In a Facebook post that was published on the 18th of July, director-scriptwriter Paul Schrader, one of the few major voices in Hollywood that is not filtered by publicists, called Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s first biopic, “the best, most important film of this century.” Coming from a blase insider who has seen them all, these words don’t ring empty at all, as they are riling up a segment of the audience that does not generally bow down at the altar of the director whenever he releases a new film.

It’s easy to see what attracted Nolan, a filmmaker that is always interested in the act of modeling time and space (in one way or another), to one of the most impactful personalities of the last 100 years: physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose research in the fields of quantic mechanics and nuclear physics would earn him the sobriquet of “The Father of the Atomic Bomb”. The solution was to adapt the events described in a biographical novel, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, into a three-hour long film, edited across several timelines (a directorial signature that is by now obligatory, unfortunately), titled “Fusion” and “Fision”, shot in black-and-white – on IMAX stock! – and color that, once mixed together, show the protagonist’s (excellently performed by Cillian Murphy) perspective when it “spills over” and enters the other narrative dimension. A labored construction that is meant to guide the spectator through an avalanche of characters and events that are cobbled together with the director’s trademark frenzied approach.

The first two acts, save for their narrative back-and-forth, are keeping in close with the formulaic approach of a correct and conventional biopic, as they follow the path of Oppenheimer from his years as a student and teacher at various universities across the States and Europe to the Manhattan Project that he is called to coordinate, whose results were the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Much is spoken, and all of it is important, usually in various classrooms, lecture halls, and laboratories, by characters whose genius is always a given, to paraphrase Leslie Graves (Matt Damon), the military engineer who built the Pentagon and who led the Manhattan Project.

Although the script is written in first person, Oppenheimer remains a protagonist that is much rather opaque, insufficiently decipherable throughout his interactions with his colleagues or through fragments of his personal life; the characters of his college girlfriend with communist sympathies (Florence Pugh) or of his wife (Emily Blunt, wasted in a decorative role) are only further highlighting the fact that the physicist is not destined for a normal life. “You see beyond the world we are living in”, he is told at one point. Consumed by a vague internal conflict, which arises due to his various left-wing sympathies that will later come back to haunt him later in life, the protagonist doesn’t manage to keep a healthy distance from the various political currents of his time. Even so, he doesn’t allow himself to be fully seduced by the mirage of communism, which had won over his family and a fair share of the academia, as well.

Most of the time, the protagonist seems to be floating above the world of mere mortals, acting arrogantly and lacking patience toward others, consumed by his obsession with the greatest questions of science (an elegant solution chosen by Nolan, that of using practical visual effects to illustrate the collision of atoms), as he even regards the Manhattan Project itself foremost as a knowledge barrier, one that he must surmount before the Nazis manage to get ahead. He knows that the mission he is working on will irreversibly change the world, but he is convinced that this is the lesser painful way of ending the war. In a meeting, he coldly discusses which Japanese cities are best suited to be wiped off the face of the Earth; Kyoto is crossed off the list because it’s a beautiful city, while others are deemed as being too culturally rich, or simply not big enough to be sufficiently proportional to the bomb’s destructive capacity.

After the first bomb is detonated in the Los Alamos desert, a sequence in which the soundtrack composed by Ludwig Göransson makes use of the full gamut of IMAX audio systems, a second bomb seems to go off on the inside of Oppenheimer, wonderfully illustrated in numerous close-ups of the expressive, angular face of Cillian Murphy, and one can see how the entire weight of the world is coming down on his shoulders: especially in a scene where the protagonist must deliver a victorious speech in front of his team while feeling overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the consequences. From here onward, Nolan’s wager on a first-person perspective starts to pay off.

The third act shifts its focus to Oppenheimer’s struggle to regulate the use of weapons of mass destruction, his opposition to the hydrogen bomb, and the consequences that the atomic bomb had on him, personally – the withdrawal of his security clearance in 1954 following a mock investigation, then the hearing of former Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) in his bid to become Secretary of Commerce in 1959.

Paradoxically enough, since the script starts to lose some of its precision and formal elegance, this last hour is when Nolan’s film starts to breathe in and resemble the high-class cinema that was promised. The juxtaposition between the Inquisition-like interrogations that Oppenheimer is subjected to, in a cramped room, at the initiative of obscure figures („Power stays in the shadow”, the film reminds us at one point), with the Senate Commission hearings, a chance for Robert Downey Jr. to (over)play enough to score him a Supporting Role Oscar nomination, creates both tension and a dose of intrigue that had been previously in the film. And the endless ensemble cast that responded to Nolan’s calls gets parts that truly showcase their talents – and Alden Ehrenreich in particular is a revelation. These are lively dialogues that, when they don’t get lost in grandiloquence or give off a smell of re-writes (such as the exchange between Emily Blunt and Jason Clarke, which finally gives the actress a meatier part to play), could well be integrated into a David Mamet play.

All in all, one couldn’t fault Oppenheimer for lacking ambition – after all, Nolan is one of the few directors who has the necessary resources to allow himself to destroy IMAX cameras or to blow up real airplanes in order to obtain the exact shot that he had in mind. He’s often truly inspired, even in the way that the condenses a gigantic amount of information in a three-hour-long film that doesn’t collapse under the pressure of its own weight. It’s just that it leaves one with the same impression of having witnessed a magic trick, which prevents Nolan from truly offering the masterpiece that so many people expect of him.

At the date of publishing, this documentary (which is essential to contextualizing Nolan’s film) is available for free on the Criterion Channel.

Oppenheimer was released in cinemas across Romania on the 21st of July.

Dragoș Marin

Dragoș Marin published articles and film reviews on filmreporter.ro and colaborated in various specialized festivals and TV shows. In everyday life he's a prokect manager while continuing to stay connected to pop culture and to write about what he has to say.