After “Dunkirk”, Christopher Nolan is drawn back to the horrible realms of the Second World War: “Oppenheimer” tells the story of the “father of the atomic bomb”, J. Robert Oppenheimer. A few weeks ago there were the first pictures from the film, which probably like no other film by the director before the Oscars. Now we get to see the first big trailer – and it has it all.
1. Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer is creepy
You could say that Cillian Murphy is one of Christopher Nolan’s favorite actors. He’s starred in the Batman movies, Inception and Dunkirk, and may well have had the role of his life tailor-made. In addition to all the thrill that the trailer promises in three minutes, the most exciting thing is the actor’s nervous face, which has crumbled from a slight madness. It’s clear: the most terrible weapon in the world could not spring from a stoic mind.
2. “Oppenheimer” becomes an audiovisual experience of terror
The atomic bomb does not only derive its fright from the stories about its deadly effect. There is countless image and sound material of detonating and igniting bombs. As the trailer makes clear, Nolan connects to these suggestive effects. The first sounds we hear in the trailer are those of a Geiger counter. And just as the ticking clock became the acoustic leitmotif in “Dunkirk”, here it becomes the cracking and crackling of the recorded violence of atomic energy.
3. Black and white, yes – but not only…
Just as Christopher Nolan shakes up the time planes in his films, he will now do the same with the film material in “Oppenheimer”. This varies between grainy black and white and the Imax color spectrum, which always tends towards light blue. So the show values oscillate between the many men (and few) women who resolutely decide that they will forestall the Nazis with the doomsday weapon, the lonely struggle of the tormented scientist, the secret mission of an archipelago in the USA specially created for the development of the atomic bomb and not finally the – as the trailer shows – almost pornographic staging of ignition sparks, expanding fire, hellish noise and a lot of flashing devices and buttons that want to be pressed (but shouldn’t be pressed at first).
4. The last great secret
Almost every scene in the trailer feels like it’s an unveiling of a secret zone that has so far been carefully protected from the world. So far, the atomic bomb narrative has been a clear one: The US did everything right and developed a weapon in time to save the world from worse. But that, as the first pictures show us, is not entirely correct as a lesson from history. Nevertheless: the development of the bomb underground, the people sticking together in the face of a possibly even greater threat (Hitler wins the war), barricading in secret laboratories and discussing the details in secret circles (also with Albert Einstein) – all this shows that how important it is for Nolan to lure us into a world we haven’t seen before with his new film.
5. It’s another moral fable
Christopher Nolan’s films are narratively intricate, but from “Following” to “Tenet” they carry one message above all: morality is a bloody tough thing, and the easiest way to deal with it is to think of it as a jigsaw puzzle. In The Dark Knight, the director takes a devilish delight in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in depicting narratives that are, at heart, mere moral experiments. “Oppenheimer” will relate this even more intensively to a level of reality in which video game logic or time fiction no longer apply. Is Nolan growing up? In any case, he does not show us science as an excruciatingly slow process of knowledge acquisition, but as an adrenaline-saturated field of action, where every single step comes closer to the goal, where sweat and madness are involved because it is (apparently) a race to see who will be the first to reach the goal comes with the construction of the atomic bomb: the evil Nazis or the world keeper USA. The trailer already says that they are entering into a pact with the devil. Or as General Leslie Groves, played by Matt Damon, puts it: “Why should we be locked up somewhere in the middle of nowhere indefinitely? Because we are working on the most important things in human history.”
6. Spoilers: The atomic bomb has not yet exploded
Prior to filming, Christopher Nolan had already shared his desire to recreate an atomic bomb explosion without CGI effects. Of course, one can admire the director for the handmade tricks in all his films, but this announcement has a different meaning here. Because the atomic bomb explosion is at the center of his new narrative – it’s what it all boils down to – and at the same time the bomb effect here is a reason to see this film in the first place. It’s an attempt to represent something different and new, something that people have seen so many times in photos and videos, but always seemed a little flatter and less threatening in the cinema. So now the big bang effect or, to put it psychoanalytically: the big doom orgasm (“Greetings from Dr. Strangelove” …) And how do magicians do it with their big tricks? You don’t light them right away in the trailer. That is why these first few minutes, those of “Oppenheimer”, are nothing more than a teaser of a bomb that is about to explode or is almost detonating. Yes, exactly, one single foreplay.