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.