Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan masterfully captures one of history’s defining figures
As the so-called "father of the atomic bomb", American theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer was also, in a sense, the granddaddy of modern spectacle, setting off a big bang whose blast radius spread out across the entirety of modern culture. Nolan regular Cillian Murphy, his otherworldly blue eyes and pout looming almost comically large, plays Oppenheimer, who we first meet at the centre of the US government's 1954 security hearing led by Lewis Strauss, the atomic energy commissioner with a political and personal axe to grind. Scenes of Oppenheimer and Kitty swooning against the Santa Fe ranch sky – with the former looking like a gaunt cowboy detective – have the spooky sweep of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema's work on Jordan Peele's fantastic Nope, another film with a view to unpacking cinema's fraught spectacle. One of Nolan's great strokes is to splice Oppenheimer's thoughts, and Murphy's glassy, galactic stare, into cosmic montages of swirling molecules, particles and dying stars, impressionistic images that have the effect of a Stan Brakhage film projected onto a planetarium dome. Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame build this montage to show-stopping effect in the film's centrepiece, as Oppenheimer and his team, under the supervision of gung-ho Colonel Leslie Groves, race to build and test an atomic bomb at a secret site in the Los Alamos desert.
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