Oppenheimer Is More Than a Creation

Myth About the Atomic Bomb

Christopher Nolan’s ambitious film explores the heated conversations and
private anxieties that led to the unleashing of a terrible power.
By David Sims

Almost all of Oppenheimer is composed of conversation. There’s academic back-

and-forth among theoretical physicists as they scribble nuclear equations on
chalkboards; heated conversations between American politicians and military
leaders about World War II and the fate of the country should the Nazis win;
terse, loaded exchanges at panels and Congressional hearings, with investigations
sifting through rumors and conjecture in an effort to determine these scientists’
loyalty to the United States. The director Christopher Nolan rarely slows down to
let his protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), actually
think. When he does, the audience sees particles swirling in Oppenheimer’s mind,
neutrons smashing and sparking, elemental forces being harnessed through
intelligence and will.
It’s mesmerizing but also quite inscrutable—a beautiful representation of the
terrible power Oppenheimer channeled in his involvement with the Manhattan
Project, which created (and detonated) the first nuclear weapons. Nolan’s film
encompasses far more than that, cramming almost all of the doorstop-size
biography American Prometheus into a three-hour running time by moving at
breakneck speed. It covers Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a student and his
postwar battles with the government over his alleged Communist past. The result
is a talky biopic with the intensity of an action movie, a series of meetings in
offices and bunkers that somehow drives the planet to the brink of apocalypse.
Although the visual scale is smaller than the many widescreen epics Nolan has
made—save for the part where the bomb goes off—Oppenheimer might be his
most ambitious work as a filmmaker to date.

It’s also a fascinating companion piece to the only other Nolan movie that’s
rooted in real-life events: 2017’s Dunkirk. That film, which depicted the
evacuation of Allied troops during World War II, was light on dialogue and heavy
on complex action set pieces, bombarding the viewer’s eyes and ears with the fury
of the front lines. Much of Oppenheimer is set during the same war, but it focuses
on the behind-the-scenes figures who sought to end the war without firing a
bullet. Nolan’s chief fascination, of course, is Oppenheimer himself, whom
Murphy plays as a grand enigma—icy at times and effortlessly charming at others,
sympathetic to leftist revolutionary causes but happy to bury those sympathies as
he begins steering the Manhattan Project.

The film’s first hour barrels through his student years and his early days as a
physicist in England and Germany; Oppenheimer crosses paths with legends in
his field such as Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett),
and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer). Their energetic discussions of
quantum mechanics and atomic theory are difficult to keep up with, but as the
plot thundered on, I realized that was part of the point: Even these esteemed men
of science can’t quite grasp what they’re dealing with. The viewer knows where
things are headed—the total success of the Manhattan Project, and the
consequences of the weapons it produced—but there’s a frightening lack of
awareness as, spurred by a fear of the Nazis reaching the same consequential
milestone first, the development of the bomb is set in motion.

Throughout the action, Nolan ping-pongs between timelines, as he has in many

films past. In painstaking detail, he depicts the humiliating 1954 hearings that
stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance and dredged up both his past
associations with Communists and his overactive love life. A more daring
element, told in black and white, follows the former Atomic Energy Commission
chair Lewis Strauss (a tremendous Robert Downey Jr.) as he undergoes a Senate
confirmation hearing for a Cabinet post, digging through the politician’s tense
relationship and eventual enmity with Oppenheimer. The majority of the story,
shown in color and centered on Oppenheimer, fizzes with energy and possibility;
the Strauss-centric sequences are slow, seething, and obsessed with the past,
representative of the conservatism and paranoia that calcified around the atomic
society Oppenheimer helped to create.

Nolan’s ambition is to intertwine multiple biographical threads about his subject

and his historical context. There’s the mad dash to create nuclear weapons, a
thrilling race against time with an explosive conclusion: the Trinity bomb test that
proved their theories correct. There’s the larger moral conflict that emerged
especially after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as scientists such as
Oppenheimer started begging governments to back away from the deadly arms
race that politicians like Strauss were effectively pushing for. And then there are
the deepest mysteries of Oppenheimer himself, a man who pleaded for peace
later in life but who never fully held himself publicly accountable for the
hundreds of thousands left dead by his invention.

As Oppenheimer zips toward its conclusion and switches perspectives with

increasing mania, it becomes clear how carefully Nolan is working to keep the
audience’s attention on his story’s lofty scope without losing sight of its cryptic
protagonist. Murphy, with his frost-blue eyes fixed in a permanent thousand-yard
stare, keeps the viewer (and the people around him) at arm’s length. But as the
years pile on, it’s obvious how the guilt has stacked up too. The film lets reality
start to crack around Oppenheimer as a result, turning the Trinity test into a
haunting, invasive specter he can never quite shake.

Nolan is best known for spectacle, and some viewers will be able to
see Oppenheimer in bone-rattling IMAX, projected on a skyscraper-size screen. But
it’s more impressive for how the director has made such a personal narrative feel
epic, not just in visual breadth but in dramatic sweep, presenting a story from the
past that feels knotted to so many present anxieties about nuclear annihilation.
After racing his way to scientific progress and achievement, Oppenheimer is
confronted with an amoral world he had previously ignored; that existential
horror, and the way it echoed into the 21st century, is the real hammer wielded by
this tale.