The old proverb tells us that “it takes a village to raise a child” and in the top secret, government-built town at Los Alamos in the 1940s, that child was the atomic bomb. It may have taken billions of dollars and the cream of the scientific community to build the bomb, but history tells us that it had only one father – J. Robert Oppenheimer, played with a haunting (Academy Award winning) intensity by Cillian Murphy.
Before the Trinity nuclear test in Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer, Murphy’s Oppenheimer confronts his child at the summit of the 30-metre shot tower constructed to give an indication how the bomb would behave when dropped from a B29 Superfortress.
Oppenheimer looks solemnly at the futuristic black depth charge that withholds the power of the universe. It feels sentient, a malignant force baying for release.
The leader of the Manhattan Project is silent, internalising the moment that his theoretical physics will be unleashed on the world.
Oppenheimer feels the atomic bomb must be detonated for the possibility of ending all war to be realised. “They won’t fear it until they understand it. And they won’t understand it until they’ve used it. Theory will take you only so far.”
Nolan is nothing if not a director who loves to grandstand with the most bombastic of gestures. His films are grandiose, testaments to hubris and the machinations of flawed men yearning for greatness.
That moment on the shot tower feels like Nolan coming to terms with his own perceived genius.
Nolan describes Oppenheimer as, “The most important person who ever lived. Oppenheimer’s story is one of the biggest stories imaginable. By unleashing atomic power, he gave us the power to destroy ourselves that we never had before, and that changes the human equation.” By design, then, only a tyrant of a filmmaker like Nolan has the intellectual heft to wrestle this American Prometheus to the screen.
Nolan is one of a scant handful of filmmakers who can launch a three-hour biopic mainly featuring white men in rooms discussing nuclear fission or the inner workings of communism, during summer blockbuster season.
But like Oppenheimer, just because he can doesn’t always mean he should.
There is no getting away from the fact that Oppenheimer is an achievement. The stellar supporting all-star cast, notably Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jnr, and Emily Blunt all took substantial pay cuts to appear in a Nolan film, and the trademark non-linear narrative and exploration of time, memory and dreams mark him out as a disciple of Andrei Tarkovsky. Anything that ties the Russian master to mainstream entertainment should be applauded but Oppenheimer becomes mired in its own self-importance and technical innovation.
Tarantino famously used 70mm for his interior chamber piece The Hateful Eight. Nolan attempts to best QT with his use of IMAX to add gravity to various hearings and meetings set in small side rooms and antechambers discussing the monstrous decisions made during the end of WW2. These scenes are juxtaposed with gargantuan vistas of the desert, or the swirling particles of the universe, or the godlike flames of nuclear detonation.
There is moral and ethical dilemma of the most perilous importance but, like the atomic bomb itself, Oppenheimer implodes. These are facsimiles of humans; they argue, invent, order, and make love but we are disconnected from any emotion. For a film where the very existence of humanity is at stake there is precious little on display.
For a film where the very existence of humanity is at stake there is precious little on display.
Great actors stare at one another with singular importance across rooms, draw impossible equations on chalkboards, and challenge one another over loyalty but those scenes never fully ignite. In the case of Florence Pugh as the Jean Tatlock, she is woefully underused as tragic titillation. Matt Damon’s presence comes closest to injecting some much-needed levity but he takes an hour to appear and disappears for the final third of the film.
Oppenheimer has been compared to JFK but imagine imperial phase Oliver Stone being given the tools Nolan has at his disposal and making this film. It would be overwrought and flawed but it would be pure sensation, and more importantly we would care.
Who knows what Nolan really makes of the #Barbenheimer social media phenomenon? What it has done has trivialised the portentous themes of Oppenheimer and for the Japanese and caused great insult to the thousands who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the initial attacks and the thousands who died later from radiation-related diseases.
In This Corner of the World#NoBarbenheimer pic.twitter.com/2oNqsMtLBJ
— シゲッチ (@ore3110) July 31, 2023
Japanese Twitter has responded with #NoBarbenheimer, highlighting the crass cultural insensitivity of memes featuring both films – forcing an apology from Warner Brothers, whose official marketing machine behind Barbie promoted such memes.
To date Oppenheimer has no release date in Japan and, even more controversially, Barbie is due to be released in Japan on August 11th – two days after the anniversary of Nagasaki. It may take a social media community to raise the prospects of the American box office, but Oppenheimer only has one father.