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Oppenheimer Prometheus unbound

One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing, by proxy, the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse. At Berkeley, the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland

Oppenheimer Prometheus unbound
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François Truffaut once wrote that ‘war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive’. This, I think, gets at why Christopher Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls.

‘Oppenheimer’, Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as ‘the father of the atomic bomb’, condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.

The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandisement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions.

One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation. The second follows the 1959 confirmation of Lewis Strauss (a mesmerising, near -unrecognisable Downey), a former chairman of the ‘United States Atomic Energy Commission’, who was nominated for a cabinet position.

Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically. Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film (which is projected in 70-millimeter), a format that he’s used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality. The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling.

In ‘Oppenheimer’, though, as in ‘Dunkirk’ (2017), Nolan uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event. Here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.

As Oppenheimer comes into focus, so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics. In the next decade, he’s at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics. Nolan makes the era’s intellectual excitement palpable - Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 - and, as you would expect, there’s a great deal of scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly.

One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing, by proxy, the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse. At Berkeley, the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland. By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator: the cyclotron (incidentally, the first cyclotron in India was made in Kolkata by Meghnad Saha and his team) and who plays an instrumental role in the ‘Manhattan Project’. It’s also at Berkeley that Oppenheimer meets the project’s military head, Leslie Groves (a predictably good Damon), who makes him Los Alamos’s director, despite the leftist causes he supported - among them, the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War - and some of his associations, including with Communist Party members like his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).

Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the colour ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation - Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome - to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the ‘Red Scare’.

These black-and-white sequences define the last third of ‘Oppenheimer’. They can seem overlong and at times in this part of the film, it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including his role as a Communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.

The movie is based on ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer’, the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the ‘Manhattan Project’. He served as the director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks. There are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film.

‘Oppenheimer’ is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history to which it relates.

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