Review : Oppenheimer

Let's start the new year with something positive : nuclear bombs.

Okay, let's not do that exactly, but after having slated pretty much all of Christopher Nolan's recent cinematic offerings, I feel honour-bound to give the guy his due when it comes to Oppenheimer. After being quite irritated by being unable to see it at the cinema (we waited so long for IMAX bookings to subside that by the time we decided to go for a regular screening, they were then only showing it at unfeasible hours), I finally saw it at home on 4k. And, having been disappointed time and again by Nolan of late, I'm glad to say that this is a long overdue return to form.

To recap, I loathed Interstellar with its rampant inaccuracies but claims to the contrary and its daft idea of "love crossing the dimensions" (urrraaarrrrggkkkk !). I found Dunkirk to be hugely underdone and anti-climatic. And Tenet felt like intellectual masturbation, relying far too heavily on a pretentious gimmick and being all but inaudible. While I admire Nolan's commitment to practical effects, sometimes he goes too far with this. Narratively too, many a time I've wondered if he's so pretentious that he's likely to disappear up his own arsehole in a singularity to rival anything in Interstellar.

But when he's right, he's right, and after such a run of largely crap, Oppenheimer at long last delivers the goods. It starts a little worryingly with Oppenheimer portrayed as the classic lone maverick genius, with one truly laughable line, "I liked your paper on molecules" repeated several times despite sounding like he's just come out of pre-school. And we get a lot of genuinely very pretty minimalistic art sequences to portray Oppenheimer's ability to see beyond the mundane surface reality and into the quantum realm, which is, I stress, gorgeous, but real scientists aren't usually so up themselves.

Shut up, we're not.

The style of delivery also takes some getting used to. It frequently jumps back and forth between different time periods and for a very dialogue-heavy movie it's extremely fast-paced, and add to that that most of the dialogue feels like the characters are literally reading out of a biography.

All this has the potential for disaster but... it works. The non-linearity adds a genuine extra tension to the narrative without being distracting, because it compares events which are similar enough to be directly relevant to each other. As a historian might draw parallels between different events through a direct analysis, so the movie presents them here. It also doubles as a story arc, beginning with a fairly standard narrative but gradually and seamlessly transforming into an Oppenheimer-vs-Strauss courtroom drama that eventually dominates and concludes. I think perhaps a few parts would be better left out and replaced with some more cinematic, music-dominated visuals instead, just to slow things down a bit, but this is a very minor quibble.

And what begins as another, "oh no, it's the Imitation Game* all over again" feeling rapidly transmutes into a pleasant realisation that "oh, you're not doing that at all". Oppenheimer is depicted as having a world-class understanding of the physics, yes. But he's not at all shown as being a lone genius or a revolutionary, but rather as an administrator. Many other figures** are from his own lips given to be more important than him, or at the very least necessarily complementary (in fact we don't really see any particular breakthroughs Oppenheimer himself makes regarding nuclear physics, which is largely left to others). He isn't especially socially awkward and there's plenty of mentions of his political leanings and activism. Overall, what emerges is a vastly more real, more complex depiction of a flawed and fraught human being than anything Benedict Cumberbatch would ever be likely to portray. For this alone I give the movie huge kudos.

* A perfectly good movie which I enjoyed very much, but it does fall for the standard lone-socially-awkward genius myth very heavily, and I really wish movies would stop doing this.

** Noland says in the extras that this is a conscious choice not to use composite characters and I applaud him for that. The large cast is never distracting, with each individual appearing when they're needed and not one moment longer. You never find yourself wondering what happened to so-and-so or who the hell that guy is. Everyone is there for a purpose and there are absolutely no pointless backstories. What we get is a far more realistic portray of the collaborative scientific process that most movies try to depict, without sacrificing narrative clarity.

I feel that by choice the movie has breadth instead of depth. It covers all the major moral issues regarding nuclear weapons and the impact on the scientists who built them, but at the expense of examining any of them in any detail. I think this is probably for the best. The overall feel is that it presents all of this to the audience for discussion, raising all the major points that need to be raised but not ramming any particular message down anyone's throats. Even the most villainous characters aren't treated as pantomime psychopaths but with some sympathy, making them all feel very much more nuanced and believable. Whether they were right to build the weapons in the first case, let alone use them, let alone use them against civilians... that's quite rightly left to the viewer to pronounce judgement, all the while showing that the same doubts gnawed at the protagonists as they surely must have done. It gets, I think, properly into the mindset of the times, of those caught up (in their own ways) in a vast and bloody conflict where there simply were no good choices to be made. It doesn't use the benefit of hindsight to cast judgement on anyone.

And it sets this in the broader political context of McCarthysim as well. In fact I think this may be my favourite, most subtle aspect of the film, examining the various political forces at work, the different structures of the political, military and scientific organisations at work on the Manhattan Project and beyond. I like especially that the detonation of the bomb is not the climax of the film but we get an extended epilogue of what happened afterwards which is probably for me the best and main point of the movie. In essence, it uses nuclear weapons as a clever plot device whilst simultaneously keeping the development process itself interesting and engaging entirely on its own terms. You could, if you so chose, stop watching after Trinity and you'd have had a damn good movie.

I do think perhaps this is a case of a movie that thinks too much and feels too little, but not to any serious extent. Quite unlike Tenet, it never gets hung up on its own clever nonlinearity. By and large we get a very thoughtful insight into the emotional lives of the characters; it demands concentration of the audience to follow everything that happens, but it isn't equivalent to solving a Sudoku puzzle in order to understand the basics, which is an approach to filmmaking I despise.

Overall, extremely solid stuff. The explosion is spectacular, the cast are perfect, the soundtrack is great (love Hans Zimmer but thank you Nolan for finally giving someone else a chance !), cinematography is perfect. I'm gonna give this one 8/10. It's a brilliant film, occasionally just a little too clever for its own good, extremely well-balanced but perhaps lacking in depth from time to time; I would rather have had a little less detail and more moral philosophy discussions. But this is probably only personal preference and I could probably be persuaded to bump this up to 9/10, and I think for the second half/final third of the film I certainly would.

Nolan, all is not forgiven. You still need someone to give you a good hard slap on the mouth from time to time. Nonetheless, welcome back to the land of sanity, and enjoy your well-earned accolades.