There’s nothing about this hotly anticipated Christopher Nolan film that isn’t epic.
It’s three hours long, it has an incredible set built in New Mexico to recreate the Manhattan Project site, and it’s being shown on IMAX 1570 format film. This format means the film itself weighs a whopping 260kg. Unravelled, it would stretch more than 18 kilometres in a straight line.
While the only place in the southern hemisphere to catch it on this impressive format is in Melbourne, ‘Oppenheimer’ is ultimately a character study, which comes across on any screen.
It’s fittingly epic for perhaps no more epic topic: the birth of the nuclear weapon. Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 biography 'American Prometheus', about the brilliant New York-born theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the film thankfully skips through a lot of the superfluous early-life detail the 700-page book offers, and viewers are thrown straight into the rapid rise of this troubled, talented scientist.
This is undoubtedly going to be the biggest cinema release of the year (and potentially beyond, given strikes) and has Oscars success written all over it. For me, it was not a perfect film; at times it felt like a few scenes were given far too much screen time without adding much to the narrative, while countless characters with development potential were swiftly disappeared, never to be seen again. So, despite the running time, it still somehow travels at breakneck speed.
The film is built around an incredible performance by Cillian Murphy. Portraying a man who increasingly subsisted on a diet of cigarettes and martinis was even a stretch for the usually slender Irish actor, but he reportedly tortured himself for his art with a meal of an almond or two a day. (We’ll take the martinis, thanks.)
Murphy however is stunning as Oppenheimer, a man said to be almost as complex as his quantum mechanics theories. An intense, emotional, driven man with a mind that never stopped and a social conscience that would come back to bite him, Oppenheimer was, from all reports, a hard man to know. Here, Murphy’s career-best turn makes you feel like you don’t only know ‘Oppy’ but understand him.
It’s hard to provide spoilers for as film that covers such an infamous chapter in modern history, but Oppenheimer’s recruitment to head the Manhattan Project and bunker down at Los Alamos in the New Mexico desert to build the first atomic bomb may be the most enjoyable ‘act’ of the film.
Knowing what does happen also delivers with it a kind of impending doom, or seeing every action through the lens of how this enthusiastic, ambitious scientist would introduce the nuclear bomb to the world.
Nolan foregoes CGI to recreate the detonation of the first bomb, known as the Trinity test, which happened in the early hours of July 16, 1945. Special effects stars Scott Fisher and Andrew Jackson really deliver on the visuals, employing magnesium flares and gasoline, among other techniques. And then sound production is just as superb. It’s a profound moment in time, and gets the perfect treatment for it.
In true Nolan style, timelines jump around, but it’s a useful device for unravelling a very complex, long story. Some of the best character interactions come from the scenes set in 1954, when Oppenheimer, after the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima and he becomes outspoken about the danger of the weapon, is made to front a hearing amid the frenzied Red Scare US political climate of the time.
A hardly recognisable Robert Downey Jr. is excellent as Lewis Strauss, the Atomic Energy Commission chairman, Matt Damon is as reliable as a blanket on a cold night as a key military figure in facilitating the project, Florence Pugh is scene-stealing in her brief time on screen (as is Rami Malek) and Emily Blunt is solid as Oppenheimer’s long-suffering wife. Josh Hartnett, meanwhile, did a lot of red-faced yelling and needless gesticulating as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Lawrence.
And if anyone wants more on this pivotal and disturbingly fascinating time in history, the BBC documentary podcast series ‘The Bomb’ is an excellent companion piece, and centres on German spy Klaus Fuchs, which Nolan perhaps wisely (‘it’s complicated’) only touches on here.
This will be three hours of your life you most likely won’t want back, as opposed to time spent in physics class.
★★★★☆
