The Media Tourist

The brainy blockbuster ‘Oppenheimer’ is a big, beautiful must-see about the man who made the device that ended World War II—and created the grim specter of global destruction

Oppenheimer
Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon & Robert Downey Jr.
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Rated R

In theaters Friday, July 21

It opens with a screen that tells us about Prometheus, the Greek god who “stole fire from the gods and gave it to men.” His fellow Olympians weren’t too happy with him, and they sentenced Prometheus to spend eternity in torment, shackled to a volcano.

Oppenheimer is based on the book American Prometheus, about Robert J. Oppenheimer, the New York-born theoretical physicist who led America’s Manhattan Project, the top-secret “think tank” that created the atomic bombs dropped in on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan in August 1945. The bombs effectively ended World War II, but also created the grim specter of nuclear war as a reality, one that could—theoretically—lead to the destruction and doom of the entire planet.

Director Christopher Nolan’s grandiose, magnum opus of a historical biopic depicts Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as a tortured, sometimes arrogant genius, wrestling with the wide-reaching global implications of what he’s doing, and later, with what he’s done. Like Prometheus, he harnessed the fire of the cosmos—splitting subatomic particles and unleashing the deadly “fire” power of a thermonuclear device—and was then pilloried for it, with accusations that he was a traitor, a spy, a Commie.

It’s a dense drama, powerful and potent, about a loaded moment in time at the intersection of politics, science, discovery, history, human emotion, psychodrama, creation and destruction, chain reactions and ethics, all swirling like protons and neutrons around something no one had ever done, or witnessed, before. It’s a cinch for year-end awards nominations, likely even some Oscars. Yes, it’s that good.

Cillian Murphy and Matt Damon

The all-star cast is outstanding, with everyone playing someone from real life, from Matt Damon as the hawkish Leslie Groves, the U.S. Air Force general who built the Pentagon and was chosen to oversee Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, to Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife—whose former ties to the Communist Party become a major, troublesome part of her husband’s trajectory from the classroom to the world stage.  Robert Downey Jr. is a major part of the story as Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission. There’s Florence Pugh, Oppy’s Communist lover, and Casey Affleck as the military intelligence officer who commands the Allied forces during the war.  Matthew Modine plays a scientist doing high-ranking R&D for America’s war machine. Kenneth Branagh is the Danish physicist Niels Bhor, and Tom Conti plays Albert Einstein.

But everything hinges on Oppenheimer, the central character in almost every scene. Murphy, an Irish actor who’s also appeared in Batman Begins and Inception, plus the British hit TV series Peaky Blinders, gives a stunning, career-high performance, conveying the inner turmoil, passionate convictions and strong opinions of the man tasked with making a device that would weaponize the science on which he had dedicated his life. Oppenheimer’s bombs ended the fighting and brought peace to a war that had been raging across the globe for six years. But what would be the cost to him, and to the world?

Director Nolan (who also wrote the screenplay and produced) is perhaps Hollywood’s leading movie maestro, known for his densely layered, often complex dramas and intense character studies across multiple genres, including a trio of acclaimed Batman blockbusters starring Christian Bale, the mind-bending Inception, Tenet and Memento, the gripping, innovative war drama Dunkirk, and the far-out space-travel drama Interstellar. He knows better than almost anyone how to make blockbusters with brains, and Oppenheimer is queued up to be one of the most intensely brainy, monumentally majestic, stylistically soaring blockbusters of the year.

And the “test” of Oppenheimer’s nuclear device, at Los Alamos in the American desert, is as gripping, jaw-droppingly dramatic and visually stunning as almost anything you’ve ever experienced at any movie, ever.

With booming, atmospheric sound design, lavish visuals, probing questions about the role of science in the world, and a dive into the mysteries of the universe and our place in it, Oppenheimer enters the race as one of the year’s most impressive, important films. I won’t even take away any points for its nearly three-hour running time. It takes a big movie to tell about history’s biggest bang. And Oppenheimer is big, beautiful and absolutely a must-see.  

—Neil Pond