Christopher Nolan is a director-writer known for spectacle. Besides Tenet (2020), a sci-fi thriller which released mid-pandemic to a respectable, but by his standards, underwhelming box office performance, the last we saw from Nolan was his 2017 film Dunkirk. The film took a step back from the high-concepts of his last two pictures (the stellar Inception and more polarizing Interstellar) and transported audiences to the past, taking on the story of the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. Dunkirk, a true audiovisual feast in IMAX, played on Nolan’s strengths, almost entirely avoiding dialogue and taking advantage of interlinking storylines, ambitious editing, practical effects, and extremely immersive sound design to build up tension over the course of its comparatively modest 105-minute runtime. It was perhaps Nolan’s most successful attempt yet at creating spectacle through purely cinematic means, steering away from his history of heavy-handed dialogue and melodramatic appeals to pathos. In making his most recent film, 2023’s epic-scope Oppenheimer, Nolan succeeds where most directors would fail, converting Oppenheimer’s story into a spectacular cinematic event, but struggles instead with his own greatest weakness: writing and portraying believable character relations.
What stands out most about this film, more than even Nolan’s usual narrative hijinks, is the lead performance by Cillian Murphy. Not since The Dark Knight’s Heath Ledger has Nolan wielded such a gifted actor at the height of his talents. Murphy’s physical appearance lends itself perfectly to Oppenheimer’s character: his long, gaunt face, his crystal-blue eyes, his skeletal figure and graying, receding hair. But Cillian’s presence transcends physicality. The expressions he summons from himself, the thousand-yard stare, as well as the voice he employs, deep and authoritative but sorrowful all the same, these elements all add up into what’s surely one of the strongest performances of the year, if not the decade so far. The rest of the cast is a little weaker, although Robert Downey Jr. puts in a good performance as Lewis Strauss and Matt Damon is a solid Leslie Groves.
As usual, Nolan can’t help but mess with time a little bit in his script, switching between two different storylines: one shot in color and following, in a linear fashion, the developing career of Oppenheimer from his youth to his role as head of the Manhattan Project, and the other shot in black-and-white and covering how Strauss, decades in the future, plots to take him down. It’s a little hard to tell how these two plotlines connect in the beginning, and the last third of the movie turns from a biopic to courtroom-drama, but for a three-hour movie, Oppenheimer flows smoothly. Each moment of the protagonist’s life, be it in the realms of science, politics, or love, logically accumulates and they all eventually culminate in the film’s most talked-about moment: the Trinity bomb test. Nolan, a firm opponent of CGI overuse in recent blockbusters, attempted to recreate the detonation by igniting smaller munitions and filming them in slow-motion, and the effect is believable and surprisingly aesthetically beautiful as well, imbuing the scene with a hint of the uncanny. Perhaps the finest moment in the film, and one of the most memorable in Nolan’s career, follows this test, when Robert Oppenheimer delivers a victory speech to his team. Nolan chooses to show the physicist’s subjective perception of the scene, building up tension through the use of eerie silence before an imaginary atom bomb blows up and melts the members of the crowd. The tone of the film, for this small moment, transforms into pure existential horror, reflecting the reality on which it’s based.
Despite all the praise Christopher Nolan has accrued as both a director and a writer throughout his career, I, and others, have always hesitated to call him one of the greats in either category for different reasons. Oppenheimer’s visual beauty and ambitious formal structure have quieted some of the complaints in the former area, but Nolan hasn’t done much to help himself in the latter. Chief among complaints about Nolan’s writing center around his female characters. Neither Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, played by Emily Blunt, nor his mistress Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh, are particularly compelling or well-developed, with the latter having a particularly groan-worthy scene where she reads to Oppenheimer from Hindu scripture while nude directly post-coitus. For all of his brilliance, Nolan doesn’t seem to have the ability to write women who are interesting and function separately from the men around them, instead employing plot-motivation dead wives and exposition-spouting femme fatales. To be fair, the amount of truly memorable and compelling characters Nolan has written can be counted on one hand, but not one of these few are female.
Oppenheimer has been nominated for 13 Academy Awards, the most of any film this year. It’s received almost universal critical acclaim and been an enormous commercial success as well, grossing over $900 million. If this is the all-around peak of Christopher Nolan’s career, which seems likely if not certain, one can only hope that he doesn’t let the success get to his head. Oppenheimer is a very good film with some spots of greatness, but some parts would’ve benefitted from a subtler touch, where Nolan sculpts them with a sledgehammer, a characteristic of his work that seems unlikely to mellow with time.
Oppenheimer is streaming now on Peacock. It’s also available for purchase in 4K Ultra HD, Blu-Ray, DVD, and digital formats.
Sophomore Gavin Myer is a Staff Writer. His email is gmyer@fandm.edu.