Warning: plot spoilers for Oppenheimer below!
For Christopher Nolan, only one thing matters as a filmmaker: the plot. He approaches movies as though they’re jigsaw puzzles, which is especially obvious in time-hopping movies like Memento (2000) and Tenet (2020), but true even of his more linear works, which, despite their surface moments of dreamlike abstraction, are usually devoted to plowing through their narratives as quickly and clearly as possible. This is especially unfortunate in Inception (2010), which is supposed to feel oneiric but devotes most of its running time to clunky exposition. Some of his works tip their hat at “big themes”—anarchy vs. civilization in The Dark Knight (2008), the machinery of war in Dunkirk (2017)—but those ideas are often presented through snippets of explicit dialogue before moving on to the next big set piece. His films never take the time to slow down and elaborate on those themes, or dwell on the characters and their relationships, or even indulge in formal experimentation, despite his reputation for visual grandiosity. In short, he might be the most overhyped director working today: the opposite of a humanist or cerebral filmmaker, focusing almost entirely on surface mechanics.
And yet I had hope for Oppenheimer, if only because of its subject matter. Here, surely, Nolan would be able to portray the lead-up to and fallout from the development of the atomic bomb in ways that warranted his achronological, cross-cutting approach. Even his lack of thematic rigor wouldn’t be a major problem, or so I had hoped: the implications of mutual annihilation that Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project set in motion should be obvious to any thinking viewer who extends their interpretation beyond the scope of the film itself. Maybe because we don’t have many event movies anymore that utilize enormous budgets and endless resources to create sophisticated, visceral work, I wanted to like Oppenheimer.
Sadly, though, I don’t, in almost any way. His previous film Tenet might be his worst movie, but I think Oppenheimer reveals Nolan’s faults even more glaringly. The film opens with a plaintive shot of raindrops falling in a puddle of water (making a connection to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which is briefly glimpsed later in the movie), then cuts to Oppenheimer’s inward visions of nuclear fission, presented through abstract blips of light, color, shape, and movement (as well as ear-splitting sound effects). It’s an arresting opening, but also indicative of the lack of dynamics in Nolan’s films: nearly everything is played at the level of bombast, even ostensibly quieter or tenser moments, so nothing really stands out as significant. Nolan’s usual composer, Hans Zimmer, was unable to work on Oppenheimer (he was busy with Dune: Part Two instead), but the soundtrack here by Ludwig Göransson does its best Zimmer impression: the droning strings and pounding percussion rarely abate throughout the film’s three-hour running time.
Oppenheimer speeds through the man’s early years as a student of physics, shuttling from Cambridge to Bonn to Berkeley and meeting “geniuses” like Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer). It’s in California that Oppenheimer first initiates an affair with the manic-depressive Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and then marries a biologist-turned-housewife named Kitty (Emily Blunt). He also dabbles in Communism before leaving the party, which is a precondition of his being assigned to lead the Manhattan Project—the American military’s attempt to create an atomic bomb before the Nazis (or the Soviets, even though they were an ally of the U.S. during wartime). So Oppenheimer creates a scientific community in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the film presents as a haven from his boyhood years (unfortunately, less time is spent on the fact that Los Alamos was built on land stolen from the Pueblo Indians). He soon gathers a team of the most brilliant scientists on the planet to aid in the creation of a superpower’s most destructive weapon.
All of this is conveyed through a rush of imagery and exposition, usually through the elaborate cross-cutting for which Nolan has become known. There are flash-forwards, for example, to a later time period in which Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, testifies at his swearing-in to become Secretary of Commerce, during which Strauss is asked about his longstanding animosity with Oppenheimer (whose security clearance Strauss revoked in the wake of World War II). The filmmakers who pioneered the use of cross-cutting, like D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, did so to either maximize the clarity and excitement of the narrative (in Griffith’s case) or present thematic metaphors and analogies (in the case of Eisenstein), but Nolan apparently uses cross-cutting to obscure and complicate things, not clarify or elaborate on them. What, for instance, is the point of cutting back and forth between the scenes of the Manhattan Project (filmed in color) and Strauss’s comeuppance in the 1950s (which are presented in a flat, seemingly lightless black-and-white, thanks in part to the fact that Kodak developed new black-and-white film stock for IMAX cameras)? The intent seems to be to establish a contrast between Oppenheimer’s complicated patriotism (he invented the A-bomb but wanted the U.S. government to share its information with its allies, including the Soviet Union) and Strauss’s vain political backstabbing, suggested to be a symptom of McCarthy-era Communist witchhunts. That might have been an intriguing contrast, but Oppenheimer rushes through everything so singlemindedly that nothing registers on an emotional or conceptual level. The film bludgeons the audience so relentlessly that all we can focus on is what’s happening onscreen right now, at this very moment; we’re discouraged from thinking about these characters or these themes in any depth after the movie is over.
This is true of the plot synopsis I briefly outlined above, which is packed with hypothetically interesting subtexts that Oppenheimer stubbornly dismisses. Let’s start with the film’s female characters, who exist only in relation to Oppenheimer. The character of Jean Tatlock is clearly suffering from mental illness, but the movie doesn’t have the time to convey her distress with any empathy. She’s characterized only by this one dramatic trait, and her suicide (in the wake of Oppenheimer’s abandonment of her) is notable only for its impact on the man, not because of what she was going through. Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, hardly fares any better: one of her first lines of dialogue makes it clear that she’s suffocated by her role as a housewife, but she remains exactly that in her marriage with Oppenheimer, a harried housekeeper taking care of their children. Her alcoholism is bluntly shown but never explored with any depth. Oppenheimer has the nerve to give her a grandstanding speech in defense of her husband, then offer a melancholy image of the two of them walking arm-in-arm as an emotional denouement of sorts, but the movie has never cared about her character up until these moments, so why should we? The only other women in the movie are scientists who exist on the fringes at Los Alamos, even though they played an important role in the development of the atomic bomb.
