By Matthew Moorcroft

Highest Recommendation

• Directed by Christopher Nolan
• Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr.
• R

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

The year is 1945. Germany has surrendered in the wake of Hitler’s suicide and now only Japan is at war with the US. In the midst of the Manhattan Project, a decision is made to test these possible new weapons on Japan as a way to force a surrender. While whether or not they were effective in that regard is up for debate – most historians seem to agree that Japan would have likely surrounded with or without the bomb – the aftermath has lingered. Nuclear annihilation was a very real fear for much of the 50s, 60s, and onwards.

The year is 2023. Russia is at war in Ukraine, and the world is seemingly on the brink once again. This makes Oppenheimer, the latest by the biggest auteur in the business, a film that is reckoning with itself. A portrait of a man almost an enigmatic as the idea of nuclear power itself, it’s an impossible task to really try and distill a life this huge, this monumental, this important to American history as J. Robert Oppenheimer, a man who seemingly tried to play god with the tools of mankind. The creation of nuclear annihilation is brought back to the forefront, and the consequences immeasurable.

But where do you start here? The answer, according to Christopher Nolan, is at the end, after Oppenheimer’s security clearance is revoked and Lewis Strauss appears to have won out in his own personal grudge against the man. The two men in their respective hearings view what they believe to be the true view of the events, each in colour or black and white depending on perspective, and what follows is less of a straight up biopic and more of a chronicle. Nolan is seemingly using the Manhattan Project as a jumping off point to explore more interesting ideas surrounding man and their never-ending need to control things around them, and this isn’t simply just a science thing either.

Oppenheimer wants to control the atom, but Strauss wants to control the weaponry. Leslie Groves wants to control Oppenheimer himself, and then both Kitty and Jean want some amount of control in their lives considering how little they actually do get otherwise. And yet, where does it get us? The endless pursuit of knowledge? Or some fanatical need to understand our place in the grand universe? The haunting reality is that mere mortals played god with things we couldn’t understand, justified it as science for science’s sake, and suddenly it was out in the open. All bets are off. Our fates are sealed.

Cillian Murphy leads the charge with a performance that’s easily the best of his career, completely transforming into the man, though it’s a testament to the rest of the actors and cast that they help bounce off him in that regard. Too many standouts to truly name, though Robert Downey Jr.’s remarkable comeback performance as Strauss and Matt Damon’s shockingly sympathetic turn as Leslie Groves are the ones that speak out as some of the more memorable ones. Downey in particular plays as almost an antagonistic force of his own right, towering over the scene in his arrogant pursuit of Oppenheimer for simply having the “gall” to call him out in a meeting.

And yet, that’s how most of these things play out right? The arrogance of man. Nolan doesn’t ask to sympathize with Oppenheimer, quite far from it actually, but he also doesn’t ask you to hate him. In one moment that’s emblematic of the greater core of the story, his wife finds him cold out in the middle of the woods after a traumatic revelation and she says to him that he “can’t run from consequences of his own making”. Is Oppenheimer a coward? An idealist? An arrogant man with a god complex? Or simply somebody in the wrong place and time? He’s all of these and none of these. Nolan’s script manages to compress these hefty ideas down in one of the most impressive writing endeavors of his career; American Prometheus is a one of a kind book that’s difficult to adapt in of itself and it’s a miracle he managed to do it without losing it’s essence.

Instead, he is Oppenheimer, a man of many identities and feelings and ideas, swirling around like the sun. And as Ludwig Goransson’s incredible score kicks in, filling the sound for at least 90% of the runtime, you are swept in the moment and start to imagine the same world as Oppenheimer, whether that be his wonderment at the sheer idea of light reflecting off of the screen, or the horror of the bodies in the street, skin peeling off of a woman’s face. It’s a film that leaves you shaken, horrified, and yet thoroughly compelled.

Oppenheimer will likely come to awards season as a clear frontrunner, and that’s not surprising. But it’s also among Nolan’s finest – the clearest expression of his work as an artist, and the film he’s clearly been building to his entire career. It’s a singular achievement from an unshackled artist, an ode to a fascinating man with an equally fascinating impact. And personally speaking, it left me utterly speechless, completely transfixed throughout it’s 3 hour runtime. One of my favourites of the year, and I can’t wait to see what Nolan has cooked up next.