Theory and Practice: A Review of OPPENHEIMER ☆☆☆☆ ½

The singular initial in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s full name did not stand for anything. But what did the man himself stand for? 

In his first foray into the biopic genre, Christopher Nolan explores this question—and, as usual, presents the audience with complicated answers. The result is a film that is Nolan’s most visually and emotionally striking to date, but it remains a movie whose biggest problems lie in how the audience might interact with its ambitious scope and message. A film about the father of the atomic bomb and, by extension, the horrific implications of that invention, needs to be both nuanced and sensitive, subtle while being morally steadfast. Just as the development of nuclear weaponry had scientists asking for certainty in the uncertain world of quantum physics, a meaningful viewing of Oppenheimer asks for moral unambiguity in the ambiguous style of Chris Nolan’s filmmaking. 

The moral message is there, but extracting that full message takes a certain audience vigilance—a vigilance that has sadly thinned, surprisingly, due to the way in which Oppenheimer has been hyped. This review, therefore, requires two components: an analysis of the terrific qualities of the actual film itself, and the not-so-terrific aspects of the film’s marketing and audience response that has complicated the way its message is conveyed.

I. The Creation

We begin with the good news: Oppenheimer is no propagandistic celebration of the man himself, nor a celebration of the Manhattan Project and the U.S. government’s security agenda. It is deftly directed, strongly acted, and breathtakingly produced to craft an anti-nuclear message that is, somehow, presented from Oppenheimer’s point of view.

As is always the case with Nolan, the key to the film’s gripping quality lies in the structure. In Oppenheimer, the director calls back to one of his innovative techniques from his early masterpiece Memento: alternating sequences shot in black-and-white and scenes shot in color, presenting storylines that eventually collide. His directorial trademark is sculpting meaning by sculpting time. In Memento, the alternating scenes move in opposite directions along the timeline of the story, which replicates the feeling of the protagonist’s retrograde amnesia for the audience. The more fundamental impact of this choice is to play with questions of objective and subjective truth: nonlinear narratives manipulate context for the audience and can emphasize one perspective over another.

 The two sequences in Oppenheimer (the color scenes are labeled “I. Fission” while the B&W fall under “II. Fusion”) very skillfully portray differences in perspective. The color sequences are meant to place the audience directly into Oppenheimer’s shoes; the cast has even revealed that those scenes were written entirely in the first-person, which is a dramatic flouting of industry screenplay standards. The black-and-white scenes are meant to rival the way “Oppie” recounts events by presenting the perspective of Lewis Strauss (an Oscar-worthy turn by one Robert Downey Jr. playing a very different type of “iron man”), who can ostensibly be described as the film’s antagonist but is more accurately labeled as Oppenheimer’s antagonist.

This is Nolan’s most talky film yet, which certainly could be daunting for a director who is already criticized for his exposition-heavy plotlines. Bomb tests don’t go “boom” in every scene. So how does he make the story engaging with so much dense dialogue? The answer is the two frame narratives he employs in the colliding sequences. The central conflict of the film is not necessarily centered around the creation of the bomb, but rather two different challenges: Oppenheimer’s quest to renew his security clearance during Red Scare interrogations by a relentless special counsel, and Lewis Strauss’ mission to gain confirmation as Secretary of Commerce as Senators scrutinize his rivalry with Oppenheimer. The choice to tell these stories is clever, subversive, and makes for a suspenseful watch; the timelines are thematically woven together and the ethical implications of the USA’s nuclear program unfolds through these dramatic stakes.

So how is the titular man presented? The film, admirably, doesn’t try to explain away Oppenheimer’s infamous contradictions; instead, it leans into them. Nothing about him and his worldview seems to exhibit moral courage. He’s an outspoken leftist who instantly drops his political activism if it means he can lead the government’s nuke project. He sets out to create a weapon of mass destruction and then feels haunted when it produces, well, mass destruction. He’s responsible for creating the atomic bomb, but almost immediately after the war becomes an opponent of expanding the country’s nuclear program. When he speaks of quantum mechanics in the film, it’s almost as if he’s speaking of himself: “It’s paradoxical, and yet, it works.”

He’s held accountable by the characters around him. In a pivotal scene, the physicist is found weeping by his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt puts in a sturdy performance despite the typical thin material Nolan gives his female characters), which leads to her discovering his infidelity. Kitty Oppenheimer is not the stereotypical passive, oppressed wife. “You don’t get to commit the sin and then ask all of us to feel sorry for you when there are consequences,” she says to him icily, “you pull yourself together!” The subtext here is intriguing: even in contexts separate from the bomb itself, Oppenheimer is portrayed as a man with an unadmirable tendency to make bad decisions and later try to avoid true accountability with his dramatic expressions of remorse. We’re not meant to conclude that Oppie is a good or bad person from these moments. But he’s certainly no hero.

Cillian Murphy is many things to Nolan. In The Dark Knight Trilogy, he’s a mad scientist playing god with a potent gaseous weapon that holds victims hostage. Inception sees him play an insecure, vulnerable young man being manipulated by the vultures around him. And he masterfully takes on the role of a shell-shocked soldier floating along the French coast in Dunkirk, definitively encapsulating the haunting effects of war. Murphy brings all of these characteristics and much more  to the personality of J. Robert Oppenheimer in an acting performance that will certainly be remembered as one of the best Hollywood male performances in recent years (perhaps even the best). He plays the savvy and seductive “salesman of science” just as well as the insular, obsessive thinker, without any of the caricaturistic dramatism that so often weighs down the biopic genre. And his eyes are perfect for the role: wide, piercing blue eyes that always seem to be hiding something a bit sinister.

