Oppenheimer Review: Man creates bomb. Bomb kills people. Man goes WTF. Nolan makes billions.

Post the point of intermission, a particular scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer finds his wife Kitty tearfully yelling at him something that goes like, “You don’t get to commit the sin and then seek sympathy from the rest of us.”

That pretty much sums up the entirety of the 3-hour-long epic that is Oppenheimer. The following observations are all devoid of spoilers but we all can find the "leaked" plot of Oppenheimer on Wikipedia. 

Man creates bomb. Bomb kills hundreds of thousands. Man contemplates why he made the bomb.

This larger-than-life tale of one man’s path to greatness and his subsequent self-introspection could have been a simple tale of science and morality. And to a certain extent, it is just that. Just like how Emily Blunt’s Kitty berates her husband, Nolan also tries to critically analyse the physicist from a moral viewpoint. 

And while Oppenheimer gets his celebrity moments to shine as he’s cheered on by crowds in many a scene (with one even featuring an American flag waving in the background), Nolan ultimately tries to tone down the jingoism of ending World War II in favour of a more moralistic lens on the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”. 

You might even extend your sympathies to Oppenheimer as he sticks to a diet of cigarettes and insomnia (a hollow-eyed Cillian Murphy seamlessly fits the part) but then again, here is the man whose brain orchestrated the massacre of millions. So, even though he thinks twice about his actions, the second thoughts come too late. 

Oppenheimer could have very easily been turned into a sob story (a particular US Prez even calls him a “crybaby” in the movie) but Nolan utilises his ambitious runtime to point out the fallacies of Oppenheimer as also a family man and a politically ambivalent individual. And this is a fresh touch considering how Nolan’s last film Tenet failed to strike any emotional depth for any of its characters (Kenneth Branagh’s Russian villain even churned out painfully outdated dialogues like “If I can’t have you, then no-one else can”).

Along with assistance from his co-writers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, Nolan attempts to add some fine nuance to Oppenheimer’s character with an expected hint of glory (after all, the movie is named Oppenheimer). 

Reputed as a womaniser in his circles, the writers craft Oppenheimer as an academic bad boy who can easily woo both young students (*coughs for the age gap*) like Florence Pugh’s Jean Tatlock and married women like his future wife Kitty. Be it a verse of the Bhagavad Gita or just breaking down quantum physics, Oppenheimer’s eccentric but effective pick-up lines would probably offer companionship-seeking engineering students some hope. 

But keeping his theoretical genius and lovey-dovey theatrics aside, Oppenheimer is painted as an emotionally-immature man. He can’t handle matrimonial responsibilities. And even though he has sympathies for the Communists (who were being hunted down ferociously right after the War), he can never fully commit himself to a specific ideological stance. One can be glad that Nolan chose to address these morally grey areas and then, mostly stuck to this characterisation. 

With him quoting the Gita’s “I have now become Death, the destroyer of worlds”, Oppenheimer can arguably be regarded as a god among men as he oversaw the creation of the bomb. But at the same time, he can also be interpreted as merely a genius pawn in the hands of the US Army. 

This duality of the man named Oppenheimer is painstakingly captured through a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes (and the movie has plenty) that turn a good chunk of it into an effective legal thriller. The man who helped in the decimation of Japanese should have naturally been seen as a patriot by his country. Instead, his own morals are questioned in a series of legal trials and Senate hearings that are sprinkled throughout the movie. 

Thankfully, Murphy never goes overboard in any of these scenes and is always controlled enough to convey the real Oppenheimer’s tragic afterthoughts. And in scenes that demand more emotional reminiscing, Nolan lets Murphy’s steely blue-eyed gaze do the talking.  

Biopics about tortured geniuses often amp up the teary “Oscar-bait” monologues as is evident from moving (but arguably overdramatic) performances like Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game, Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind and Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything. But in Oppenheimer’s case, the jargon-heavy discussions also give way to the atomic bomb: the spectacle for which people have been booking their Oppenheimer tickets in advance. 

After all, Oppenheimer isn’t just a gloomy biopic of a cursed physicist but also the grand and visually-striking biopic of the world’s first atomic bomb. Regardless of your stance on nuclear arms, the recreation of the explosion is bound to fill your mind with fear and awe in equal amounts. As much cringe as it would induce (not as much cringe though as the man sitting behind me shouting “Into the Nolan-verse”), it can be said that the majestic testing and detonation of Oppenheimer’s bombs make for an effective “cinema is saved” moment. 

Nolan’s undying commitment to practical effects is responsible for this feat and so is Ludwig Göransson’s anxiety-building score that can give horror flicks a run for their money. Much like its titular figure, the music of Oppenheimer crescendos between elevated and mournful. The sound design crew also deserve a raise for the hauntingly ominous soundscape they have conjured. We all know that the bomb’s testing will be a success for the history books. And yet, the sound succeeds in building up enough curiosity.

With Oppenheimer boasting a seemingly unending list of positives, the movie also bears a few flaws. The runtime, for starters, could have been chopped down by at least fifteen or twenty minutes in the “talkative” parts (especially in the legal scenes). The movie hardly has a dull moment from the start to finish but the duration can be overbearing for some viewers. 

The science jargon is expectedly theory-heavy and would obviously be better appreciated by scientists. But maybe, dumbing down the dialogues could have altered the realism of it all (well, science students do talk in a manner incomprehensible to the rest of humanity). 

As Nolan has been held guilty for many of his other movies, he and his writers always seem to fumble in writing more well-defined female characters. Jessica Chastain’s Murph in Interstellar can be an exception. In Nolan’s defence, Oppenheimer could hardly focus on any women given how Oppenheimer commanded a boys’ club of scientists to create the bomb. 

But the two important women in his life are arguably reduced to relatively simpler caricatures. Florence Pugh gives her all in portraying Oppenheimer’s mentally distraught psychiatrist girlfriend Jean but her brief screen time only reduces her to a Sylvia Plath caricature. Emily Blunt’s role of Kitty is meatier in comparison and the screenplay uses her to subtly hint at American upper-class patriarchy of the era (Kitty remarks on how after pursuing biology, she "graduated to a housewife"). 

And yet, she’s reduced to another mentally unstable partner with occasional moments of rage. Despite her character leaving more unexplored potential, Blunt is perfectly cast for the part and adds some contrasting energy against the solemn Cillian Murphy.

The ensemble includes plenty of talented faces like Matt Damon (basically playing Matt Damon from Ford v Ferrari and Matt Damon from Air) and Rami Malek (whose limited role is more controlled than his Freddy Mercury mimicry in Bohemian Rhapsody) but it’s Robert Downey Jr who truly stands out. Freed from his commitment as the face of the now-sinking Marvel ship, Downey shines as morally dubious bureaucrat Lewis Strauss. Even with a half-bald look, the actor can manage to bring his usually sly, smart-talking energy on screen.

But, of course, the biggest hero of Oppenheimer is Nolan himself. Almost every character in the movie points out how Oppenheimer might be a genius but he’s a very self-centred genius. That perhaps applies to Nolan too. 

He might add that this movie is his way of objectively analysing a fascinating real-life story but we all feel deep down that this is his moment to show how great he is. Regardless of your involvement in the cult of Nolan, you would also nod in agreement to his self-indulgent greatness. If any other filmmaker crafted such a simultaneously engaging and exhausting epic, cinemagoers would have had more complaints.

We're going with 4 out of 5 for Oppenheimer.

PS: The so-called steamy sex scene between Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh that Nolan teased earlier is heavily censored in the Indian theatrical cut.