An extraordinary Nolan’s epic "Oppenheimer"

For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face. 

Cillian Murphy, staring with icy blue eyes, dominates the film, playing Robert Oppenheimer with a restraint that perfectly suits this charismatic yet chilly character. The story takes us from his student days in Europe, to his time as a professor in California in the 1930s, and then to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret US programme to build nuclear weapons in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where his team races to create a bomb to end World War Two. Murphy keeps us with him even when the character seems a bit opaque. Nolan based his film on the magisterial biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin and captures just what that title suggests: a tragic and profoundly American hero who helped shaped the modern world and became a victim of Washington politics. Much of the film is from Oppenheimer's point of view, in bright colour, designed and shot with immediacy despite its wide-screen format. Black and white sections that feel deliberately claustrophobic show Strauss' perspective, as he appears before a US Senate committee voting on his nomination as Secretary of Commerce. Those sections eventually echo Memento, in which the story is not what it first seems. The fractured chronology effectively creates a sense of doom that haunts the earlier scenes. 

Nolan moves back and forth in time, either side of the historic 1945 firebreak, giving us Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a young scientist, lonely and unhappy, electrified by the new developments in quantum mechanics, the young leftist who never became a Communist party member but whose anti-fascism galvanised his desire to develop the bomb before the Nazis could, directing the work of hundreds of scientists. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are appearing before a tribunal and bring called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The tribunal is out there in the dark. We've been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

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 Sarah H

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