“Oppenheimer” (2023)
“They won’t fear it until they understand it”.
It’s Wednesday 26th July 2023 and now four days on from seeing Oppenheimer for the first time, and as it’s raining cats and dogs here in the UK once more, washing away the early promise of a Summer extending past June, I thought it high time I make sense of the scribbled notes I made in the darkness of the cinema on a film I greatly admired and can only see growing in my affections akin to The Prestige into a genuine cinematic comfort blanket as well as a goddamn masterpiece.
As a starter before your Christopher Nolan main course, can I offer you my unabashed love on the entirety of his career pre Oppenheimer and a recent rambling tale of living inside a Christopher Nolan type day?
Act One: Fission
Scrolling through the cast and crew list surprisingly there isn’t one person credited with the overall sound design and as ever in a Nolan film, the seeming tick-tock of a relentless clock throbs and pulses through a sound designed to unnerve and unsettle you. Ludwig Goransson deserves huge praise for his musical score and composition, the second collaboration with Nolan following 2020’s Tenet, and from the cinematography of long time collaborator Hoyte Van Hoytema through the production design of Ruth De Jong, the team of set decorators and costume designs of Ellen Mirojnick, expect all these behind the scenes heroes and heroines to be front and centre come Oscar season, 2024.
Act Two: Fusion
Cillian Murphy heads a stellar cast that unless you continue reading here you may miss one or two stars as from the first minute until the last nearly three hours later, Murphy is supported by yet another career high performance from Robert Downey Jr, Emily Blunt, Alden Ehrenreich, Jason Clarke, Tom Conti, Josh Hartnett, Florence Pugh, Matthew Modine as well as Matt Damon trying to steal every scene and almost, almost succeeding. If that list isn’t interstellar enough, then also consider that Gary Oldman is damn near unrecognisable in his cameo, Rami Malek’s role grows with the second half of the film and we still have Casey Affleck and Kenneth Branagh to contend with alongside the ambition, betrayal, hope and mass of contradictions pouring forth from Murphy’s titular as well as very singular performance as J Robert Oppenheimer.
The only minor issue I had was of Murphy de-aged to Oppenheimer’s university days but it is a tiny drawback and necessary cinematic evil for the story being told (based on the 2005 biography “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin) traverses several timelines you’ll be unsurprised to learn as well as changing tone and colour to black and white and back again, but not necessarily (on first viewing anyway) in a rigid, piece by piece fashion as 2000’s Memento.
Act Three: Genius
Cillian Murphy confirmed the entire shoot for Oppenheimer took 59 days (WTF with Marc Maron podcast, episode 1453) 59 days! But the London born filmmaking genius has done it again. There’s little point in hiding any of my biases or my unabashed love for the movies he’s created (though Insomnia leaves me cold and you can explain Tenet to me any time you wish!) so as you would expect I LOVED this film. Oppenheimer can only age like a fine wine akin to The Prestige, and I can’t compliment Nolan’s latest creation any higher than that.
From ambitious idealist to conflicted outsider blacklisted in a “Kangaroo Court” from the profession he loved surrounded by spooks and spies and character assassinations based upon political ideology, this sets the table for the McCarthyism of the early Cold War and the war with Russia that has been raging, cold or hot, since the end of World War II and which shows no signs of abating to this very day.
Oppenheimer is a towering achievement from Christopher Nolan and I’ll leave the final words to my son who upon seeing it 24 hours before I did remarked that whilst he liked it, “Dad is going to LOVE this”.
And I did.
Thanks for reading. Please see my “Film” library for more spoiler free appraisals of hundreds of films old and new, or linked below are my three most recently published reviews from this year:
