A biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and father of the atomic bomb—played here with a mixture of bravado and regret by Cillian Murphy—Nolan’s film grapples with two of the greatest atrocities committed by the US: The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even beyond this summertime reckoning with state-sponsored mass murder, Nolan has made a work of art that interrogates loyalty to country and how it can collide with ego with disastrous results. This is dense material that’s thoroughly engrossing and by its end, shattering.
Billed as a spectacle, Oppenheimer is talkier than one might expect from the director of Dark Knight and Inception, best known for his visual feats. Nolan puts all of his technical prowess into shooting the drama, but his screenplay is a heady thing adapted from the mammoth biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
Yes, the depiction of Trinity, the first test of the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos, is stunning, with white light flooding the screen in silence before the sound reverberates around you. But the meat of the film lies in the interrogation scenes that recur through the entire three-hour runtime; from various viewpoints, they present a multifaceted portrait of its subject, a man whose insatiable curiosity led him to play God.