Christopher Nolan directs a labyrinthine film on the “father of the atomic bomb”

When a Christopher Nolan film about Robert Oppenheimer was announced, critics were salivating in advance. Dubbed the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” as scientific director of the Manhattan Project, whose work culminated in the atomic bomb in 1945, Oppenheimer was racked with guilt for being responsible for the 110,000 victims of the Hiroshima bombings. and Nagasaki by the United States. Promising, Oppenheimerwhich comes out Wednesday, July 19, does not tick all the boxes, however.

Sophisticated and didactic

In April 1954, while the hunt for Communists is raging in the United States, Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is suspected of having communicated to the USSR the manufacturing secrets of the atomic bomb. Heard by a security committee, he recounts the steps that led to the manufacture of nuclear weapons, his sympathies with Marxist ideology, and his private life.

Accustomed to convoluted scenarios, Christopher Nolan indulges in them to his heart’s content in Oppenheimer. The historical character, himself difficult to apprehend and tormented, lends itself to such sophistication. But not wanting to lose the spectator, Nolan forces himself to be didactic to explain the phenomena of fusion and fission at the origin of the nuclear reaction, of which the physicist was one of the prime contractors. Added to the unattractive psychological portrait of Oppenheimer, the risk of losing the public is not far away.

Atomized

Christopher Nolan works with puzzles. Many of his scenes plunge the spectator into the heart of an action or a dialogue that escapes him and of which he will very gradually understand the ins and outs. If the principle has the laudable objective of making people participate in the spectacle and no longer just be passive, the process becomes systematic, therefore repetitive and ultimately formal. However, Nolan does it with the elegance of extremely neat images and the most efficient actors (Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Kenneth Branagh), at the heart of an ambitious staging.

But Christopher Nolan atomizes his subject. If he touches on the complexity of Oppenheimer, he needs a dose of suspense to hold the attention. He finds it in the hearing which structures the story: is Oppenheimer guilty of intelligence with the enemy? However, this is not what interests Nolan, his subject being man, his responsibility and his guilt. He skips a bit quickly over Washington’s justification for detonating two atomic bombs to avoid causing even more casualties by continuing the war against Japan. We have since known that the United States wanted to verify the effect of the bomb on a life-size basis. An atrocity that goes wrong. Also by wanting to preserve both the goat and the cabbage, both in meaning and form, the film becomes unbalanced, even if it is crossed by flashes.

The sheet

Gender : biopic
Director: Christopher Nolan
Actors: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Robert Downey Jr, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh
Country : UNITED STATES
Duration : 3h01
Exit : July 19, 2023
Distributer : Universal International Pictures France