Film Review - Oppenheimer (2023)

Oppenheimer starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt coming to UK and Ireland from 21st July — *OPPENHEIMER, written and directed by Christopher Nolan*

The heat is on. Well, at least that’s what cinema goers and commentators believe is happening on July 21st this year. For the first time in a long while two huge event blockbusters, both of differing styles and stories, are going head to head at the box office on the same day, a rare occurrence in Hollywood if ever there was one. Well, and a strike, of course. The usual rule of thumb is to give your film as much breathing room as possible but not this time – Greta Gerwig‘s kaleidoscopic Barbie is going up against Christopher Nolan’s latest epic for box office supremacy. Or that’s what people want to think. In reality, however, these two films are hardly rivals in anything but sharing a release date but to paraphrase a famous movie poster tagline: Whoever Wins, We Still Win.

After his somewhat bitter divorce from Warner Bros in the aftermath of Tenet’s release in the summer of 2020 mid-pandemic, Nolan opted to move to Universal for his latest mammoth undertaking, a biopic (of sorts) of famed theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his work on The Manhattan Project in the 1940s. But while on the surface it screams biopic, nothing could be so straightforward under the creative mind of a director who loves stories of time, fate, destiny and the psychologies of man. Don’t expect a cradle to grave story, here, for the event that takes place at the centre of the film is as compelling as the man at the centre. Crafting his film in the first-person for much of it, he filmmaker takes you on a magical mystery tour through the beginnings of the end of the world. So, as cheery and uplifting as Barbie, then.

From its first trailer to its latest snippets, there was no doubt that yet again Nolan had yet again created a monolithic cinematic experience like no other and, true to those early glimpses, he certainly has but it’s perhaps in the film’s more classical moments – ostensibly, people talking in rooms for a lot of its three-hour runtime – that it truly soars. That isn’t to say that the visual representation of the creation and eventual detonation of the world’s most destructive weapon isn’t an exhilarating, fearsome event all by itself because, trust us, it is, but where the film truly explodes (thank you) is in rooms. Whether bed, board, court or science, the film’s true pulse comes here, with Murphy’s Oppenheimer on screen for almost the entire film as he fends off the military, scientists, doubters, spies, jealous compatriots, family, lovers, the press and, more impactfully, his own mind.

And, as with any other stories like this, in Nolan‘s hands we go deep into Oppenheimer‘s mind as he wrestles with his moral and ethical codes, anxiety, stress and the literal fallout of his greatest accomplishment, all told through the prism of a bomb going off in his head and all that goes with it. And the images? Astounding, awe-inspiring, nerve jangling, awesome as only Nolan can. The Great improviser and the Great visionary, together.

At the tip of the atomic reaction is Murphy, showcasing his immeasurable talents on his biggest stage yet and perfectly captures the complexities, contradictions and turmoil’s of Oppenheimer, and delivers a performance worthy of inclusion in any awards run. Nolan surrounds him with an incredible ensemble, no part of which is filler, with each character fully embodied by those performing them, but from them Jason Clarke, Josh Hartnett, David Krumholtz, Olivia Thirlby, Alden Ehrenreich and the brilliant Benny Safdie deserve special praise, whilst the big hitters of Blunt, Pugh, Damon, Malek and Branagh do what they do. Then there’s Downey Jr, one of modern cinema’s most irrepressible performers who, for the first time maybe since Chaplin back in 1992 (!), is able to genuinely get his teeth into something truly profound, and he excels. If there’s a pace-setter for Best ing Actor, he is it.

We could wax lyrical for more than the 180 min runtime of the film which is slightly to its detriment, particularly in the final act, but such is the audacity, dynamism and exhilaration felt through every moment of it that such small bumps are natural, just like the project at the centre of it. Fuelled by some staggering IMAX images and some otherworldly hand-made ones through Hoyte van Hoytema‘s lens and propelled by Ludwig Göransson’s impeccable score that sits in your brain from the very first moments, Oppenheimer is a staggering achievement of the power of cinema, in pushing its boundaries beyond what is possible, and in compelling, mature storytelling under the watchful eye of the medium’s most extraordinary modern talent. Truly, utterly astounding.