Oppenheimer
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Based on: Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Scott Grimes, Jason Clarke, James D’Arcy, Kenneth Branagh, David Krumholtz, Matthias Schweighöfer, Josh Hartnett, Alex Wolff, Florence Pugh, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Matt Damon, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Benny Safdie, Gustaf Skarsgård, James Urbaniak, Rami Malek, Olivia Thirlby, Casey Affleck, James Remar, Steve Coulter, Gary Oldman
Seen on: 21.7.2023

Plot:
After an influential career, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) finds himself facing reckoning, both public and not so public. Was his development of the atom bomb and the subsequent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unavoidable? Should he be hailed as a hero or condemned as a devil? One thing is for certain: Oppenheimer was influential and divisive.

Oppenheimer is a film with a complicated structure, a long runtime and extensive ambitions. One might wonder if it is necessarily this convoluted and whether it doesn’t miss key components of the story. But it certainly aims high. I would say, it is a Nolan film in its purest form, all the best of him and all the worst.

Nolan chose to tell Oppenheimer’s story not only through one hearing that reflects on his actions, but two, leading to three separate timelines that don’t always continue chronologically. It is to the filmmakers’ absolute credit that it doesn’t get confusing and you always know where in the story you are. But I found myself wondering whether one hearing as a framing device wouldn’t have been enough. It might have shaved a little time off the film as well, and that wouldn’t have been too much of a fault either.

The film is certainly very convinced off itself and its importance, its depth. And it is far from a shallow film, but – much like its protagonist – it would have profited from a little hesitation and self-reflection in its quest for greatness. For example, it is arguably about how (white) men get lost in said quest for greatness, but then reproduces the exact same thing, sidelines the female characters (poor Kitty, and even worse: poor Jean… when we get that vision of Jean fucking Oppenheimer during a hearing, I wanted to kick Nolan, but I was rolling my eyes too hard to be able to do that) and doesn’t even feature one Japanese character though the Japanese were certainly the most impacted by Oppenheimer’s work (to put it coyly).

The film also doesn’t question the myth of genius enough for my taste. It might be a more critical examination of what we societally see as the marks of genius (which boils down to white men with poor social skills and an interest in natural sciences and/or technology), but in the end, Oppenheimer again reproduces this instead of questioning it, really. Despite its ambitious nature, it falls into the same traps as many stories before it.

Maybe this is entirely on purpose. Maybe Nolan tried to make the point that Oppenheimer thought he was above everybody else, but in the end he found himself making the same destructive choices as so many men before him, and so he made a film that would be hailed by everybody as great and then give us not much new. But somehow I doubt that Nolan was playing 6-dimensional chess in that way. Doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good film, but maybe one that could have profited from more doubt.

Summarizing: If you like cinema, you probably won’t get past this. If you don’t like cinema, this is probably not for you.