Oppenheimer (2023)
Movie rating: 10/10
With just a few days to spare before Labour Day, I finally caught a screening of Oppenheimer Thursday, ensuring I was caught up with the Barbenheimer phenomenon that has become the biggest pop culture event of summer 2023. More than just a meme that fueled two box office behemoths, Barbenheimer has become cultural shorthand for two genuinely good, albeit very different movies. In the end, Oppenheimer turned out to be the biggest surprise for me. I saw Barbie first because I had less idea what to expect. Oppenheimer, however, turned out to be not just a very different beast from typical Hollywood fare—it’s far and away Christopher Nolan’s best film, no small praise for the man who directed The Dark Knight.
The film, of course, tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), who directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project that led to development of the first atomic bomb during the Second World War. Told in non-linear fashion, as is Nolan’s habit, Oppenheimer covers the titular character’s studies as a young physics student; his work on the Manhattan Project; his left-wing political activities, which eventually led to efforts to revoke his security clearance as World War II gave way to the Cold War; and romantic relationships with his alcoholic wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) and mistress Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). Key figures in Oppenheimer’s career include Gen. Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), director of the Manhattan Project, and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a founding member of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Part of what makes Oppenheimer so unique comes down to Nolan’s unique status in Hollywood. As director of the Dark Knight trilogy, particularly the second film, he redefined what superhero movies could be and garnered them a new level of critical respect. The success of his Batman films gave Nolan the cachet to bring to the silver screen his own mind-bending original stories—a rarity in an era where intellectual property rules Hollywood, with studios allergic to any idea audiences are not already familiar with—and to tell them with big budgets and A-list stars. Films like Inception and Interstellar were critically acclaimed and massive hits. At this point, Nolan is perhaps the only filmmaker in Hollywood who could convince a studio to give him a $100-million budget for a talky, intellectual three-hour drama that is mostly people speaking in small rooms, and cast any actor he wants for the project. (Matt Damon promised his wife he would take time off from acting, with one exception: “if Chris Nolan calls.”)
All that doesn’t guarantee a good movie. Fortunately, Oppenheimer is a great movie. Despite its length, I was never anything less than engrossed in the story of this “American Prometheus”, described by fellow physicist Neils Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) as “the man who gave [humanity] the power to destroy themselves. And the world is not prepared.” All of the acting is terrific, as one would expect with this cast. Murphy gives the best performance of his career as Oppenheimer, ably carrying the film on his shoulders and presenting a complex, brilliant, but flawed individual. The other MVP is Downey, portraying an ambitious government official with a key role in the hearings to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Both actors should be shoo-ins for Oscar nominations.
At least two aspects of this movie pleasantly surprised me. One was the dialogue. Despite critical acclaim, I’ve always found the dialogue in Nolan’s films—the director writes or co-writes all his scripts—lacking in subtlety. It comes off like it was written by, well, an English literature major, which is exactly what Nolan was as a young student at University College London. Too often, his characters hit you over the head with speeches that sound like a screenwriter spelling out the themes of his movie for the audience. Batman Begins is my go-to example. Fear is a major theme of that film, so the characters are constantly talking about fear in a way that sounds less like natural human speech and more like a college thesis. Same with clunky lines like, “It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.” Happily, this wasn’t a problem at all in Oppenheimer. The dialogue managed to be thoughtful and evoke the themes Nolan wanted to highlight while feeling much more naturalistic. I think Nolan has gotten better at writing dialogue over the years.
The second unexpected bonus was the movie’s politics. While I can’t speak to Nolan’s political beliefs, his films have often seemed to embody a conservative message that was most obvious in his Batman films. Many interpreted The Dark Knight as a metaphor for post-9/11 in America, in which Batman (read: George W. Bush) was justified in spying on citizens in order to find terrorists like Joker (read: Osama bin Laden). The Dark Knight Rises was filmed before the Occupy movement, yet Nolan’s portrayal of Bane as a violent revolutionary who ranted against income inequality and sought to impose a reign of terror on Gotham—in stark contrast to the heroic presentation of the police—certainly seemed to support conservative values. To be fair, that’s a problem with pretty much any interpretation of Batman and superheroes in general, who tend to reinforce the status quo.
Regardless of Nolan’s own ideological leanings, Oppenheimer delved far deeper into the title character’s politics than I ever expected. Indeed, one could consider it as much a focus of the film as the development of the atomic bomb. We see Oppenheimer in the interwar period as a sympathizer of the Communist Party who vocally supports the Spanish Republic against Franco’s Nationalist forces and tries to unionize faculty at his university. Both of Oppenheimer’s romantic interests in this film are Communist Party members.
