"Oppenheimer" engrosses and impresses as a Nolan opus

Oppenheimer (2023)

Writer-director Christopher Nolan doesn’t make small or linear films, nor are they always complex puzzle boxes. His latest opus, “Oppenheimer,” is monumental in scale but actually quite intimate. In telling the comprehensive story of J. Robert Oppenheimer—“the father of the atomic bomb”—Nolan doesn’t require audiences to have any expertise in quantum mechanics, but he does expect you to keep up. A daunting three hours of risk-taking, moral injury, and consequence, “Oppenheimer” is impressively crafted and almost always engrossing.

Cillian Murphy, forever a striking presence with his intense blue eyes and enviable cheekbones, is riveting as the titular physicist. Known to be egotistical and a little unstable with questionable ties to the communist party, Oppenheimer was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project in New Mexico on a mesa called Los Alamos. From the time he injected his Cambridge teacher’s apple with potassium cyanide but felt conflicted about it, he was always a man of contradictions. Working as a professor at Berkeley, he was soon selected by Lieutenant General Leslie Groves Jr. (a brusque but very funny Matt Damon) to head the operation. The rest is history.

Based on Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus, the film plays out in three differentiated timeframes. There’s the tense security hearing in 1954, where Oppenheimer is indicted and endlessly interrogated by a board from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Another ongoing section, shot in black and white, involves Lewis Strauss (a tremendous, note-perfect Robert Downey Jr.), a chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission who pursued Oppenheimer. He would end up being the driving force of the hearing that would revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance and ultimately be the villain in this story. The last section, of course, is everything leading up to and following Oppenheimer’s development of the hydrogen bomb, beating Nazi Germany to the punch but feeling the blood on his hands. 

“Oppenheimer” may be Nolan’s most propulsive film, remarkably pieced together with technical mastery and no need for audience hand-holding. Whether it’s because there’s a lot to cover in Oppie’s life, or that’s just the director’s approach to the material, the film is always propelling forward with a restless precision and even a rat-a-tat rhythm in several of the dialogue-heavy exchanges. Read the full review at GuyAtTheMovies.com.

Grade: B +

Universal Pictures released “Oppenheimer” (181 min.) in theaters on July 21, 2023.