For his first biographical film, Christopher Nolan deliberately conceals important parts of the history of the “father of the atomic bomb” and instead makes the character a powerful metaphor for the American collective consciousness of the post-war period. This ambitious blockbuster about his life, one of the filmmaker’s greatest works, turns out to be a monumental, but heartbreaking epic about the self-destructive power of the human being.
Adaptation of the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2006, the film condenses the life of the physicist and director of the Manhattan Project into three unseen hours.
Born in 1904 and from a wealthy Jewish family in New York, Julius Robert Oppenheimer distinguished himself in academia in theoretical physics, before being drafted by the army to lead the team of scientists who produced the first atomic bomb. His relations with left-wing intellectuals and his opposition to the design of thermonuclear weapons (the H-bomb), however, discredited him with the American government during the McCarthyism era. It was not until the 1960s that he was publicly rehabilitated, when he was awarded a prestigious prize and headed a laboratory at Princeton University.
True to form, Nolan (Origin, Interstellar) superimposes — and constantly alternates between — different temporalities in the film. It depicts at length the building of the bomb, a process that culminates in the spectacular Trinity test in the New Mexico desert and the tragedies of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No reconstruction of the bombings in Japan is shown. The filmmaker chooses instead to tell how these events transform, even traumatize Oppenheimer, to the point of inciting him to oppose the development of even more deadly weapons.
Robert Downey Jr. steals the show
Cillian Murphy, who looks like him like two drops of water, magnificently embodies all the loneliness of this man plagued by doubt, if only by his tender and piercing gaze. Robert Downey Jr., however, steals the show, very fair and unrecognizable in the role of the impassive Lewis Strauss, chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), who revokes his security clearance and his position with the commission.
Indeed, Oppenheimer is genuinely humiliated by his own government, forced to undergo a bogus losing trial over his ties to communist sympathizers to justify his exclusion from the AEC. It is this narrative framework that constitutes the main plot of the film, like a political thriller. However, to restore all the tension of this “safety hearing” and to stage in such a grandiose way the advent of the atomic bomb, Nolan depicts in broad strokes certain subjects which are nevertheless fundamental which influence the thought of its protagonist and which are discussed in the book, such as his childhood, his links with other thinkers, and his life after the hearing.
The interiority of the character is therefore sometimes lost in the striking spectacle of the explosions and the vast landscapes of the American West. Fortunately, said show, backed by an epic soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson, very fast editing and an impressive cast, is no less powerful. Nolan eloquently shows how a small team of scientists could change the course of history in just a few months, without Oppenheimer himself having been able to foresee it. It challenges our preconceptions about the power dynamics behind military conflict and rehabilitates an eminently influential, yet unrecognized, figure in modern history.
With its budget exceeding 100 million dollars, which is rare for a biographical film, and its magnificent 65mm images alternating between color and black and white, the British filmmaker is back with a unique proposition that could win over Sunday cinephiles and the most seasoned. A breath of fresh air for commercial cinemas, which will exceptionally be able to present the film for months before it arrives on the platforms.