Oppenheimer

OPPENHEIMER   ***

Christopher Nolan

2023

IDEA:  A biography tracing physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's early academic work, involvement with the Manhattan Project, and postwar security hearing organized by his colleague and rival Lewis Strauss.

BLURB:  In Oppenheimer, as in many of his films, Christopher Nolan’s mode of filmmaking is to bombard the audience with exposition - delivered dourly, breathlessly, and in non-chronological order - while a booming soundtrack blares relentlessly in the background. His technique is at once brute and convoluted, less that of an artist than a wannabe engineer smashing pieces together to see if they fit. Despite his precise technical attention to film stock and practical effects, Nolan remains lost at sea when it comes to composing an interesting image, and his fragmentary narration and nonstop crosscutting often feel more like pompous formal affectations than necessary designs. While these pitfalls are present in Oppenheimer, especially in its first hour, the film is in other ways served by Nolan’s hectic, pile-driving style. His script, which shuttles chaotically between multiple timelines and events within those timeliness, aptly captures the myriad collisions of historical forces that led to the advent, use, and aftermath of the atomic bomb. Nolan’s structure becomes one of dialectical materialism, or “Fission” and “Fusion” as he labels his timelines, and his endlessly fractured scenes become like the bustling atoms and molecules Oppenheimer keeps envisioning in his nightmares. Nolan’s abilities as a filmmaker come into sharpest focus at the film’s turning point, the Trinity test, when he harnesses editing, and particularly sound, to orchestrate a visceral, tension-filled sequence that convinces us of a Rubicon-crossing moment. It’s during and after this showpiece that Oppenheimer begins taking needed breaths, crystalizing as a deliberately unwieldy portrait of the follies of mankind - from scientific hubris to partisan politics and nationalist tribalism - that seem to reach their logical endpoint only in the world’s literal annihilation.