new people into Oppenheimer’s orbit every few seconds. The action jumps throughout between color scenes from Oppenheimer’s perspective to black-and-white scenes centered on Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr)—Strauss was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 when Oppenheimer’s purported Communist sympathies prompted a hearing that ultimately stripped him of his government security clearance (a decision reversed by the Department of Energy last year). Those events are the fulcrum on which Nolan’s intricate chronology turns.

It’s hard to keep up, but that’s probably the idea—by the time Oppenheimer takes over the Manhattan Project, everyone watching the movie is already part of the race to build the Bomb.

It’s no small achievement to condense a three-hour feature out of the 700-page tome the movie is based on, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin (not to mention that the Manhattan Project itself has become its own metaphor for complexity). But Nolan pulls the abridgement off, with an all-star cast and some Hollywood script-writing tricks that help things along. For example, the relationship between Gen. Leslie Groves (the military director of the Manhattan Project, played by Matt Damon) and Oppenheimer occasionally takes things into buddy-movie territory. And Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) gets a Dr. Strangelove treatment that he may deserve. Some well-placed moments of humor also enliven the script, with a slapstick bit in which Oppenheimer repeatedly pushes away an over-eager note-taker, David Hill (one of Enrico Fermi’s associates from the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, played by Rami Malek), nicely setting up his role in a serious turn of events toward the end of the film.

Only 30 theaters worldwide are capable of screening the film in the full-frame IMAX format Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema prefer it to be seen, and at various moments I did wish I could have the full experience. (Though Chicago was the site of the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction that made this whole story possible, we can’t seem to keep a proper IMAX theater around.) But even at the standard 70mm screening I attended, there was no question this was great cinema. “A wonderful format for faces,” Nolan told The New York Times. And it is. Nolan only thought of Cillian Murphy to play the lead when he wrote the film, and it’s clear why.

During the most powerful scene of the whole film—more powerful even than the big explosive one you might be thinking of—all of Nolan’s experimental IMAX filmmaking fuses in a vertiginous nightmare that could stand alone as a statement about the horror that the Bomb unleashed on the world. In that moment, aided by the gigantic screen, I felt momentarily nauseated. Around the same time, the soundtrack (scored by Ludwig Göransson) evokes both the Lacrimosa movement from Mozart’s Requiem and the piercing strings from Psycho, a perfect blend of the regretful and ominous.

It’s notable that the longest scenes—when Nolan lets things settle for a moment—are those in which the big moral and political questions are being debated: the decision to use the bomb on civilians, the development of the hydrogen bomb, preventing an arms race, etc. As these scenes repeat across Nolan’s interconnected narrative, Murphy portrays Oppenheimer becoming increasingly detached and diminished as he loses his grip on the nuclear genie he helped unleash. Elsewhere, the film delivers Oppenheimer’s thoughts through a kaleidoscopic medley of words and scenes that are sometimes obviously fictional, and sometimes a hodgepodge of real events. Some are accurate in broad strokes, but not the details. For instance, in the film, Hans Bethe (Gustaf Skarsgård) corrects calculations by Teller that suggest the atmosphere of the entire Earth could be ignited by a nuclear chain reaction. But Bethe himself credited Teller (and his associate Emil Konopinski) with the best calculations proving the impossibility of that “ultimate catastrophe.” It’s an example of some of the forgivable license taken in the movie—Teller’s cantankerousness needs to be preserved to keep the whirling cast of characters coherent.

Those with more expert knowledge of the history and science will doubtless have other things to say about factual faults in the film. Nolan has also been criticized before for his tendency to portray women unimaginatively through male eyes; “Oppenheimer” is no exception, though in this case, Oppenheimer’s perspective is obviously the point. There are other critiques of the movie’s accuracy and completeness that can be made—for instance, the Native American and Hispano communities that populated the areas around Los Alamos and also worked at the lab turn up for only one fleeting moment, when Oppenheimer suggests to a decidedly unsympathetic President Truman that he “give it back to the Indians.”

But “Oppenheimer,” after all, is Nolan’s prismatic psychological study of one man’s personal choices and struggles, not a history of the Bomb. And if audiences can concentrate through the movie’s knotty and breakneck storytelling on its main dilemmas—whether or not building the bomb was the right thing, and how to live with the consequences—then the fragile moral journey that Nolan’s version of Oppenheimer survives will be haunting and illuminating. Nolan’s ability to transport audiences is undeniable. But like Oppenheimer’s own ambiguous end, the destination remains uncertain.