Oppenheimer Review: A Masterful Character Study of a Complicated Man

★★★★★

Christopher Nolan is one of the most celebrated directors of the modern age, with general audiences and “film bros'' alike flocking to see whatever he comes out with next. With films like the Dark Knight Batman trilogy, Memento, Inception, and Dunkirk, Nolan’s films are seen as events, garnering critical acclaim and raking in over £5 billion in terms of box office over his career. And this vice-like grip on the moment continues with Oppenheimer, with its baffling, public, buddy-cop bromance with Greta Gertwig’s Barbie (or Barbenheimer, as it has come to affectionately be known), and the excellent calibre of filmmaking on display.

Oppenheimer is not only, in my opinion, Nolan’s greatest film thus far, but I think it stands as one of the best English-language films of the 21st century, and one of the greatest biopics of all time. High-praise indeed! If you’re suspicious of any one of these three claims, then I hope this review serves to back them up, and give you cause to go and see this movie in all its glory while you still can. You won’t regret it.

While Oppenheimer is obviously most known for being “the Father of the Atomic Bomb”, I think there’ll be a fair number of people a little disappointed to find that the film doesn’t really focus on “the nuke”. Instead, the film centres around its titular character as a person, examining his early life, his ascent through the world of theoretical physics, and the dichotomy of genius-level intellect and crippling personal flaws that paved the way towards the birth of the atomic bomb. The initial Trinity nuclear tests and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are important events within the context of the film, but the narrative focus is definitely squarely fixed on Oppenheimer’s shoulders.

To offer a brief-ish synopsis of the movie, we follow the life of Oppenheimer in chronological order, with jump cuts towards the “present day” of the film (around 1954). We see his beginnings as physics student at Cambridge, struggling with homesickness and the required lab work. He is inspired by a visiting scientist, Niels Bohr (portrayed by Kenneth Branagh) to study theoretical physics in Germany, where he completes his PhD. He returns to the USA, hoping to expand research into quantum physics, meets his future wife Kitty (played by Emily Blunt), and begins an on-again, off-again affair with Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh), a US Communist. Spurred on by Nazi German research into nuclear fission, and amidst the growing threat of WWII and the Nazi party, Oppenheimer is recruited by US Army General Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon) to lead the Manhattan Project alongside a team of scientists at the new Los Alamos research facility.

From here, we see the juxtaposition of the team of scientists ramping up to the climax of the initial Trinity test, and the crumbling of many aspects of Oppenheimer’s personal life. Questions are raised of the necessity of the atom bomb after Germany surrender, but the decision is made to drop the bomb anyway on Japan, of course forcing their eventual surrender. Between all these events, we have been cutting back to the present day. Oppenheimer has been under investigation for his political leanings, with his governmental security clearance in danger of being revoked, due to a culmination of many of the events that we’ve seen thus far; a process led by Robert Downey Jr’s embittered Lewis Strauss. By the end of the movie, we see Oppenheimer as a man that’s been betrayed by many of his colleagues, distrusted by his friends, family, and country; all while he struggles to come to terms with his role in the dawning of a new, nuclear age. That pretty much sums up the movie; it functions almost as a fragmented tapestry of Oppenheimer’s personal and professional history. Oppenheimer is a pure biopic, focusing entirely on one man, his influence over history, and how his personal life and challenges moulded him to be the man that we remember today. And one of the main reasons this film is so fantastic is the breadth of characters we see on screen, and the standard of acting on display.

Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer is genuinely one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen, and if he doesn’t win the Oscar then we just live in a very sad world. As well as foundationally pulling off a pitch-perfect impression of the man, Murphy effortlessly portrays the crushing inner struggle, the wry arrogance, and the almost childlike curiosity of a scientist lost in the bureaucracy and politics that surrounds him. Everything about this performance is flawless; you don’t feel like you're watching a movie at points, but a particularly stylish documentary. It genuinely feels like you’re watching the Oppenheimer, and the only thing I can think to compare it to is a performance like Daniel Day Lewis’ Abraham Lincoln, Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles, or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote, in that the actor completely disappears into the role of portraying a real-life person from history. This film is over 3 hours long, and the full weight of the story rests entirely on Cillian Murphy making you believe his performance; he pulls this off spectacularly.

Oppenheimer as a character is one of the most nuanced and interesting I’ve seen in quite some time. I’ve read some discourse about the film, taking issue with the “positive” depiction of a man who is ultimately responsible for a genocide, and arguably the worst invention of all time. I couldn’t disagree more with this take, because the film does nothing to paint Oppenheimer in a particularly favourable light. If we were to attempt to boil down the characterisation of Oppenheimer into something more simplistic, he could be described as incredibly weak-minded, naïve, and intellectually curious to an almost sinister degree.

He is weak-minded, in the sense that he seems incapable of truly taking responsibility for practically anything he does wrong, and often reframes events to centre around himself. He poisons his Cambridge lecturer’s apple out of anger and frustration after one of his classes, before rushing back in to try to prevent it. He willingly engaged in an affair with Jean Tatlock, knowing that she was mentally unwell, and then when she commits suicide after he leaves her, he presents to his wife as though this is a terrible tragedy that’s just happening to him. He flip-flops between feeling guilty for all the deaths caused by the bomb, and revelling in his big-brained scientific achievement. He never once, throughout the entire film, ever truly condemns the bomb; a fact which is pointed out to him by several characters towards the climax.

