'Oppenheimer' Review

What happens when Hollywood's most powerful auteur reaches the height of his powers?

EXT. DESERT - DAY

The sun has long been gone as workers mad-dash back and forth in a makeshift town built on the whims of our protagonist: all with the goal of creating an explosion the likes of which mankind has never seen. Last minute calls are made, safety measures are triple checked, and all wait at the beck and call of the maestro: all in his industry aspire to be him and perhaps even envy his domination of said industry. A few confirming words are spoken and all wait in stunned silence for the explosion to come.

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The protagonist in question is Christopher Nolan. The scene: the set of his latest- and perhaps most ambitious film yet- Oppenheimer.

Ambitious. Ambition is a dirty word in Hollywood: it conjures up images of Francis Ford Coppola screaming as the helicopters he borrowed from the Philippine government for the filming of Apocalypse Now are called back by the military in the middle of shooting. It brings to mind so many box-office disasters that ended careers: the dreams of so many young directors cut short perhaps by their own ego or an inability to communicate their vision properly.

Christopher Nolan has made his entire career on the back of this very ambition, citing in an interview from the book The Nolan Variations that with each cinematic undertaking he intends to make the greatest film ever and that to look at his projects otherwise would be unthinkable. This is reflected in the grandeur of his films: even one of his most controversial films (and possibly one of his most criminally underrated) like The Dark Knight Rises is vastly more interesting and watchable than any of the other theatrical schlock out there. Nolan’s mind is a well-read, well-informed one and it his desire to push the boundaries of what cinema can be that makes him the single most exciting director working today.

That being said, all of this comes with a price, in what I call the “Wes Anderson trap.” When a director becomes so well known for a particular style and way of doing things it is natural for him to fall into the trap of “style over substance”. Oppenheimer is a film filled with style: there are three different kinds of film stock used for the three intercutting timelines, historical scenes are recreated with painstaking accuracy, and the music and sound design are technically unassailable in terms of their perfection (this film will sweep the technical Oscars). The characters are all thoroughly researched and vividly brought to life by a murderers’ row of A-list actors whose presence in even the smallest of cameos served as a potent reminder of that old middle-school-theater adage: “No role is too small”. The much-anticipated bomb sequence is well worth the price of an IMAX ticket (the old woman sitting next to me was not ready).

Then why did this magnificent, perfectly made film leave me so empty?

Oppenheimer himself is brought to life so well by Cillian Murphy that it is almost eerie; at no time did I think of him as “Scarecrow” or any of his other notable Nolan-cast roles, he completely owns the part. But the script failed to give me any reason to care about Oppenheimer getting his security clearance or not, failed to give me a reason to care whether or not the bomb goes off, and failed to give me a reason to see his love life succeed.

To this one can argue: this is a common Nolan accusation, that he is a “cold filmmaker” who gives little care for the fates of his characters, which is simply not true (I actually would attribute this better to David Fincher). Nolan would not be where he is at now if he did not make us care deeply about Leonard in Memento, Cobb in Inception, or, most crucially of all, a billionaire who dresses like a bat and fights crime. All of these stories speak deeply to the human experience and to real human desires: all of his protagonists despite their isolation desire connection with another human being above all things, even if, like in Interstellar, this literally means traversing across the vast oceans of space and time.

But Oppenheimer has so much ground to cover historically and practically (Nolan insisted, to the delight of his fans including myself, to find a way to create the nuclear explosion portrayed in the film’s indisputable best scene without CGI) that there simply ends up being no room to really dig into Oppenheimer’s mind outside of just showing that he is a man haunted by the invention he has brought upon the world. What should be rife dramatic material is eschewed in favor of real-life historical figures yelling at each other and making glib comments about how much smarter or more ethically righteous they are than their scientific peers. It’s clear Oppenheimer does desire this connection with others to a degree but this must take a backseat to him thinking about what his legacy will be decades after he dies.

In my opinion, this film is thematically the closest within the directors’ filmography to The Prestige, a warning against the dangers of progress and science, but unlike that film Nolan is forced into working within the confines of reality and history itself, and the film offers little hope or direction as to what humanity must do to rectify itself after introducing such a monstrous weapon. It is suggested that Oppenheimer created the bomb mainly out of sympathy for his fellow Jews in Europe but it is hardly believable when the character hardly shows a glimmer of emotion throughout the entire film. He is in the end portrayed as a man cursed by knowledge, forced by Hitler to do a thing that he never would have done otherwise, as the film goes to great lengths to make sure the audience knows that he had to do it. The film does not sanctify him but also doesn’t confront him with his sins: his adulterous past plays a big part in the first half of the film but really has nothing to do with the rest of the story and only serves as a distracting exercise in Nolan flexing his R-rating that he perhaps was not allowed in his post-Dark Knight days at Warner Bros. Robert Downey Jr’s Lewis Strauss and Jason Clarke’s Roger Robb serve as interesting counter-forces who are intent on revealing the truth about what happened at Los Alamos to light but in the end almost become caricature-level villains who deserve the anonymity that history has bestowed them in the shadow of Oppenheimer. And perhaps the greatest missed opportunity is a severe under-utilization of Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, who never really challenges him on anything but just looks angry all the time and over-drinks. (Compare this to Rebecca Hall’s character in The Prestige, and the electric scenes she shared with Christian Bale when she discovers the nature of her relationship with him). It’s all framed as a fantastic tragedy until it’s not: the film’s ending banks everything on the hope that we will understand and possibly forgive Oppenheimer for what he brought unto the world, when all I’m really left with is a portrait of a man bereft of any scruples in his family life, and it’s hard to care whether or not his legacy is preserved. It is not surprising that this film places such an emphasis and worry upon the maintaining of a legacy when Nolan is at the stage in his career where all it takes is one bad movie to end his reign at the top.

All of this is to say that while the film is a wonder to behold on the largest screen possible that it is simply overshadowed by the better films in Nolan’s filmography that have come before it. I’ve watched The Prestige at least six or seven times and Inception at least four: I would never really feel inclined to watch Oppenheimer more than maybe twice. As Nolan’s power grows he is taking some gigantic swings and I am absolutely here for it, but the greater his reach the easier it is to get caught up in the technical perfection rather than it is to create an emotionally engaging story. I hope that his next film is able to return to that fusion of spectacle and story that makes Nolan the great that he is without losing sight of the flesh-and-blood humanity that his audience is comprised of.

RATING: 3.5/5 stars

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS:

• One could argue that Tenet works fine without the emotional engagement that I found sorely missing in this: I actually think that film works fine without it because quite simply it’s Nolan’s take on a “mindless popcorn movie” and I actually enjoy it for that. This film however banks everything on making you care about Oppenheimer but instead spends 15 minutes on whether or not he lied to Casey Affleck about something in the past