Movie Review: Oppenheimer

“Do you guys ever think about dying?”

I tend to sort Christopher Nolan’s films into two categories: those that are about filmmaking, and those that try to be about something else.

In the second category: The Batman trilogy is great if you don’t look too closely at its politics. Insomnia... I barely remember it. Tenet doesn’t reach its goals. Dunkirk was deeply affecting, as all war movies are, but suffered from the conceit of three different “timelines.”

It’s the films in the first category that I like best. Memento’s two color palettes and loop-de-loop narrative highlighted the power of visual storytelling in a way that was new to me when it came out. The Prestige links visual trickery and plot together through Michael Caine’s diegetic narration. It also has David Bowie! Inception, as Nolan himself has explained, uses the process of filmmaking as a guiding principle, with Ariadne as the set designer, Cobb as the director, Eames as the actor, and so on.

Oppenheimer allows Nolan to merge the two categories, making a movie about movies that is also, finally, about something substantive beyond the metafictional. It is Nolan’s best film yet, although I don’t think it has the rewatch potential of Memento (what actually happened?) or Inception, which is so glossy that it’s lovely background noise after you’ve seen it a billion times. This movie is just too heavy for that.

Oppenheimer, of course, is not actually about movies. But it is about directing, with Cillian Murphy in the titular role playing the same basic function as Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception or Michael Caine in The Prestige: the person putting all the pieces together, bringing the team together, building something, failing, trying again, and then, finally, considering the fallout.

Of course, more obviously, it’s a biopic of the director (ahem!) of the Manhattan Project, which ushered in the nuclear age and caused the death of about a quarter of a million people. It is about a brilliant man who never really thinks through the consequences of his actions until it’s a bit too late, and frequently seems to forget that other people might have wants, needs, or even interior lives.

One of my favorite moments in the film is when Oppie brings his wife and child to their new little house at Los Alamos, and she points out that he didn’t include a kitchen. Another recurring pattern is how easily Oppie manages to make a terrible first impression by accidentally insulting someone he just met—which winds up setting up his conflict with Admiral Strauss (played by Robert Downey, Jr, who is phenomenal) and his own struggles during McCarthyism.

That’s not to say that Nolan portrays Oppie as unsympathetic, or that Cillian Murphy fails to generate audience empathy. They both excel. Watching this movie was like receiving a gift of understanding someone else, their strengths and weaknesses and contradictions and quirks. This film doesn’t praise Oppie, but it doesn’t bury him, either. It interrogates our ideas about scientists (and scientism), and about the Great Man method of history... by showing us a Great Man who is actually just a really complex guy.

Nolan also frames Oppie as a sheriff in a Western. Just swap the fedora for a Stetson.

Oppenheimer is a Nolan film, so it doesn’t follow a purely chronological sequence. There are flashbacks (as far back as Oppie’s college years) and flashforwards (to Oppie’s struggles during the Red Scare and McCarthyism). The center of the film—its narrative climax and its beating heart—is the invention of the bomb, including an amazing test sequence, where the camera tracks various groups of people reacting to the explosion.

As Oppie himself watches the bomb explode out in the desert, we hear a voiceover of his famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita. In real life, he didn’t say that until years later. But in this film, he utters it the first time long before Los Alamos, while having sex with his mistress Jean Tatlock (played perfectly by Florence Pugh). To hear it again, as the bomb goes off, creates a link between concepts and moments: sex and death, penises and bombs, love and destruction, thrill and consequences (especially given how Tatlock’s story ends, and how Oppie treats her). There’s a complexity there — even, dare I say, some welcome messiness – that I have never associated with Nolan before, and which brings me great joy.

The film is a technical marvel. The sound design is amazing. At least, I think it’s amazing. This is only the third film I’ve seen in the theaters since COVID, and one of those was a documentary (the other was the new Mission: Impossible). My seat shook; I loved it. We hear sounds, especially stomping, hours before we realize what they signify. It was wonderful. I could even understand about 90% of the dialogue, which is a big step for Nolan!

I really can’t say enough good things about the cast, either. In fact, I don’t have room in this review to do so, so I’ll just say: they are all great (shout-out to my mom’s favorite cutie pie Matt Damon!), and I’d love to hear which was your favorite in the comments.

The film is also beautiful to look at. I loved the repeated motif of ripples in puddles and in ponds, which ties into the conversation between Oppie and Einstein that unspools over the course of the narrative, and which ties into the movie’s final moments, which I’ll gently allude to in what follows.

I’m used to overthinking my favorite Nolan films, because I love a narrative puzzle. But Oppenheimer doesn’t just encourage metafictional, postmodern, drawing diagrams with straws types of thought. It also raises serious questions that matter not just for how we understand history but how we may fear it will be repeated.

At one point in the film, someone asks Oppenheimer what to do with Los Alamos now that the tests have been completed, the bombs detonated, and the war won. “Give it back to the Indians,” he says. It’s a throwaway line, of sorts, but one that made me think of Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony, about a young Pueblo-Apache man named Tayo returning home from the Pacific theatre of WWII with what today is known as PTSD.

That book takes place primarily in the American Southwest, especially eastern Arizona and New Mexico. The book’s climax, in a disused uranium mine not far from Los Alamos, which Silko references directly, forces Tayo to consider the sheer horror of what was invented at Los Alamos, on Indigenous land, and the sheer impossibility of fixing the world in the face of colonialism, acquisitiveness, and other forms of what Silko, drawing on Pueblo and Navajo philosophy, calls “witchcraft” (which is distinct from western concepts of witchcraft).

The first time you read that book – that is, the first time I did — the sudden intrusion of fear about nuclear war is unexpected. But that’s because I’m an elder millennial, just a kid when the Berlin Wall fell, in middle school during the perestroika years. Unlike those who were children in, say, the 1960s, we’re not trained to be afraid of nukes. We are, in fact, taught that fear of nuclear war was part of the Cold War panic. Not something to really be afraid of. As Nolan put it in an interview with the New York Times, “When I first told one of my teenage sons what I was writing, he literally said to me, that’s just not something anybody worries about anymore.”

Nolan interlaces the encounter between post-war Oppenheimer and an aging Albert Einstein throughout the film. The final moments, in which Einstein and Oppie consider the consequences of the bomb, make this movie more than a biopic. It is a cautionary tale about the consequences that we have forgotten to consider, much as Oppie himself frequently forgot to consider consequences in matters both world-changing and personal.

The chilling imaginative sequence that brings the film to a close asks us to consider a question also addressed in Barbie: Do you guys ever think about dying?

Four out of four Matt Damons.

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

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