(Paris) Christopher Nolan is back where we least expected him, on the ground of the biopicrevisited in its own way in Oppenheimera film that paints a tortuous portrait of the American who developed the atomic bomb.
Highly anticipated, the film, which is released in theaters on Wednesday, retraces in 3 hours the key moments in the life of Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), a physicist who marked the history of the United States and the XXe century, and contributed to ushering the world into a new era: that of nuclear power.
As usual, the author of the blockbuster action tenetfrom the war movie Dunkirk or the astral epic Interstellar deploys enormous resources, with shooting on film in new formats (including black and white Imax), for a blockbuster with a complex construction and claimed visual ambition.
The title role is held by Irishman Cilian Murphy, a regular on Nolan’s sets and also known for the series Peaky Blinders. Emily Blunt plays his wife Kitty, Matt Damon plays Leslie Groves, the general responsible for supervising the manufacture of the bomb, and Robert Downey Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a politician who will precipitate the fall of the physicist.
At the heart of the film, the scientific epic of the race for the atom, on the secret base of Los Alamos (New Mexico) where, in the middle of World War II, scientists and soldiers of the Manhattan Project are busy developing the bomb before the Nazis.
This handful of men is both aware of crossing a point of no return for humanity, by equipping it with a weapon capable of destroying the entire planet, and galvanized by the prospect of ending the world conflict. And perhaps, by deterrence, to any form of war in the future.
The highlight is the first test of the bomb, called “Trinity”, and reproduced in the New Mexico desert without digital effects, but with old-fashioned tricks, one of Christopher Nolan’s trademarks. .
“In Our Flesh”
PHOTO JULIEN DE ROSA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Christopher Nolan, director ofOppenheimer
With computer graphics, “it’s hard to instill fear. So I challenged my teams to deal with the real, analog world,” Christopher Nolan told AFP during a meeting in Paris. “What we needed was to try to give our audience an idea of what it felt like to be there” when the first nuclear explosion continued, the 52-year-old filmmaker continued.
On set, at the time of the explosion, “we all felt […] what that moment meant in history. We kind of felt it in our flesh,” added Cilian Murphy. The 47-year-old actor explained that he had been preparing for six months to embody the inventor of the atomic bomb.
A rich and very complex role, both the film, adapted from a very detailed biography (Robert Oppenheimer, Triumph and Tragedy of a Geniusby Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Le Cherche-Midi) explores the dilemmas, contradictions and multiple facets of a man whose secrets have never been unlocked.
An ambivalent character, crushed by responsibility and doubt after the nuclear attacks of August 6 and 9, 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which claimed at least 210,000 victims and were presented by the United States as necessary to end the war, Oppenheimer is also one of the most famous victims of McCarthyism, in the midst of the Cold War.
Honey for Nolan, who loves nothing so much as mixing temporalities, stories and playing with paradoxes, at the risk of confusing. Alternating black and white and color, to reflect the subjectivity of certain scenes told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, the filmmaker stages crucial hearings in the life of the physicist at length, illustrating his setbacks faced with an administration launched into the hunt for communist sympathizers.