What really makes the film is the production design, which is nothing short of outstanding. To cover a historical moment like the Manhattan Project—where a literal entire town was constructed around the development of the atomic bomb—Nolan does nothing short of constructing a convincing Los Alamos ecosystem for his own depiction. Providing the audience with an appropriate sense of scale is obviously essential when making a movie about the nuclear bomb. Nolan visually accomplishes this to stunning effect when it comes to laying out the ins and outs of the Manhattan Project. His choice to shoot exclusively with IMAX cameras adds a visual height and depth that not only allows the bomb itself to impose on the audience in its devastatingly powerful hugeness, but also applies to the way that he presents natural beauty, which is a key element in the story of the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer’s personal outlook. The scenes of the New Mexico landscape, apparently inspired by the beautiful framing of Soviet director Andrei Tarkoskvy, adds a show-not-tell method of conveying Oppenheimer’s love of nature and his intimacy with the world around him—the kind of intimacy that makes his work on a weapon of world-destroying potential so morally difficult. 

I’ve been privileged enough to see the movie twice in IMAX, and that makes the biggest moment in the film all that much more fascinating and frightening: the Trinity Test. Nothing I write about the scene could possibly replicate its sheer emotional and visual intensity. Possibly the best element of the scene is the sound editing, which gets the actual sonic effect of the bomb test down to the most accurate second at which the scientists would have heard the weapon go off after already seeing the mushroom cloud flare up in the sky. The amount of detail and care to make the scene visually memorable is mind-blowing. Which makes the contrast with what comes next all the more uncomfortable.

That brings me to the most controversial decision of the film—and its biggest question mark in terms of what the audience will take away from the movie.

II. The Fallout

Why does any of this matter? Oppenheimer’s story—the tale of a brilliant physicist who grants his government the power to create a global catastrophe, only for his own government to turn on him after the war—may be interesting enough as a biopic. But without the consequences of his work, that’s all it is: an interesting story.

The story only matters because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It has devastating societal importance.

The actual subject of dropping the bombs is by no means avoided in the film. The political cruelty of the decision, the shocking apathy of those who chose to drop it—it’s all on full display. Secretary of War Henry Stimson is shown crossing off Kyoto from the list of potential targets because he and his wife found it to be a “lovely city” on their honeymoon. And through a mixture of ego, ideology, and just plain weakness, Oppenheimer made it possible—even though he intended for the bomb to be used against the Nazis who were committing genocide against fellow Jews in Europe, not against Japanese civilians after the Germans had already surrendered. Oppenheimer ultimately hears about the bombing of Hiroshima on the radio. I found the scene that follows—the physicist’s victory speech to a crowd of cheering, screaming, and crying fellow scientists—to be the most chilling scene in the movie.

All of this, however, doesn’t really substitute for a significant missing element. Some whom I’d seen the film with were perplexed and disappointed by a key decision of Christopher Nolan’s: How could he not show a single scene of the Japanese civilians who were brutally killed, maimed, poisoned, inflicted with permanent trauma, and destroyed for generations after those bombs were dropped?

Given my Nolan superfan status, I was immediately defensive to explain away the decision. There were the narrative reasons, of course, not to show the bombings: the film is told through Oppenheimer’s literal eyes, and he wasn’t present for the destruction—he didn’t even initially see images of it. Then there were the more debatable ethical reasons not to recreate the actual bombing in a scene; no possible recreation of the event could encapsulate the true extent of the horrors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such an endeavor would just cheapen the real moment in history. 

Even if those points are conceded, an easy solution remains: just show real footage and images of the bombings and their impact. There’s even a scene where Oppenheimer is seated in a darkened room, watching an image slideshow of the nuclear victims. Nolan chooses to have the physicist look away, and so the audience doesn’t get to see the images either. The director is no stranger to making significant omissions in the presentation of historical events (see the lack of Indian and African soldiers in Dunkirk—soldiers who fought on behalf of the British Empire and were pushed to the back of the line during rescue efforts). But his omission here is not oversight, it is deliberate. Narratively, this reinforces one of the film’s key themes: Oppenheimer can’t bear to look, he can’t fully come to terms with the mass violence that he has enabled. But at a certain point, there should be more important considerations than simply telling Oppenheimer’s story artistically.

We are nearly 80 years removed from the dropping of the atomic weapons. Our generation remembers Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a horrific historical event. But a vague remembrance is not enough. “Theory will only get you so far” is a line that Nolan has his characters repeat multiple times in the film. Yet he falls victim to this very idea himself. There are so many deep ideas and valuable lessons packed into this movie—lessons about the hubris of science and politics, and the ways science can run amok without accountability. But without even the briefest visual acknowledgement of the bomb’s victims, the viewing experience becomes an extended exercise in theorization about nuclear horror. 

I think this choice could potentially have real consequences. Just look at the way the film was marketed: the Barbenheimer craze of this summer had its ups (with the revitalization of non-franchise box office numbers for movie theaters), but some significant downs too in the way that the dropping of the atomic bomb on innocent Japanese civilians was trivialized. Online jokes contrasting the fun of Barbie with the flames of nuclear fire over Japan turned history’s most devastating wartime memory into a meme. This is not to sound sanctimonious or holier than thou, it is a simple fact that we all accept when we take a step back: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a meme.

To engage with a film will always require some degree of theorizing. Its danger is that it is an immersive medium that can trick us into feeling like we understand an event simply because we hear about it in a well-crafted story. Oppenheimer is beautifully made, condemns the bombings, and asks important questions of us, if we’re willing to listen. Everyone would be well-served by seeing it. But when you do, don’t fall victim to simply placing yourself in the shoes of Oppenheimer. Empathize with the victims of his creation, too.