Film Review | Bomb’s Away

If it can be said that sensation-lusty auteur Christopher Nolan managed to impart human qualities and frailty on Batman with his Dark Knight trilogy, something perversely inverse takes place in his overwrought Oppenheimer. In this case, the writer-director turns an extremely real person into something of a cartoon character, a complex marvel of a man caught in a crucible of human history.

The madly criss-crossing strains of Nolan’s account follows the physicist who brought quantum physics to America and was tasked with creating an atomic bomb before the Nazis, and who created the think tank/death tank in Los Alamos which led to the endless nuclear arms race and post-atomic anxiety. Interwoven into the saga, told in dizzying chapters of mixed chronology in graphic novel-like shifts in film stock and emotional temperaments, are multiple angles on the man (played by Cillian Murphy, eerily resembling the actual Oppenheimer). 

It all adds up to a three-hour messy mesh of a movie — even as we’re (mostly) compelled by this all-American story.

In the pithy estimation of one observer in the film, Oppenheimer — aka the father of the atom bomb — was “an American Prometheus, who showed the world how to destroy itself and was respected for it.” The complexity and ambivalence of that implied respect — in public and personal terms — is at the heart of Nolan’s film, based on the book American Prometheus. Did he save the world, or doom it? To what degree did he experience moral quandaries, hiding behind scientific and existential/military imperatives while leading the design of a potential apocalypse machine?

Interestingly, although the tragic human toll of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts are virtually kept off-screen, extended dramatic build-up is given to the initial “Trinity” A-bomb testing in New Mexico, a moment of reckoning and the literal birth of the nuclear age in practice. The scene accounts for the highlight of the film, a critical moment when the Los Alamos scientists discover if their calculations are correct — or if possibly the bomb could wreak much broader havoc than planned. Their jubilation after the success of the blast is ecstatic but sullied by a dark and ominous undertow, an “ashes in the victor’s mouth” sensation.

Much of the film focuses on the scrutiny of Oppenheimer in the post-WWII period. He is subjected to insinuations of his communist sympathies and possible betrayals as a spy and suppressor of the H-Bomb in a kangaroo court hearing and then a Senate hearing.

Unfortunately, various filmic missteps in Oppenheimer get in the way of a convincing or empathetic portrayal of our protagonist. Albert Einstein keeps popping up at junctures in the maze of a script, like a wise gnomish grandpa or Euel Gibbons surrogate. Ludwig Göransson’s musical score, a frustratingly almost wall-to-wall musical wallpaper for the film, wins honors as this year’s Most Overbearing Hollywood Score, and yet it neatly suits the general more-is-more expressive mandate laid out by Nolan.

In some way, Nolan strives to make Oppenheimer an operatic experience — perhaps partly in cross-reference to John Adams’s respected opera Doctor Atomic — but it ends up being more “soap” operatic, mixed with cartoonish qualities. One wonders if the creator of head-tripping classics Memento and Inception had applied the cleaner narrative approach seen in his Dunkirk to his latest film, we’d care more about Oppenheimer, the man, and Oppenheimer, the film.