The story, or rather the career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” and head of the secret Manhattan project, is one that is very exciting to read, but has so far been unsatisfactorily told on screen. Because hardly anyone understands physics. A physics that is so important that the human using it often disappears behind it. Norman Taurog’s 1947 propaganda debacle The Beginning or the End, the first Hiroshima film, ranks alongside Roland Joffe’s nicely uniformed but inconsequential General Groves vs. Oppenheimer standoff The Shadowmaker from 1989.
Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is also capable of the world of thoughts – or rather the world of feelings? – of the theoretical physicist who shaped the world of the 20th century more than Albert Einstein or Sigmund Freud. Maybe he doesn’t want that either. The director is very individual, for Nolan it was always crucial that he was able to bring to the cinema things that only he understood. In his most difficult to understand work, “Tenet” from 2020, he allows himself the arrogant fun of having Kenneth Branagh explain the “inversion principle” at the very moment when the engine of his electric catamaran is roaring at full speed, that soundtrack composer Ludwig “Loudness” Göransson can’t compete either. And you don’t understand a word. In “Oppenheimer” the Swedish musician also falls back on his principle of total composition and delivers a sound competition with bang, thunder and pressure wave.
Significance does not only have positive connotations, as perhaps the most important person of the last century knew. Significance also means scope. Oppenheimer quoted from the Baghavad Gita, the central text of Hinduism: “If the light of a thousand suns / suddenly broke forth in the sky / that would be like the splendor of this glorious one, and I have become death, smasher of the worlds.” Because Christopher But Nolan believes that he has to offer the viewer something more here than the further processing of verses in physics, if he doesn’t fade in Oppenheimer from 1965, who was suffering from a serious illness, and who said these words – captured in a video that has become famous – speaks, as a broken genius with his eyes down, but: having sex with his lover Jean (Florence Pugh). It’s Nolan’s keenly cinematic attempt to portray the inner turmoil of a man who realizes too late that his work is productive, in this case even a source of pleasure, but that this work can also be abused.
Every Nolan protagonist, no, every well-constructed film protagonist, in Nolan’s case Batman, Cooper or Cobb, for example, is determined by events from his childhood or at least early adulthood. These (anti)heroes try to process a trauma by doing as many things as possible right from now on. Who J. Robert Oppenheimer was, why he pushed the construction of the atomic bomb – was it really his will to be faster than the Nazis? – doesn’t seem to be an urgent concern of Nolan’s. We see how, as a young student, Oppenheimer tries to poison his teacher with cyanide, but is just able to prevent the attack when remorse overcomes him. That’s something – anyway. But it’s not much.
“Science can’t replicate someone’s life,” says Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy. This attempt would also not be good to watch. As in “Interstellar”, Nolan tries to make a complicated natural science transparent using practical examples, which sometimes leads to unintentional comedy. In his 2014 space drama, he explained the principle of gravity – borrowed from the sci-fi trash film “Event Horizon” – with the pencil that reaches the end of a sheet of paper faster if it pierces the fold. In “Oppenheimer,” the flirty “Oppy” waves a glass of whiskey and woos his future wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) with a speech about ice in the glass and “energy fields that attract”: this is the physicist’s sex talk. “There’s no kitchen here!” Kitty then exclaims angrily on the first ascent of their house in Los Alamos. “We can work it out,” J. Robert assures her, barely listening. Blunt remains in the film, like Florence Pugh’s tragic communist Jean, as a kind of “astronaut’s wife”, ie a female character who, above all as a wailing and crying better half, cannot take part in the events.
Casting is becoming a growing problem for Christopher Nolan, the most coveted filmmaker alongside Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino among actors. Everyone wants to work with him. In contrast to Spielberg and Tarantino, Nolan probably agrees with everyone. Even in “Interstellar”, the smallest supporting roles, which can almost be described as cameos, were cast extremely prominently – William Devane, David Oyelowo, Ellen Burstyn. You expect them to do something big in the film because of their celebrity – and then they quickly disappear. In “Oppenheimer” it is Rami Malek, Casey Affleck, Matthias Schweighöfer, Matthew Modine and many more who remain larger than their role precisely because they are given no space to fill their characters. With no other director do the stars settle for so little, and yet none have enough time to shine. Kenneth Branagh, on the other hand, gets another chance to work on his accents from the fantasy kingdoms after his Hercule Poirot exercises and those as the oligarch in “Tenet”.
