Oppenheimer movie review & film summary (2023) – Roger Ebert

For all of the pre-release hypothesis about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” would re-create the explosion of the primary atomic bomb, the movie’s most spectacular attraction seems to be one thing else: the human face. 

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a movie about faces. They discuss, loads. They pay attention. They react to good and dangerous information. And generally they get misplaced in their very own heads—none extra so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons group at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan’s main supply, the biography by Kai Fowl and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX movie system not merely to seize the splendor of New Mexico’s desert panoramas however distinction the exterior coolness and inside turmoil of Oppenheimer, an excellent mathematician and low-key showman and chief whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his non-public life a catastrophe, and whose biggest contribution to civilization was a weapon that would destroy it. Shut-up after close-up exhibits star Cillian Murphy’s face staring into the center distance, off-screen, and generally straight into the lens, whereas Oppenheimer dissociates from disagreeable interactions, or will get misplaced inside reminiscences, fantasies, and waking nightmares. “Oppenheimer” rediscovers the ability of big closeups of individuals’s faces as they grapple with who they’re, and who different folks have determined that they’re, and what they’ve achieved to themselves and others. 

Typically the close-ups of individuals’s faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of occasions that have not occurred, or already occurred. There are recurring photos of flame, particles, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, in addition to non-incendiary photos that evoke different terrible, private disasters. (There are a whole lot of step by step increasing flashbacks on this movie, the place you see a glimpse of one thing first, then a bit extra of it, after which lastly all the factor.) However these do not simply relate to the massive bomb that Oppenheimer’s group hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones which can be continually detonating in Oppenheimer’s life, generally as a result of he personally pushed the massive crimson button in a second of anger, satisfaction or lust, and different instances as a result of he made a naive or inconsiderate mistake that pissed someone off way back, and the wronged particular person retaliated with the equal of a time-delayed bomb. The “fissile” reducing, to borrow a physics phrase, can be a metaphor for the domino impact attributable to particular person selections, and the chain response that makes different issues occur consequently. This precept can be visualized by repeated photos of ripples in water, beginning with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off increasing circles on the floor that foreshadow each the ending of Oppenheimer’s profession as a authorities advisor and public determine and the explosion of the primary nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then lastly really feel, in all its terrible influence). 

The weight of the movie’s pursuits and meanings are carried by faces—not simply Oppenheimer’s, however these of different important characters, together with Normal Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Los Alamos’ army supervisor; Robert’s struggling spouse Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt), whose tactical thoughts may have averted a whole lot of disasters if her husband would have solely listened; and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Atomic Vitality Fee chair who despised Oppenheimer for lots of causes, together with his choice to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent a number of years making an attempt to derail Oppenheimer’s post-Los Alamos profession. The latter constitutes its personal adjoining full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer’s Mozart, repeatedly and sometimes pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, again within the day, and that he is an excellent particular person, not like Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This movie asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a 3rd social gathering who then wrote to the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The movie speaks very often of one of many rules of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the outcomes of this experiment. The modifying illustrates it by continually re-framing our notion of an occasion to vary its that means, and the script does it by including new data that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a personality did one thing, or whether or not they even knew why they did it. 

That, I consider, is admittedly what “Oppenheimer” is about, rather more so than the atom bomb itself, and even its influence on the battle and the Japanese civilian inhabitants, which is talked about however by no means proven. The movie does present what the atom bomb does to human flesh, nevertheless it’s not recreations of the particular assaults on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines People going via it. This filmmaking choice is probably going to antagonize each viewers who wished a extra direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and people who have purchased into the arguments superior by Strauss and others that the bombs needed to be dropped as a result of Japan by no means would have surrendered in any other case. The film does not point out whether or not it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides extra with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that time in World Conflict II and would have finally given up with out atomic assaults that killed a whole bunch of hundreds of civilians. No, it is a movie that allows itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we count on it to do: Dramatize the lifetime of Oppenheimer and different traditionally important folks in his orbit in an aesthetically daring means whereas additionally letting the entire characters and the entire occasions be used metaphorically and symbolically as nicely, in order that they turn out to be pointillistic parts in a a lot bigger canvas that is concerning the mysteries of the human persona and the unexpected influence of selections made by people and societies.

That is one other putting factor about “Oppenheimer.” It isn’t fully about Oppenheimer though Murphy’s baleful face and haunting but opaque eyes dominate the film. It is also concerning the impact of Oppenheimer’s persona and selections on different folks, from the opposite strong-willed members of his atom bomb growth group (together with Benny Safdie’s Edwin Teller, who wished to skip forward to create the rather more highly effective hydrogen bomb, and finally did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer’s mistress Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, who has a few of Gloria Grahame’s self-immolating smolder); Normal Groves, who likes Oppenheimer despite his conceitedness however is not going to facet with him over the US authorities; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (performed in a fabulous cameo by Gary Oldman) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic “crybaby” who sees historical past primarily by way of his personal emotions.

Jennifer Lame’s modifying is prismatic and relentless, usually in a faintly Terrence Malick-y means, skipping between three or extra time intervals inside seconds. It is wedded to just about nonstop music by Ludwig Göransson that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd however distinctive type of scientifically expository aria that is most likely what it will really feel wish to learn American Prometheus whereas listening to a playlist of Philip Glass movie scores. Non-linear motion pictures like this one do a greater job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear motion pictures do, and so they additionally seize what it is wish to learn a third-person omniscient ebook (or a biography that allows itself to think about what its topics may need been considering or feeling). It additionally paradoxically captures the psychological technique of studying a textual content and responding to it emotionally and viscerally in addition to intellectually. The thoughts stays anchored to the textual content. Nevertheless it additionally jumps outdoors of it, connecting the textual content to different texts, to exterior information, and to at least one’s personal expertise and imaginings.

This assessment hasn’t delved into the plot of the movie or the real-world historical past that impressed it, not as a result of it doesn’t matter (after all it’s) however as a result of—as is at all times the case with Nolan—the principle attraction shouldn’t be the story, itself however how the filmmaker tells it. Nolan has been derided as much less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated, however in the end muddled and simplistic blockbusters which can be as a lot puzzles as tales. However whether or not that characterization was ever fully true (and I am more and more satisfied that it by no means was) it appears inappropriate if you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it has been utilized to a biography of a actual particular person. It appears potential that “Oppenheimer” may retrospectively seem to be a turning level within the director’s filmography, when he takes the entire stylistic and technical practices that he’d been honing for the earlier twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward, utilizing them to discover the innermost recesses of the thoughts and coronary heart, not simply to maneuver human items round on a sequence of interlinked, multi-dimensional storytelling boards.