Christopher Nolan's magnum opus delves into the complex life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who ushered in the atomic age. seriously, who else would convince a studio to greenlight a three-hour, R-rated biopic of a theoretical physicist and then turn it into a near-billion-dollar box office hit. The guy has magic.

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• Title: Oppenheimer
• Director: The wizard himself, Christopher Nolan
• Lead Cast: Cillian Murphy (finally taking the leading role, man), Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and Robert Downey Jr. like you've never actually seen him do before.
• Genre: Bio-pic, historical drama, psychological thriller. it's literally all of them.
• Runtime: A tidy 180 minutes. Yes, you heard right. Three. Hours.
• Release Date: July 2023
• Rating: R for nudity, language and some sexuality .

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So what's the story? This is not Grandpa's war movie. You want to see huge bomber planes and bombs rain down over Japan? Go elsewhere, man. This is a movie that takes place almost entirely in the shaking, guilty conscience of one man: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man they call the "father of the atomic bomb".

The arrangement is straightforward: The US government, out of sheer dread that the Nazis beat them to it, hires our guy Oppie to head the highly classified Manhattan Project. His charge? Come up with an arsenal so apocalypse-capable that it will destroy the world. Breezy. He assembles the world's best minds, constructs an entire secret town in the middle of the New Mexico desert, and they just. think. Big, heavy thoughts.

But wait a minute, the movie's not about constructing the damned thing. Nolan does a classic Nolan and blows up time like a broken plate. We're careening back and forth between Oppie's early life, the Los Alamos pressure cooker, and two post-war hearings intended essentially to dismantle him. One's in colour (that's the "Fission" strand, from Oppie's perspective) and one's in nasty, brutal black-and-white (the "Fusion" strand, named after his political opponent, Lewis Strauss). It sounds confused, but believe me, it kind of does.

My Take

My brain is reeling. I left the movie theater with a sense of having been hit by a truckload of moral dilemmas. A nice big, loud truck.

Ugh, how to even put it into words. The entire thing is a three-hour-long slow-motion anxiety attack with a theremin and a drum set in the hands of a genius. Ludwig Göransson's score isn't something you hear; it's a character. It's this sustained, festering, nervous rhythm that burrows itself under your skin and won't let you alone. You can feel Oppie's paranoia, his ambition, his raw cosmic horror in your very bones.

And the visuals, man. Nolan and his cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema refuse to use IMAX to capture broad cityscapes, though--to ensnare you in close-ups so close, so intimately up-close-and-personal of Cillian Murphy's face that you can see every flinch, every bead of sweat, the fear in those wild blue eyes. It's a performance delivered by pores. And then they'll switch over to these hallucinatory shots—fire, ripples in a pond, subatomic particles churning—to show the world on fire in his mind. It's raw pictorial poetry and raw psychological pain, all in one .

Shout-Outs

And now, on to the fun stuff. The fun stuff that makes this whole dang experiment worthwhile.

1. Cillian Murphy is Oppenheimer. Bury Tommy Shelby. This performance is for the ages. He does not play Oppie; he is him. He's jagged edges and repressed fury, a man whose intellect functions at a quantum level but whose heart is a critical mass waiting to be detonated. The manner in which he delivers that "I am become Death" line. gives me shivers. Actual shivers.

2. Robert Downey Jr. Unplugged. Yo. Don't care about Iron Man. Don't care about who you think he is. His Lewis Strauss is a masterclass in small, angry resentment. He plays this dude who's all smiles and high-fives on the outside, but who's just full of jealous rage and insecurity on the inside. It's a rich, poisonous performance that reminds you that this guy was an acting force to be reckoned with before he put together a suit in a cave.

3. The Trinity Test. DANG. Alright, so the thing that everyone pays lip service to. The test of the bomb. Nolan, analog king that he is, used actual practical effects. No CGI. And you can FEEL it. The tension is nearly unbearable—this long, wordless countdown, and then. not what you anticipate. It's not a great big boom. It's a flash. A strange, lovely, frightening fireball that appears to drain all the noise from the universe before a shockwave hits that made my teeth rattle at the cinema. One of the greatest and most frightening set pieces of all time. To learn more about how Nolan makes these legendary scenes, read our article on Christopher Nolan filmmaking tricks.

4. It Makes Physics Sound Like a Thriller. You somehow make a group of guys in rooms writing on chalkboards sexy. Nolan does. The arguments about chain reactions, atmospheric ignition, and moral responsibility are filmed and edited like a heist film. You're sitting forward on your couch listening to people argue about theoretical physics. Make it click.

