Film Review

Oppenheimer (2023) — masterful atomic drama falls short of masterpiece

The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

Attending a funeral in the mid-1980s, I briefly met a retired US colonel who’d been present at the first detonation of the atomic bomb, on the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945. I doubt the colonel ever thought of me again, just one of many strangers at his daughter’s funeral (all his children, born after that epochal event, had died of cancer before their fortieth birthdays), but I have always treasured that tiny connection to one of the most significant moments of the 20th century, which could still (if we’re unlucky) turn out to have been the most fateful in human history.

The explosion at Trinity was only a moment: one from so many millions in the colonel’s life. But in all honesty, I think of him entirely through the lens of that test, never considering whatever else he might have done or been. And this way that an event can completely overshadow an individual is perhaps the reason that…