Yeah, the other big release this weekend. I’d heard of people trying to do the double feature with Barbie, but that didn’t seem like a good idea for me. For one thing, that’s about five hours of sitting in a movie theater for a single day. That’s a bit much. For another, the tonal whiplash between the two seemed to make sitting through both in a single trip a bad idea. One is a lighthearted, comedic take on a decades old fashion doll with some feminist undertones. The other is a serious look into the life of the man who gets the most credit for the invention of the atomic bomb. One is set largely in a fantasy world with live people basically playing dolls. The other has the director’s teenage daughter appearing as a dream character whose facial skin was being flayed from her skin by an atomic blast. And one felt like it ran a bit too long while the other kept me gripped despite not having a particularly good seat in a crowded theater.
Oddly enough, the shorter movie is the one that felt too long.
Writer/director Christopher Nolan tells the story of J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in a somewhat nonlinear manner. The movie pops around three different time periods. Most of it is set in the past as young college professor Oppenheimer learns advanced theoretical physics, bringing quantum physics back to the United States and building the nation’s first department in the study, meeting with some political radical types, and eventually finds himself running the scientific side of the Manhattan Project. A second shows a postwar Oppenheimer’s grilling by a committee looking to possibly revoke his security clearance over concerns of his past political affiliations. And the final portion, filmed in black-and-white, shows the Senate hearings of one Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), up for Secretary of Commerce but whose own past with Oppenheimer might prevent him getting the confirmation he wants.
Most of the movie’s three hour runtime is focused on Oppenheimer’s life as he meets various scientists, clashes a bit with the likes of General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), dealing with a sometimes testy marriage to wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), an even more testy relationship with sometime lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and learns how to juggle the needs for security with the needs to build a bomb with a lot of eccentric, often egotistical scientists all working out of Los Alamos, a location that means a lot to Oppenheimer as he loves the desert almost as much as he does theoretical physics. However, Oppenheimer had concerns about the use of the very weapon he helped to develop, a concern that led to the other two timelines depicted in the movie. Can Nolan tie all these plot lines together in a coherent manner?
The challenge, of course, for any biopic of a well-known figure it how does the movie depict it. Can something that most if not all of the audience knows must happen still be done in a manner where the outcome can feel uncertain because, you know, the people involved in that event didn’t know it was going to work at the time. In this case, that would be the actual first successful detonation of an atomic bomb at Trinity, New Mexico. And I can honestly say, despite knowing the bomb was going to work, that it was a legitimately suspenseful scene, and perhaps one of the most effective scenes I’ve seen in any movie all year. The way Nolan built tension using character interaction, editing, music, and sound shows a real master at his art, and it makes for a great climax for the movie.
Then factor in the murderer’s row of famous and familiar faces throughout the movie, and not a single performance doesn’t work. Heck, I didn’t even recognize Gary Oldman when I saw him. For all that this was a three hour movie, the longer it went, despite not exactly having the best seat in an IMAX screening room, I can honestly say I was more invested in the movie as it went, more or less the opposite of what I felt in Barbie for the last twenty minutes or so. Yeah, this is a movie where I didn’t notice the three hour runtime nearly as much as Barbie‘s just under two. I wasn’t happy with Nolan after his reaction to various issues with releasing Tenet in the early days of the COVID pandemic, but I never wrote off his ability to put together a compelling movie. And, quite frankly, Oppenheimer might be one of if not the best of his career.
Grade: A
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