It’s surprising that Nolan didn’t hire his favorite actor, Michael Caine. Caine could have taken over the performance of John Gowans, who in the role of Ward Evans as one of three investigative committee members decides on Oppenheimer’s future in the scientific community. Tom Conti is most convincing as the resigned Albert Einstein who looks like a Muppet. Einstein was the man who could explain the universe like no other before him, but on earth, as Nolan shows in a sentimental shot, can’t keep his hat on in strong winds. One almost wishes that Einstein would stick his famous tongue out at the “Oppenheimer” people more often.
Equally strong is Matt Damon, who takes on the thankless role of General Groves, the interface between brilliant scientists and the military, whose soldiers don’t understand most of it, but have to fulfill tasks until they can finally overthrow Oppy and his team – “no offence, but from here we take over”. In Roland Joffe’s Shadowmaker, Paul Newman played the general as a barking bully, Damon giving Groves a sarcasm that only people who work with people whose intellectual heights they don’t reach can have.
Christopher Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema not only shot on IMAX 65mm, but also in analogue IMAX black and white, which makes “Oppenheimer” look less like a Nolan film and more surprisingly like a David Fincher film (which of course also does may be due to the fact that Robert Downey, Jr. is in the cast, as well as Gary Oldman, who apparently only wants to appear with heavy facial make-up to portray historical figures). Many crucial events are only touched upon – a lot of material is supposed to fit into this three-hour film, but not much fits into it. “I don’t want to resign from the project just because plutonium is radioactive,” says a Trinity test researcher, casually pointing to the long-term effects of the fallout. After all, the seemingly inhumane question is discussed as to whether the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the fact that the number of war victims in the Pacific was not even higher – expert opinions differ as to whether an infantry invasion of Japan would not result in even higher casualties on both sides would have led. It was not soldiers who were hit in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but civilians. “Oppenheimer” does not shy away from letting the “hawks” and “doves” in the military staff wrestle with each other.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was a communist sympathizer but was not a communist. But that wasn’t enough for the investigative committee – which is hearing about him in a ragged, empty office, an aesthetically clear, satisfying set of scenes by Nolan. The failure of the “safety guarantee” against him, the exclusion from government projects gnawed at the then 50-year-old. His political stance in building the atomic bomb may have played a smaller role than previously thought. Oppenheimer simply wanted to make the right decision for the right system, to help the right people, who in turn would provide him with the right resources to build the weapon that the German Reich could never have. Oppenheimer left us a world in which the survival of subsequent generations is no longer assured. Why isn’t there a single scene where he is seen with his two children? How he talks to them or at least looks at them? That would have given insight into the things that were important to him – or were not important.
It would have been nice to see what the eternally small boy in the grown-up genius would have said about whether his dreams would at least come true with the construction of a bomb. Whether the little boy’s nightmares would come true, too. The most moving scene comes right at the beginning: young Oppenheimer, who doesn’t yet know what life is all about, lies in bed, pulls the covers over his head and cries at a window on which the rain is pattering.
More about “Oppenheimer”:
Regardless of the dramatic potential of the story about the physicist, director Nolan impressed even before filming was completed with the public claim that he did not use computer effects to create an atomic bomb explosion. Since then, many fans of the filmmaker, who almost slavishly tries to create a maximum of naturalism and authenticity with hand-made action sequences in his works, have wondered whether it could even be a real atomic bomb explosion.
A few hours before the (German) theatrical release on July 20, the British eccentric spoke up about this basically crazy rumor via the “Hollywood Reporter”. “It’s flattering that people think I’m capable of something this extreme,” Nolan said, “but it’s also a bit scary.”