The political implications of the early part of the film might have been thought-provoking, but Oppenheimer presents them only as plot mechanics, not as indications of American ideology. Oppenheimer’s interest in the Communist party is presented as youthful dabbling, which is fair enough—as a scientist first and foremost, his attentions soon turn to more empirical matters. But strains of socialist thought likely stayed with him for years, especially in his eventual rancor with America’s warmongering hostilities with the Soviet Union. The fact that American Communism—which was relatively strong in the early twentieth century—was violently suppressed by the military-industrial complex is a fascinating historical timeline, but Oppenheimer isn’t able to dissect that occurrence with any insight. Instead, the film uses Oppenheimer’s political background as a device to push the plot forward, culminating in the black-and-white flash-forward scenes that don’t clearly convey any political or moral point-of-view (except for “Oppenheimer good, Strauss bad”).
The tension between Communism and capitalism is connected to Oppenheimer’s “Great Man of History” approach, which is suggested by its very title and biopic format. Biopics, in their very nature, regard the human individual as the most important factor in our world: scientific geniuses, brilliant artists, or other singular mavericks who change the course of history. Capitalism has the same mindset: individual happiness, power, and wealth is all that really matters, so build you own personal fortune so you can own whatever material possessions you want (or, to use capitalistic lingo, need). Communism, of course, prioritizes the social collective, the group, the dialectical forces of politics and the economy that impact people’s lives. In this way, Oppenheimer is a resolutely capitalistic movie by focusing primarily on its eponymous subject’s life, crises, heartaches, and accomplishments. But the film is muddy about this, too: although he’s explicitly referred to as a great man who would create the most defining moment of the modern era, it’s also made clear that Oppenheimer relied on the input of scientists like the Hungarian Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). In a meeting with President Truman (Gary Oldman), Oppenheimer is even told that nobody cares who built the bomb, only who dropped it. (This scene may be based in historical fact, but it still plays like dull, middlebrow prestige fare: any time Oldman shows up to play a historical politician, I almost immediately lose interest.) So, what are to make of Oppenheimer? Is he an idiosyncratic genius whose creation would impact global politics from that moment on, or only one figure in a vast and complex network of people and social forces that could only end in mass destruction? Oppenheimer can’t seem to decide, which only heightens its lack of meaning.
In the past, Nolan’s films have been elevated by grandiose set pieces that remain memorable long after the movie is over: the Joker’s infiltration of the hospital in The Dark Knight, the gravity-defying hallway fight in Inception, the forwards-and-backwards car chase in Tenet, et al. The same is true here as the film culminates in “the Trinity test,” a detonation of a nuclear bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16, 1945. (Even that name, which means “dead man’s route,” might have been an intriguing point for the film to include.) All of the countdowns and impassioned debates and concerns about destroying the world lead to this moment, which is hauntingly conveyed through an eerie almost-silence (a welcome reprieve!) and stunning close-ups of the conflagrations that ensue within the detonation. It’s the most viscerally striking moment in the film, and you get the sense that it’s the entire reason Nolan made it. But even that “highlight” is questionable: it fetishizes the doomsday beauty of nuclear annihilation. It’s such an apocalyptic moment, in fact, that you might expect it to be a major concern for the rest of the film, but aside from a few obligatory and powerless scenes in which Oppenheimer envisions the gruesome impacts of a nuclear bomb on human flesh, it’s mostly disregarded as the movie steamrolls through its overstuffed plot. Oppenheimer may lament the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, but for the most part, the film named after him has no time to mourn the bombs’ countless Japanese victims. If Oppenheimer the movie had any thematic impetus, you would think it would be the man’s feelings of guilt and culpability in the wake of such devastation, but this “insight” is so obviously and cursorily presented that it fails to register; there’s one scene and a few lines of dialogue that express his ambivalence, but like everything else, they’re rattled off with blunt rapidity, another jigsaw piece for Nolan to shove into place.
Maybe this all seems unfairly harsh: by nature of its subject matter, Oppenheimer encourages the audience to contemplate a world perpetually in a nuclear stalemate, with mutual destruction never very far off. (Its final shot is striking in this regard, though it could have been even more unsettling; perhaps it’s an unfair comparison, but episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return conveys the horror of nuclear violence more ably than all of Oppenheimer.) In order to have enough time to properly explore its themes and characters, the film needs to be significantly longer—if not, say, a six-hour film, then perhaps a TV miniseries. And yet, I can’t help but feel that Oppenheimer is worthy of fervent criticism, in part because of the resources and the hype behind it, but also because it approaches urgent and dire subject matter in the least interesting way possible. Political subtexts, character relationships, and existential themes of death and destruction are subordinated to endless scenes of men shouting in rooms, presented through Nolan’s flashy but vacuous structure. A story like this demands passion, messiness, vulnerability, a sense of humanity. Oppenheimer sorely lacks anything close to that; all of the plot’s interlocking gears and mechanisms have the machinery of a ticking bomb, but once the countdown is over, all you’re left with is a puff of hot air.