Oppenheimer (MA15+. 180 minutes)
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Five stars
With every second of its 180-minute runtime carefully considered and masterfully constructed, Christopher Nolan's biopic of the man behind the atomic bomb is unmissable cinema.
Nolan adapted his screenplay from Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and focuses specifically on the man's work leading to and throughout the Manhattan Project, and then the dismantling of his career and legacy in the years that followed.
![A scene from Oppenheimer. Picture supplied A scene from Oppenheimer. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/MxhEgQKUJhZgHxwVaKiqcq/41949e27-37ea-40de-8872-81911f5f0a71.jpg/r0_314_3074_2049_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Peaky Blinders actor Cillian Murphy would have to be odds-on favourite for next year's Oscar for his performance as the physicist who changed not only the course of the Second World War, but of world politics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer (Murphy) is a passionate intellectual in love with ideas, ideas learned at graduate school in England and Germany in the 1920s where he picked up several languages and interests like art and politics in addition to the emerging science of quantum mechanics which he introduces to American academia on his return.
When German scientists split the atom in 1938 and his Berkeley laboratory colleague Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) successfully repeats the experiment, Oppenheimer immediately visualises its possible use as a weapon.
However, with the war begun and the American military having started their secret weapons program code-named Manhattan, Oppenheimer's reputation for leftist ideologies and friendships within the American Communist Party means it takes some time for project lead Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to approach him.
His genius finally recognised, Oppenheimer convinces the military to establish a research facility close to his family property in New Mexico and allow him to recruit the pick of American intellectual talent, who work relentlessly towards the construction of a war-ending weapon.
Interspersed through this narrative is the hearing conducted by the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 investigating Oppenheimer's supposed Communist sympathies and his fitness to continue holding a security clearance, and other meetings engineered by UAEC chairman Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr).
It really is an all-star cast, with Murphy, Damon and Downey joined by Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh as, respectively, Oppenheimer's wife and mistress, but also with huge names in the smallest of roles, including the likes of Rami Malek, Gary Oldman and Kenneth Branagh in significant one-or-two scene appearances.
Every performance is controlled, with Blunt and Downey Jr best given the chance to show what they are capable of, but the film is Murphy's, all haunted sanpaku glare.
Nolan expects a lot from his audience, a decent level of understanding of many of the players and of the landscape of the Second World War, not spoon-feeding or overexplaining, and a mutual understanding at the horror Oppenheimer's bomb unleashed. This allows his narrative to remain focused on the Manhattan Project team's race to deliver, and the years-later fallout the moral weight of that work would have on careers and relationship.
The sound work in this film is as big a contributor to its success as the performances or direction. It is designed as an immersive experience and I'd strongly recommend doing a bit of leg-work to make sure the screen you book into has Xtreme Sound some cinemas advertise and is bigger than the shoebox I watched it in.
Ludwig Goransson's music, sometimes strings but always a merciless beat leading to crescendos and crashes, is augmented by stunning sound design work that makes us feel the pressure of a research project team driven by the weight of millions of deaths on the European and Pacific battlefields.
The film opens with Oppenheimer's visions as a young man of such universal forces as the explosions within our sun, feeling like the esoteric final scenes of Nolan's Interstellar, but it then leaves this musing behind for the specific and human.
Nolan's screenplay jumps through time, slowly revealing his characters and their motivations, only making complete sense in its final moments, but with not a moment wasted.
At three hours, I was expecting to be sneaking glances at my watch having had my brain deplasticised over COVID, but I didn't feel the time dragging.
It's hard to articulate on opening day for both this film and Greta Gerwig's Barbie how both will be remembered, but at 10 in the morning I saw what looked like multiple booked-out cinemas, in numbers that put to bed the fiction that COVID killed the cinema experience.
I saw fans of all ages dressed in Barbie pink (and a few Kens), and plenty seemed to have bought into the online hype for a Barbenheimer double feature and came into my session of the Nolan film, and talked enthusiastically as the end credits rolled.