The sections in which government officials question Oppenheimer’s political views and his loyalty to the United States clearly paint the McCarthyists and conservative cold warriors in a negative light. We see how the U.S. ruling class maintained a consistent distrust of the Soviet Union and its supporters, even when the two countries were allied together against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Suffice it to say that Nolan’s film was far more sympathetic to Oppenheimer’s left-wing politics than I would have imagined.
Discussing the film with others afterward, I felt at one point that its portrayal of scientists involved in the Manhattan Project evoked the memorable line by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Oppenheimer, a left-wing Jew, knows more than most the dangers of the Nazis possessing an atomic bomb. Germany also had a head start in development of nuclear weapons—hobbled in large part by Hitler’s antisemitism, which dismissed the work of Einstein and other modern theoretical physicists as “Jewish physics”.
The race to beat Nazi Germany in developing an atomic bomb provides much of the motivation for scientists in the Manhattan Project, along with their pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake. By the time they successfully detonate an atomic bomb in the Trinity test, though, Hitler’s Germany has already been defeated. The question of what U.S. officials will do with the weapon of mass destruction they now possess feels almost like an afterthought. The success of Trinity marks the moment at which Oppenheimer’s influence with U.S. officials begins to ebb. Almost immediately, the attitude of figures like Gen. Groves towards Oppenheimer shifts to a stance that could be summed up as: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Oppenheimer learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima the same way most Americans did: through a radio broadcast from President Truman.
Some viewers have criticized Oppenheimer for not depicting the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in all their unimaginable horror. I disagree with such criticism. Nolan doesn’t hesitate to display the effects of nuclear war and radiation sickness, but he does it in a way that fits within the scope of his film’s primary focus: J. Robert Oppenheimer himself.
There’s a scene after the bombing of Hiroshima in which Oppenheimer addresses a cheering audience waving American flags. Already looking somewhat queasy, he says of the bombing: “I bet Japan didn’t like it.” Yet for all Oppenheimer’s “patriotic” bravado, the roar of the audience vanishes into near-silence as he imagines people in the crowd suffering from the effects of atomic warfare: people with skin peeling off, reduced to ashes, and vomiting from the effects of radiation sickness. I thought this scene powerfully conveyed the perspective at the time of the man most responsible for the atomic bomb—who knew precisely what such weapons could to human beings, but with little documentary evidence at the time could only imagine the effects. If you want to see the documented reality of these atomic bombings, I would recommend the first 15 minutes of Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Why was the U.S. government in 1945 willing to commit an action we now think of as unthinkable: the use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population? Generations of schoolchildren in the United States and allied countries have been taught that the bombings were necessary due to the unwillingness of Japan to surrender absent a full ground invasion. In true Orwellian fashion, we’re told the use of atomic weapons that killed hundreds of thousands of people “saved lives”. But facts are stubborn things. Imperial Japan was already trying to surrender when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Michael Angove in a 2017 article identified the real reason Truman engaged in nuclear warfare:
These bombs were not dropped to prevent further casualties, nor to destroy the Japanese military. Contrary to what is often stated neither city had justifiably large military garrisons nor were they sites of great wartime importance. These cities were destroyed as a method of intimidation and to set the scene for America’s imperialist aspirations in Asia. Further, it was a clear demonstration of America’s willingness to utilise their atomic capabilities. By ending the war in such a way, America achieved its most pressing goal: to halt the Soviet expansion into East Asia.
J. Robert Oppenheimer spent the rest of his life grappling with the ramifications of that decision, a struggle fully depicted in Nolan’s film.
Oppenheimer showed me what’s possible when a talented, intelligent filmmaker with a proven track record is given all the resources necessary to bring their vision to life. Its particular subject, with the budget and A-list cast to match, is something that could have only happened with a director of Nolan’s calibre, and represents the exact opposite of all the IP-centred franchise fare Hollywood now specializes in. The U.S. film industry is currently being rocked by its biggest crisis in decades, with the failure of multiple high-budget would-be blockbusters and simultaneous actors and writers strikes. The box office success of Barbie and Oppenheimer shows people are looking for something fresh and different.
I’m grateful a movie like Oppenheimer exists. It feels like a real movie, the kind that would have been successful in the 1970s: a blockbuster that’s not an escapist fantasy for the 18-34 demographic, but a serious drama that grapples with one of the most important events in human history and presumes its audience will have the patience and attention span to sit through a three-hour movie focused on politics, war, science, and adult relationships. At the time of writing, Oppenheimer was nearing $800 million at the global box office, one of the best results ever for an R-rated drama, and solid evidence that mass audiences are more intelligent and discerning than film industry groupthink would have us believe.