I enjoyed Oppenheimer, and I certainly wasn’t expecting to. Christopher Nolan’s films have mostly left me bored and/or annoyed before. (Memento was OK I guess. I haven’t watched his Batman films, because they’re Batman films.) I know he’s raved about by the sort of tech-fixated movie bros who claim you haven’t seen a film at all until you’ve seen in 70mm and Surroundsound, but I don’t see how a bigger screen or louder speakers could rescue a film like Inception, one of the most tedious things I’ve ever sat through. Anyway, by default, Oppenheimer is my favourite Nolan film.
Inception and Interstellar both had endings which you can see coming the instant they’re set up, and so does Oppenheimer: early in in the proceedings Oppenheimer is talking to Einstein in long shot, the dialogue inaudible, when Einstein’s hat blows off. Nolan’s clearly marking the moment: we’re going to return to it and find out what they were saying. And sure enough, about three hours later, we do. The intervening time is mostly spent in laboratories, senate hearings, and committee rooms - it’s all just MEN TALKING, as I noticed some midwit complaining on Twitter (I’m not sure what else you expect when you go to see a film about the development of the Atomic Bomb… Car chases? Dancing girls? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the Serengeti?)
The dialogue is workmanlike biopic boilerplate - there’s a lot of, ‘you’re not just a common soldier - you studied engineering at M.I.T’ type stuff (probably not an exact quote, but you get the idea). There’s surprisingly little about Oppenheimer’s actual work. The disagreements among the Manhattan Project physicists over various possible routes to building the Bomb are the stuff of fascinating drama, but that’s pretty much skipped over in a single scene here, and even that’s mostly concerned with introducing the hawkish Edward Teller as Oppie’s antagonist. There’s a spy story to be had too, but we only learn later about Claus Fuchs leaking secrets to the Soviets. And of course the whole Los Alamos set-up resonates deeply on a mythic, almost Biblical level - the mountain in the desert, a pillar of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night - but Nolan isn’t really interested in any of that. He’s a very literal film maker, and his focus is entirely on Oppenheimer as a man, on his private life and, ultimately, on the campaign in the 1950s to get his security clearance cancelled, led by Lewis Strauss (a very impressive Robert Downey Jnr).
Naivety seems to be our man’s Achilles Heel, leading him to imagine the Communists are the good guys in the ‘thirties, then that the Bomb he is designing will make war impossible, and finally that he can trust the U.S government, which is very happy to use his earlier leftist sympathies against him when he tries to caution against the development of more and bigger nuclear weapons. He has a curious mixture of guilt and pride - ‘sometimes we confess to a sin so that we can take credit for it’ his wife says, in another example of the film’s subtle dialogue.
The Bomb itself sits at the heart of the story, of course. The Trinity test is the major set-piece, the spectacle for which, if we’re honest, most of us probably bought our tickets. And it delivers, though mainly because of the sound design. Ludwig Göransson’s unsettling music rises to a deafening crescendo as the clock ticks down to zero, and then cuts off at the instant of detonation: as white light bathes the faces of the onlookers the only sound we hear is Oppenheimer’s breathing, until the shockwave hits and normal service is resumed. But visually, I thought the explosion a bit underwhelming. Nolan seems very proud of not using CGI, but there are times when a bit of it would probably come in handy. (It might also have helped with the later flash-forward scene where an aged Oppenheimer is attending a White House reception - the make up is terrible, and this was on the little screen at Newton Abbot cinema - God knows what it looks like in IMAX.)
So if the dialogue is iffy, the history questionable, the make-up amateurish, and the A-bomb disappointing, what makes Oppenheimer so compelling to watch? (Because it is compelling, at least until the last half hour or so, where I think the screenplay could have been tightened up a bit.) Well, it’s nicely filmed and very well edited, which helps, and the sheer quantity of information it throws at you, combined with its choppy structure and short scenes, make it feel like a lot is going on even when it’s just MEN TALKING. The performances are mostly good too - Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt, and more cameos than you can shake a stick at - although it’s really Cillian Murphy’s film. The main image you take away from it is his haunted face. But I think what pulls it through is its immense self confidence. Like his fanboys, Nolan believes he’s a genius, and sometimes self-belief that strong can be infectious, and make you ignore any evidence to the contrary, at least until the final credits roll.
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