#763: Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan
Initial release: July 11, 2023 (France)

JOHN CONNOR: We're not gonna make it, are we?
THE TERMINATOR: It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

—Terminator 2: Judgment Day

August 6th, 1945. The city of Hiroshima, Japan, disappears in the blink of an eye. World War II comes to an end. In its place, a door is thrown open; beyond the threshold is humanity's self-annihilation. How responsible is J. Robert Oppenheimer for everything that followed? How responsible is he for the estimated 150,000 to 246,000 people killed by the atom bombs, both in the moment and in the aftermath? What burden does he shoulder for the terrors of mutually assured destruction? For a generation of children hiding under their school desks? For the uncountable close calls, those moments where we came closest to destroying each other?

This is the question that lies at the heart of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, a three-hour journey through the life and times of the man who headed up the Manhattan Project. No mere biopic, this: Nolan has never heard of a linear narrative in his life, and his film is Oppenheimer's life flashing before our eyes as we jump around between the Manhattan project, the notorious 1954 security hearing that cost Oppenheimer his security clearance and credibility, Oppenheimer's trainwreck of a personal life, and the 1959 confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss, a politician who had a particular hatred of Oppenheimer, largely over perceived slights and disagreements. Despite its constant whiplash between moments in time, there is nevertheless a steady march forward, with the 1954 hearing serving as the framework upon which most of the rest of the film is hung. It's not about the linearity of events; it's about the meaning of those events.

As a filmmaker, Nolan seems to have picked up where Stanley Kubrick left off. His films have often been eclectic, dense and meticulously constructed, the cast list a veritable who's-who of Hollywood, with even minor characters being given the space and time to embody their roles. Cillian Murphy is a veteran actor, both under Nolan and not, but it's stepping into the shoes of Oppenheimer that has pulled out a performance nobody knew he had in him: a tormented soul prone to fits of egotism, who constantly runs up against the limits of theory but is afraid of the consequences of action. Opposite him is Robert Downey Jr. as Strauss, a petty, insecure heel who, ultimately, embodies, like a Greek deity, all the paranoia and ill feelings of the McCarthy era; a far cry from Tony Stark and all the Tony Stark-like characters RDJ has played over the years, huh?

At least since The Dark Knight, it's felt like every new Nolan film of the last twenty years has been his magnum opus; I'm not sure he knows how to make movies any other way anymore. Shot entirely on film (fast becoming a lost art) and lasting a whopping three hours, Oppenheimer is pure cinema, the kind of movie that movies were invented for. Nolan uses color in different ways: scenes involving Strauss are usually shot in black and white, seeming to both represent his particular way of thinking about the world, and the 1960s political thrillers his particular persona would have slotted neatly into; but even the color sequences, which make up the majority of the film, also differ (the 1954 scenes feel washed out, like mid-century color film; the Manhattan project scenes feel almost, but not quite, oversaturated.) His use of sound is impeccable as always, with a particular motif being the footstomps of a joyful audience of scientists at Oppenheimer's victory speech, a sound that haunts the film like an angry ghost, sounding like a steam engine picking up speed for some dreadful fate that cannot be avoided.

You might ask: where are the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this? Nowhere and everywhere. Nolan keeps us detached from the victims of the bombings, deliberately so; there are other films that can talk about the Japanese experience better than Nolan could (I recommend the animated film Barefoot Gen.) But the moral failure of the bombings, and of creating the bomb itself, haunt Oppenheimer. In a way, it's akin to The Wind Rises, Hayao Miyazaki's semi-fictional animated biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed the infamous "Zero" fighter, terror of the Pacific Theater. These aren't movies where the protagonist and their actions are cast into heroic or villainous lights; instead, they are flawed human beings, building devices that kill people for one justification or another, only to regret it after. Oppenheimer's hypocrisy and his moral/political fence-sitting are his defining characteristics; he spends the final third of the film after the successful Trinity test in a deep gloom over his role in creating the atomic bomb, but he was absolutely gung-ho over not letting the Nazis beat the Allies to it.

I like Nolan's movies. I like some more than others — Interstellar I think might be the best thing he's ever made — but they're always a joy to watch. He's a filmmaker's filmmaker, a big-budget arthouse auteur whose movies always seem to have a driving question at their core, one that isn't always answered.

Is Pandora responsible for what came out of the box? It turns out, not even Oppenheimer knows.

-june❤