![]() There are other problems: the cursory treatment of the female characters is one. ‘A clenched fist looking for something to punch’: Matt Damon, left, as Lt Gen Leslie Groves, with Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer. Nolan’s films frequently require a couple of viewings to unravel fully, and while it lacks the baffle-factor of Tenet, Oppenheimer is no exception. Time in Oppenheimer doesn’t feel entirely linear – there are moments, in particular a pivotal encounter with Albert Einstein, that seem unmoored from the rest of the film. Insights into his stellar early academic career are punctuated by glimpses of a later humiliating security clearance hearing that picked over every aspect of his life the development of the bomb – the so-called Manhattan Project – is cut together with another hearing, this time in the Senate, to establish whether Oppenheimer’s former colleague Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey Jr, excellent) should be appointed in a federal government role. The version of Oppenheimer that we see on screen at any given time is a marker, an indication of which timeline we are currently inhabiting. Given Nolan’s preference for shooting on Imax 70mm film, the picture has a depth of detail you could drown in At other times he’s calm and glassily composed, somehow removed from jostling egos and the fusion of ideas that will take shape into the ultimate weapon. In one shot we see Oppenheimer hauling an armful of books into a new classroom, and it looks as though he’s buckling under the weight of his accumulated knowledge. He seems impossibly slight, a theoretical idea of a man in contrast to the robust certainties of the military figures he works alongside ( Matt Damon’s Lt Gen Leslie Groves, for example, is bullish and solid, a clenched fist looking for something to punch). In fact, Murphy’s physicality as a whole is one of the most potent weapons at the film’s disposal. Murphy’s far-seeing ice-chip eyes have never been put to better use. It’s a realisation that plays out, inexorably, in Oppenheimer’s hollow, haunted face as the film unfolds. Ultimately, however, the monster in this story is not Oppenheimer’s invention but the appetite for annihilation that it unleashes in mankind. ![]() Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is an atomic-age Frankenstein, a man captivated by the boundless possibilities of science, realising too late that his creation has a limitless capacity for destruction. But perhaps more than all of this, Oppenheimer is the ultimate monster movie. It weaves together courtroom drama, romantic liaisons, laboratory epiphanies and lecture hall personality cults. Oppenheimer is a dense and intricate period piece, playing out in a tangle of timelines. But “biopic” seems too small a word to contain the ambition and scope of Christopher Nolan’s formidable if occasionally unwieldy latest. It’s billed as a biopic of theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, dubbed the “father of the atomic bomb”. ![]()
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