Oppenheimer is naïve to think that his research would never be used to commit atrocities, that his purely intellectual interest in US Communism would ever be seen as just light reading, and that his fellow scientists and government officials would heed his warnings about the dangers of further nuclear research. He is so naïve, in fact, that he even personally vouches for a Los Alamos scientist who turns out to be a Soviet spy! And with his intellect and scientific curiosity, he of course pushes forward the research and eventual use of a weapon of mass destruction, the latter of which it can definitely be argued didn’t even really need to happen. We are consistently shown these reincorporated patterns of behaviour throughout the duration of the film, and each is communicated perfectly to the audience, through a tight script and powerful performances.

But with all this, we also see Oppenheimer is very much aware of the magnitude of his research and its dangers, and is at his core, simply, a lover of science. We see his passion from the beginning of the film as colourful flashes of inspiration as he becomes the expert in his field, in the form of these stylised visuals of ripples in space, black holes, and stars. These same visuals grow more and more corrupted by the end of the film, becoming creepy, threatening, and apocalyptic in nature. Oppenheimer shrinks into himself, becoming more gaunt, troubled, and feeble by the film’s end, unable to stop the ripples he’s created by bringing forth this dangerous new nuclear age. If Oppenheimer says anything, it’s that something as pure and emotionally amoral as the advancement of knowledge can be easily corrupted. I don’t think we’re supposed to see Oppenheimer as a good or a bad person. He is, ultimately, the father of the atomic bomb; a brilliant scientist, and a deeply flawed human being - who simply couldn’t bring himself to fully condemn nor commend his creation. The film allows us to take away our own interpretation of the man, as any good biopic should, and it does so flawlessly in my opinion.

There are so many other phenomenal performances in this film, too, in what is an incredibly stacked cast. Robert Downey Jr as businessman Lewis Strauss is a brilliant antagonist; capturing a weaselly, paranoid, and vindictive energy that serves as the perfect foil to Oppenheimer’s moral complexity. Oppenheimer and Strauss bring out the worst in each other, with Strauss highlighting Oppenheimer’s aloof and somewhat arrogant personality, and Oppenheimer exacerbating Strauss’ insecurity and paranoia. While all of Oppenheimer’s POV scenes are shot with vibrant colours, ripples, and effects, to capture his vision, intelligence and imagination; Strauss’ POV is entirely in black and white, because this is how he sees the world, and Oppenheimer himself. He fails to ever really get to grips with Oppenheimer as a person, seeing only an arrogant, celebrity scientist with a sketchy, “Communist past” and questionable morals. All of this, however, masks the very simple motivation of Strauss wanting to punish Oppenheimer, because he embarrassed him (who is absolutely an unreliable narrator by the way) at several points in his life. This flimsy, shallow, and borderline pitiful motivation to discredit Oppenheimer for his awkward personality, contrasts perfectly with the final shot of the film. Oppenheimer standing silent and slack-jawed, pondering the future of mankind and the very likelihood of nuclear apocalypse. The two characters could not be more diametrically opposed, making for an engrossing, thematic and contextual conflict that carries the film.

Without going into so much more detail, every character is played brilliantly by the ridiculously stacked cast. Emily Blunt is superb as Oppenheimer’s long-suffering wife Kitty, delicately balancing Kitty’s simultaneous admiration and exhaustion with her husband. Casey Affleck shows up for a brief but memorable role as a menacing colonel, and Benny Safdie threatens to steal the show as Edward Teller, an egotistical and grating scientist working at Los Alamos. I could list every single named character in this film and spend a good paragraph explaining why they’re great, and I’m not exaggerating. The standard of acting and the sheer density of watchable, well-performed characters is a big reason as to why the film flies by at 3 hours.

And then of course, it’s a Christopher Nolan film about the atomic bomb, so you know the visuals are going to pop. The effects that go into making the atomic bomb are stellar; especially in the cinema, you can almost feel the heat of the bomb through the screen - and the shockwave feels almost like a jumpscare. All of the technical elements of the film that you would expect to be great, are great; accomplished on the contextually measly budget of $100 million. As a period piece, Nolan transports the audience to war-time America, with impeccable set design and costuming, and a fantastic musical score by Ludwig Göransson that perfectly captures the mood throughout every event in the film.

The film is presented almost as a standard thriller despite being a biopic, which means the pacing and pulse of the film, despite a lot of it being dialogue and conversations as opposed to action, really zips by. Long stretches of the film, such as the build-up to the first test of the bomb, and the aftermath of the Manhattan Project, are some of the most tension-filled, creepy, and uncomfortable scenes I’ve ever seen. A scene that I won’t spoil in its entirety sees Oppenheimer giving a rah-rah speech to his fellow scientists after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it is wholly unnerving and uncomfortable to watch in the best kind of way, and the feeling it draws out of you is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen pulled off in a film, period.

Overall, Oppenheimer is a consistently entertaining and exciting film to watch for all of these reasons, and despite the long runtime, I was never bored by what I was seeing. As I’ve alluded to countless times throughout this review, it’s kind of a perfect movie. The acting is some of the finest that you’ll see for quite some time, and the journey that Oppenheimer takes you on from the very first second to the last is intelligently told, emotionally engaging, and powerfully resonant. It is, simply put, one of the best films I’ve ever seen, and if there’s any film I could recommend going to see in cinemas ASAP, it’s this one. And if the depressing reminder of the looming nuclear apocalypse, that is no doubt slowly creeping towards us, bums you out, you can always go see Barbie afterwards!