Oppenheimer

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Running time: 3hrs | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Cillian Murphy stars in Oppenheimer

By all accounts, including Christopher Nolan’s ambitious new biopic, J. Robert Oppenheimer was an introverted but charismatic man. Played here with magnetic intensity by Cillian Murphy, we encounter him as a physicist but also a leader, able to pull people into his orbit when it served him, but inclined inward, drawn to the core of things, with an extraordinary focus. It makes sense that he was compelled to inquire into the nature of atoms, the building blocks of reality.

Every atom contains a particle at its centre, the nucleus. The nucleus is the heart of the atom. Splitting the nucleus of an atom causes it to radiate dangerous energy, hence “nuclear radiation”. In a way, it’s heart-break at a molecular level, and as scientists discovered in the 20th century, it’s a powerful force. Split the nuclei of a trillion, trillion atoms, as Oppenheimer and his colleagues did in their atom bomb, and that nuclear energy is released with enough force to wipe out a city.

There are many ways you could go about dramatising this kind of story, and Nolan opts for a relentless, sensual, immersive approach that is somewhat slippery: often deeply conventional, at times experimental. At first I felt that the experience of watching the film was something like watching a trailer for the film that you’re already watching. A famous quote here, a convenient line of brisk exposition there, a split-second vision of an explosion, a crucial character-forming incident, an encounter with Einstein, a sultry meet-cute, and so on, swept along by a deeply-felt score from Ludwig Göransson. I realised upon mulling it over that the other thing that this reminded me of was the Proustian free-association of memory, where one memory can lead directly to the next, but at other times, the associations are looser or deeper or less intuitive, and the effect is of a river of time ebbing and flowing and circling back on itself.

That probably makes Oppenheimer sound meandering, but threaded through all of this, giving the film some thematic and structural heft, is an anxious dialogue concerning individualism versus conformity, fusion versus fission, and the dangers of both. The first type of nuclear bomb, developed in the 1940s, derived its power from energy released when the heart of the atom is split apart, i.e. fission. Nolan names the earlier timeline in his film after this process, and shows us the deep fissures and rifts in Oppenheimer’s life, both occupied and created by him, both personal and political. 

But then along comes fusion, the process of forcibly joining together, which lends its name to the second timeline in Nolan’s narrative. In most films, the act of joining together is benign, often a requirement as heroes progress towards victory. But in Oppenheimer, joining together is a source of terror. 

Nuclear fusion is the opposite of nuclear fission: fusion is not about splitting the nucleus, it’s the process of fusing the hearts of atoms together, which releases far more lethal energy than breaking them apart. Oppenheimer was alarmed by the use of fusion to create a second type of nuclear bomb, the hydrogen bomb, developed in the 1950s, which had the potential to kill up to 1000 times more people per blast than a regular old atom bomb. Nolan dramatises this with a characteristically deep-seated suspicion of lockstep thinking: Oppenheimer is persecuted by conformist McCarthyites who demand the coming together of all Americans into a single unified mindset. This is fusion as political hegemony. 

What to make of a world in which it is possible to make an exhilaratingly beautiful film where the more modest kind of atom bombs emerge as the moderate choice? Perhaps that lurch in perspective is the point, serving as a warning and advertisement for the power of cinema’s own act of fusion and fission, the splitting of the infinite, living, material world into just 24 frames per second, followed by the fusion of those images into an illusion sometimes more convincing than the reality from which it was forged.

OPPENHEIMER (2023) Written by Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin | Shot by Hoyte Van Hoytema | Edited by François Quiqueré 

In cinemas now