Thoughts on Oppenheimer

You know that old saying: you wait four years to go back to cinemas after a global pandemic, and then you go twice in the course of a month.

I caught Oppenheimer this afternoon with my dad and his lady. He'd expressed interest in seeing it, since it features scientists that he was (in some cases) vaguely acquainted with at Caltech, and since it's been the subject of cultural buzz for a while. Neither of them wanted to make it a double-feature with Barbie, so I'll have to save my Barbenheimer hot takes for another day. 

Though it's worth noting: what a point we're at in our culture, where the two biggest movies of the moment are a surprisingly grown-up take on a children's toy tie-in, opposite an impressively art-deco biopic of one of America's greatest scientists. It's hard to think of two concepts more diametrically opposed, but here we are: Barbenheimer's a thing.

Anyhoo:

The first thing to say is that I really liked it. Like a lot of Christopher Nolan films, it plays with the timeline, starting us off at the hearings where Oppenheimer's security clearance was stripped from him, and at the confirmation hearings for the man who, it turns out, engineered those other hearings. And then from there we see Oppenheimer himself, portrayed as a younger man at university. 

We jump among each of these timelines throughout the movie, and I suppose the jumps are meant to evoke the quantum strangeness of the fundamental physics that Oppenheimer studied. It's hard not to see that theme in the recurring shots of rain on puddles, which is sometimes a stand-in for nuclear detonations across tactical maps of the world. It doesn't play out like a formal experiment like the time jumps did in Dunkirk, but it's clear the two films share some DNA.

The casting is pretty great, as Nolan's tends to be. Cillian Murphy is not necessarily the person I'd have tapped to play Oppenheimer, but he's otherworldly enough to play to that sense of a man never quite at his ease in the world. I also appreciate the casting of Matt Damon as Leslie Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers, who oversaw the Manhattan Projects - despite the "Maaattt Daaamon" jokes of Team America, Damon's a pretty versatile actor who does a good line in that type of character. It reminded me a little of The Good Shepherd, which is not a great film and it's a different character, but it belies the sense of Damon as an interpreter only of youthful parts.

I'd also give a nod of recognition to Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty, who has some great scenes and lines. I especially like the reference in her first appearance to the fact that Kitty's a biologist - acknowledging that women could aspire to be more than housewives.

Likewise, the cinematography is as good as always for a Nolan film. It may not be bombastic like the flipped-over semi in The Dark Knight, but the shot of the gantry at Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project is about to explode the first test device was still breathtaking. Just as breathtaking are the shots of the Earth being ravaged by nuclear explosions, or the interstitials of reactions that punctuate the scenes of high stress for Oppenheimer.

I also loved the score, which put me in mind of that for Interstellar (probably my favorite Nolan movie, and among my top favorites ever). It doesn't achieve the same soaring qualities that marked out that previous film, but has similar tonality and motifs. The sound design is good in general, as well, with Nolan not afraid to make you jump out of your seat by keeping the visual of the atomic explosion silent for a long time, then hitting you with the roar of the bomb like a wall of sound.

Thematically, there are two things I appreciate. First is how anarchic scientists are among themselves. They drink, they joke (at one point Enrico Fermi is taking odds on whether or not the test explosion will ignite the Earth's entire atmosphere), they womanize. We see Oppenheimer sleeping with Jean Tetlock (played by Florence Pugh), married to Kitty, and only toward the end of the film is it confirmed that he's also had an affair with someone else.

There's also the political side, with Oppenheimer's contacts with labor unions and out-and-out Communists, including both Jean and Kitty. This is the other theme that I appreciated, which was a little more nuanced in its treatment of Communism and the arms race than you typically get from American movies. Nolan's themes frequently feel more conservative, so it's interesting to see how the characters grapple with communism and leftism generally here.

Overall, I liked the movie, and like any number of Nolan's other films, I can see myself exploring it further, trying to tease out its complexities. Most importantly, I'm glad I saw it in the theater, because as much as I love watching movies on my dinky 32-inch screen at home, this has big enough visuals and sound that watching it at the cinema really lets you get lost in the story. I'm even tempted to go check it out in Imax at some point soon, to see how it hits in that format.