It's not all that great, though. Gotta be real.

1. The Women, Though. Old Nolan problem, lowkey. For a movie so obsessed with being human, the women get a surprisingly hard shake. Florence Pugh's Jean Tatlock is a hot, volatile ball of energy, but she actually exists only as a tragic plot contrivance to get in the way of Oppie. And Emily Blunt is just a monster as Kitty—tough, hard-edged, and merciless—but for the initial two acts, she's stuck firmly in "disappointed wife" mode. She does get one incredible scene in the hearing where she totally devastates the prosecution, but oh, I wish she had more to do.

2. The Sound Mix Strikes Again. Hold on a second, am I alone or does Nolan enjoy setting dialogue so that one can't hear it? There were points, particularly at first, where the score was SO LOUD and the actors were mumbly SO LOW that I actually lost some crucial lines of dialogue. I get that it's creative having me in the middle of the turmoil, but man, I just want to know what the scientist guy is saying about the uranium.

3. It's a Lot of Dudes Talking. I'm not being dishonest, the third act—all of the incessant government hearings and behind-the-scenes politicking—is a grind. It's required for the story, demonstrating how they dismantled Oppenheimer bit by bit, but after the raw adrenaline of the Trinity test, it's a difficult adjustment into thick, natty courtroom drama. Your bottom will begin to doze off. Alert: it's approaching.

4. The Absence. The elephant in the room, the big one. The movie never, ever forces you to look at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We don't see the survivors. We just sit in a gymnasium and listen as Oppenheimer speaks, his eyes flooded with a blinding white light and the cacophony of screams in his head. It's a strong, subjective image of his guilt. But part of me. Part of me thought it was a cop-out. Like by not really showing the real, true-to-life terror, the movie is giving the viewer a little get-out-of-jail-free card. It's an outlandish, push-the-envelope decision and one I'm still trying to figure out.

So, all that said. how many points does it get?

I'm giving it 9/10. It's a mess, a mess-up, but it's a masterwork nonetheless.

Is it for everyone? HA. No. Seriously, no.

You'll love this if: you adore Nolan, you enjoy movies which are experience over story, you can handle lots of scientific terminology and backroom political dealing, and you can be bothered to have an existential crisis in public. It's a movie that will keep you in its thrall and repay you with some of the most awe-inspiring filmmaking of the decade. Watching Cillian Murphy transform with this performance is worth the cost of admission alone, and you can check out more of his dramatic makeovers in our Cillian Murphy performance deep dive.

Don't bother wasting your time with this thing if: you're just looking for a night out, you require non-stop action to keep you awake, you have the attention span of a peanut, or you just want to sit back and watch a simple war film. This ain't that.

Last word? Oppenheimer is a monstrosity of a movie. It's bombastic, it's fraught, it's arrogant-y, and it'll drain you emotionally. But boy, it's a ride you won't soon forget. It's the sort of film that makes you remember the reason we even go to the movies. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go look at a wall and ponder the impermanence of human life. No issue.

References

1. Rotten Tomatoes. Oppenheimer (2023). Retrieved from https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/oppenheimer_2023
2. Wikipedia. Oppenheimer (film). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_(film)
3. Cinemasters. "Oppenheimer" Review: An Atomic Blast of Nothing. Retrieved from https://www.cinemasters.net/post/oppenheimer-review-an-atomic-blast-of-nothing
4. Ars Technica. Review: Oppenheimer is pure visual poetry. Retrieved from https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/08/review-oppenheimer-is-pure-visual-poetry/
5. Toronto Film School. Oppenheimer Movie Review | The Mystery of Its Success. Retrieved from https://www.torontofilmschool.ca/blog/oppenheimer-film-review/
6. IMDb. Oppenheimer (2023). Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/
7. The New York Times. 'Oppenheimer' Review: A Man for Our Time. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/movies/oppenheimer-review-christopher-nolan.html
8. RogerEbert.com. Oppenheimer movie review & film summary (2023). Retrieved from https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oppenheimer-film-review-2023
9. Medium. Oppenheimer Review: There's Only So Much Nolan Could ... Retrieved from https://medium.com/the-film-corner-writer/oppenheimer-review-theres-only-so-much-nolan-could-do-with-the-concept-but-that-s-no-excuse-24d9537f9afe
10. Britannica. Oppenheimer. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Oppenheimer-film