"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
Christopher Nolan's epic, both in scale and in length, new film Oppenheimer (based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J.Sherwin) tells the story of J Robert Oppenheimer, his life leading up to the atomic annihilation of those Japanese cities and his life in America following those events. But if you're hoping to see Japanese people dying in the streets and burning to death under mushroom clouds as their cities are razed around them you'll be a little disappointed.
Oppenheimer is not that film. You don't so much as see remote video footage of the bombs falling on Japan and you find out that even Oppenheimer himself didn't receive news of the bombings until nearly a whole day after they had happened. For the most part it consists of men (well, mostly men) in suits sitting around desks, scrawling equations on blackboards, and walking around discussing theoretical physics, politics, and morality which, admittedly, sounds like it might actually be a bit boring. It certainly doesn't sound like the stuff a blockbuster cinema release is made of. Which is perhaps why Greta Gerwig's Barbie is doing bigger business.
But, quite remarkably, it's not boring at all and it gets better the longer it goes on. It's hard to get a handle on just who everyone is and it's even harder to get a handle on the maths and the physics that underpin Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project. It should be hard to get a handle on Oppenheimer, or Oppie as those closest to him call him, but Cillian Murphy's brilliant portrayal can't help but draw you in. His piercing blue eyes, a fedora that put me in mind of Joseph Beuys, and an enigma that can never be fully unlocked.
Oppenheimer was a genius. He could speak multiple languages (even learning Sanskrit) and he could see mathematics and physics in ways others could barely imagine. He mixed with Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein (in the film played by Kenneth Branagh and Tom Conti) and he was able to bring together a team of the most eminent physicists in the Western World when appointed by Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to take charge of the Manhattan Project.
A project that would, undoubtedly, change the world forever. A project that, at one point, Oppenheimer and others feared would end the world forever. Surrounded by the likes of Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), Boris Pash (Casey Affleck), David L.Hill (Rami Malek), Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), and Klaus Fuchs (Christopher Denham), Oppenheimer set up the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in his beloved New Mexico and then set about creating an atomic bomb with absolute urgency.
A Jewish man, Oppenheimer was aware that the Nazis were doing the same and he was aware that they had employed the services of the brilliant Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighofer), a man Oppenheimer had known when studying at Gottingen, to help them do so. He knew it was only a matter of time before the Nazis had the bomb. He wasn't sure if America would act wisely when given unknowable nuclear strength but he was certain that the Nazis would not.
He wrestled with his conscience over this but it was not something he was happy showing to his team, his colleagues, or even the women in his life. Somehow, Oppenheimer had time to be something of a womaniser. We first see him with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a Communist Party member who throws Oppenheimer's regular floral gifts straight in the bin and won't commit to a relationship. Tatlock is troubled where Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), may best be described as formidable.
She throws glasses at him, she tells him - more or less - to man up, she takes virtually no interest in her always crying baby, and she seems far more concerned with pouring a Martini out than anything else. Blunt does a good job in giving depth to what could have been a fairly one dimensional character.
Then there's Oppenheimer's nemesis, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss. Played by a Robert J. Downey whom I didn't even recognise as first, Strauss (pronounced Straws, it's a Southern thing apparently) has never been able to forgive Oppenheimer for making a fool of him at a congressional hearing and, in Strauss' fevered imagination, badmouthing him to Einstein. So Strauss seeks revenge on Oppenheimer and the scenes where this battle is played out last far longer than any scenes of mushroom clouds.
As it's a Nolan film it is, of course, non-linear but Nolan's been doing that for so long now (Memento was twenty-three years ago) that he's a dab hand at it. Three timelines unravel together. There's Oppenheimer's early student life from Cambridge to his appointment on the Manhattan Project, there's his security hearing in 1954, and then there's Strauss's confirmation hearing in 1959. There's also an excellent scene when Oppenheimer meets with a scornful President Harry S. Truman. Gary Oldman has certainly come a long way since he was playing Sid Vicious and Joe Orton.
It's to Nolan's, and the cast's, great credit that this never gets (too) confusing. Ludwig Goransson's score can sometimes be powerful and can sometimes be jarring and the same can be said for the scenes that show fractals, stars, and melting planets. They don't all work and I wasn't overly keen that some of the film was made in black'n'white. Going monochrome seems a bit of tired old trick and one that should be put to bed for good. Though, to be fair, it was hardly as distracting as the fact that the chap next to me spent a good 50% of the film scrolling on his mobile phone - although, to be fair, he did still seem to be taking the film in. Even if he was stopping others from doing so.
Ultimately, Oppenheimer is an exercise in style and it's a history lesson. It's interesting, it's involving but it was never, for me, truly moving. I didn't cry, I didn't really worry about any of the characters though I did laugh a couple of times (Matt Damon's Groves has a great line regarding what he might do to prevent leaks coming out of Los Alamos). In that I suspect I was not unlike J Robert Oppenheimer who even when pondering that he may have become Death, the destroyer of worlds, didn't seem overly bothered about it.
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