"Oppenheimer" Review: At Long Last, Nolan Has His Great Movie

In Christopher Nolan's sprawling biopic, the father of the atomic bomb finally finds cinematic resolution.

August 31, 2023

On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 a.m., a nuclear bomb detonated in the New Mexico desert after 2 ½ years of work by the Los Alamos Laboratory for the government-funded Manhattan Project, began to create the world’s first nuclear weapons for potential use in World War II.

In Christopher Nolan’s new biopic, Oppenheimer, the titular physicist looks out at the detonation with anticipation. The military men and scientists of Los Alamos prepare for the blast, scurrying about the perimeter of the desert compound, anxious to know whether their $2-billion project will succeed.

In an instant, the gadget detonates, casting a brilliant white light across the dirt plains of New Mexico and sending a mushroom cloud 7.5 miles into that early-morning sky. It is the culmination of years of scientific innovation, where the world's greatest minds gathered to unleash the fiercest power the world has ever known. It is also the place where Oppenheimer observes his creation and must consider the profound scope of his accomplishment, not just a leap in technological industry and a mastery of his craft, but a sobering realization about what he has done:

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Oppenheimer requires a delicate balance as complex as the revolutionary science that gave birth to the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Oppenheimer himself must be many different things without being too much anything in particular. After all, a character must not be the vessel through which its creator preaches to its audience. Nolan would have been hard-pressed to conjure invention: Oppenheimer was real. It’s a challenge to his egotism, the biggest impediment to his potential greatness: without the liberty to inject himself into the movie, said movie becomes something, at long last, worth watching.

Its value is in why it is worth watching. The performances are fantastic, and the visuals, although somewhat underwhelming during the Trinity Test, are stunning.

But it's the endless parade of struck balances as the various truths about the magnitude of atomic energy take shape that power the movie. Oppenheimer’s loose sexual morality and indignance at the apparent splitting of the atom establish his arrogance and bravado, but his willingness to wear a military uniform at a General’s behest and make peace with those who wrong him establish a cowardice and conflict-aversion.

The result is a fascinating inspection of the creator of the atomic bomb, which, depending on which side you are on, was either the most morally bankrupt, arrogant, cowardly decision ever made in wartime or spoke to the, for lack of a better term, "cajones" necessary to pursue excellence and embrace conflict as a necessary evil. He is his creation, from conception to testing to infliction to now, nearly 80 years later, where the debate surrounding its use still rages.

Technically, Nolan has finally found his footing as a writer: no “I’m 14 and this is deep” pseudo-intellectualism introduces ideas that collapse under his misguided execution and no streams of consciousness that same pseudo-intellectualism validates for those who laud concepts and don't require the follow through necessary to legitimize them.

He understands Oppenheimer intimately and impartially: the only way one can if they seek to do him justice. Whether as a young student studying at Cambridge, the head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the detonator of the first atomic bomb, or the man who gets whacked with the reality of political intrigue and the lust for power, he is himself. He is not changeable by his circumstances or rigid beyond reasonability. Everything we see remains; Nolan finds a way to do what few screenwriters ever accomplish: develop the character on their terms, not the story’s.

It fulfills the film’s most pressing need: to add stakes to the Trinity Test and layer every scene preceding it with the necessary context to convey its gravity. It’s a testament to Nolan that, nearly eight decades after that New Mexico morning, when the development of the atomic bomb and the nuclear assaults on Japan remain subjects of rabid debate, we feel desperate to watch the Manhattan Project take shape, anxious to watch the gadget explode, and sobered by the realizations Oppenheimer comes to in the wake of his crowning achievement.

How does it manage this? Yes, the characterization of Oppenheimer is nearly flawless in the first two hours, even if his romantic life introduces thinly imagined women that do little to contextualize the man within the grand scheme of his life’s work and story. But it’s also in the briskness of its pacing, the interluding visual displays and blaring sounds that instill us with a microscopic idea of the gadget’s power, the music that riles the nerves while feeling light as a feather, and a faultless approach to the science.

Few in the audience know anything about fission, fusion, atoms, or plutonium; the masses need the science dumbed down (but without condescension). After all, the characters possess the know-how: any elementary dialogue would feel expository and false. Nolan lets his characters articulate and respect their work, but in a way that allows us to, if not fully grasp the magnitude of this scientific leap, understand its implications and the intricacy of its design enough to respect the minds behind it.

