‘Oppenheimer’ is the first ‘biopic’ that Christopher Nolan directed, his longest film to date and perhaps, although it sounds contradictory, his most frantic; its three hours of footage progress at a speed that most ‘blockbuster’s would envy, and that has an added merit if we consider that it is made up mostly of scenes in which scientists and politicians talk and talk, almost always sitting down. For the rest, it fits perfectly into the filmography of its director.
In fact, it makes a lot of sense that the Briton claims to have been obsessed with Oppenheimer for a long time, because the profile of the so-called “father of the atomic bomb” fully coincides with that of a prototypical character in his cinema: A brilliant, emotionally handicapped and almost always arrogant individual, faced with an extraordinary moral dilemma and often forced to endanger his own to save the world as a whole.
Oppenheimer has also gone down in history as the creator of one of those gadgets that should never be used, of which we find so many examples in Nolan’s movies: the machine to create clones that Nikola Tesla builds in ‘The Final Trick’, the sonar that Batman creates in ‘The Dark Knight’ from the telephone signals of all his fellow citizens, the device that Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) uses in ‘Origin’ to enter the dreams of his victims and steal their secrets; Almost always, of course, that technology ends up being used.
dangerous methods
Nolan himself has consistently resorted to dangerous methods to accomplish his goals. For example, he shot scenes for “Interstellar” on top of a decaying glacier, and blew up a Boeing 747 per the demands of the “Tenet” script. And, while filming ‘Oppenheimer,’ he recreated the first-ever detonation of a nuclear weapon with little recourse to CGI. It’s unlikely that he dropped an actual bomb to see the effects of it on camera, but if it were found out that he did, there wouldn’t be much reason to be surprised.
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He is a director, in other words, capable of anything to achieve his goal: making films with an eye on the box office that not only demand the active participation of the viewer but also require several viewings to be assimilated, and that satisfy both those who go to the cinema in search of visceral entertainment and those who are also looking for intellectual stimulation. The former are provided with images of cities folding in on themselves and frantic air battles; for the others, moreover, they turn superhero movies into a walk through the territory that separates anarchy from fascism and use the lexicon of heist movies to reflect on free will.
In other words: while telling stories about obsessive guys willing to accomplish seemingly impossible missions -saving Gotham, finding a new home for humanity, preventing World War III, developing the technology needed to build the most destructive weapon imaginable-, Nolan confirms to us over and over again that he himself is one of them.