In nearly every conceivable way, Oppenheimer’s first two hours are a masterclass in filmmaking. Why, then, is it not a perfect film? Firstly, no film is, though a few have come close. Secondly, because its third and final hour, while not a complete collapse, does little to respect the two that came before it.

It conjures recollections of Ben-Hur, that legendary epic that won a record 11 Academy Awards (since tied by Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). It’s a massive biblical epic with glorious set pieces, monumental scope, and expansive vision. It also has an extra hour that needlessly drags the movie past its spiritual conclusion and into a boring side plot. Considering said side plot is about tracking down two women with leprosy and getting rained on, it would have been better off ending with the titular character in the arena where he’s just won his avenging chariot race, but, alas, Golden Age editing.

Movies tell a story that reaches a climax: that climax must be the culmination of all it wishes to impart, not just the technical conclusion of the narrative. We can’t have loose ends or lingering questions, but we also can’t feel overextended. Oppenheimer tries to weave the post-Trinity Test aspects of its subject’s life into its first two acts, splicing in black and white side-steps into Louis Strauss’ quest to attain a Cabinet seat at Oppenheimer’s expense by compelling a lawyer to send a letter of concern regarding his loyalties and suggesting his security clearance get revoked. The resulting "trial" is used both as a storytelling device to inform the past and a means to establish the thematic weight of the third act, but it’s mostly a pipe dream: everything post-Trinity, while well-written and intriguing in its own right, feels like it deserves its own movie, a deeper and more thorough exploration than Oppenheimer can give.

It doesn’t help that it also sends the film down a thematic path that the first two-thirds balanced better. All the impartial relaying of fact that so expertly challenged us to conclude based on context instead of platitude vanishes, giving way to drawn-out sequences where Oppenheimer sees white light and peeling skin as the horror he’s unleashed on the world sets in.

As the man takes the lashings of an overzealous all-but-in-name prosecutor seeking to destroy his credibility to meet Strauss’ ends, we see how he’s been aged by his circumstances, self-inflicted or otherwise. It could be an aim to truthfully portray the actual man’s perspective on his greatest accomplishment: post-war, Oppenheimer opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb and advocated for a single body that would own all fissionable material and have sole control over its production, working towards peaceful energy production.

In fairness, much of Nolan’s recounts are factual. Oppenheimer did meet with that assembly at Los Alamos immediately following the Bombing of Hiroshima and relayed his regrets that the bomb was not available for use against Nazi Germany. However, he felt Nagasaki militarily unjustifiable and relayed his concerns to President Truman about the consequences of an arms race with the Soviet Union, remarking that he “had blood on his hands."

However, a movie can be true to fact by seeming accident; for all the credibility it establishes in its first two hours, it feels slightly disingenuous at the end. A few less melodramatic visual cues would likely have spared it that fate and carried its first two hours with greater poise.

Still, while almost any point, positive or negative, is worth making in film criticism, we must always acknowledge which are monumental and which are more nitpicks. Oppenheimer’s faults are not “nitpicks” per se, but they pale in comparison to how it succeeds.

Ultimately, the film has but one goal: not to dazzle us with a CGI-less nuclear explosion, dissect the nature of one of history’s most controversial figures, or even impress us with a who’s who of Nolan casting signatures, although it mostly does those well.

It is tasked simply with convincing us of the gravity of its situation, the implications of Oppenheimer’s accomplishments, and the viability of science’s propensity for mass destruction in a world desperate to reconcile its conflicting ideologies to achieve civility. It is to avoid taking sides, lecturing, or even teaching and instead plainly present reality, forcing us to ponder the consequences of the Manhattan Project as it unfolds.

At that, it succeeds. Nolan has finally found true genius: bold, brilliant, flawed, and memorable. Despite its immersive dive into occasional melodrama, as we leave the theater, we feel humbled by the reality of Oppenheimer’s work and reflect on what it truly means to have such immense power at your disposal, how wielding it can shape the world, and what it can mean to watch your life’s work become realized before your eyes: to become Death, the destroyer of worlds.