What Oppenheimer Knew

On Christopher Nolan’s surprisingly (and rightly) ambivalent film about the father of the atom bomb

Film director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan attends a special screening of OPPENHEIMER to celebrate the contributions of the film's crew and craftspeople at the AMC Lincoln Square on July 17, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Universal Pictures)

I would never have seen Oppenheimer on its opening day if it hadn’t been for my 21-year-old son.

He’s been a fan of Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking since he saw The Dark Knight (2008) a few years after its release. That movie, Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Interstellar (2014) are all among his favorite films. It made sense, then, that he’d be excited to see the maximally hyped Oppenheimer at the first available opportunity.

So I bought tickets a couple of weeks in advance for the two of us to catch an 11am showing on opening day—even though my expectations were somewhat lower. My favorite Nolan movie is Insomnia (2002), the only film he’s directed that he didn’t write or co-write. It’s also, not coincidentally, the only Nolan film that isn’t overly plotted, tonally bombastic, and tangled up (sometimes fatally so) in conceptually muddled pretensions. Don’t get me wrong, I like all the films my son and so many others adore. They’re wildly ambitious, even audacious in their aspiration to make Big Statements while also earning hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. But they aren’t great films, in my view. Which means I think all of them are overrated.

A Story of Ambivalence

Measured against these modest expectations, Oppenheimer is an impressive achievement. The discipline of having to build a film around the events of a real person’s well-documented life was good for Nolan’s screenwriting, keeping it tethered to the ground. On the other hand, the guy just can’t resist unnecessarily complicating a compelling story, which he does in Oppenheimer by telling most of it in color but parts of it in black and white for no discernable reason. That he also gives the two parallel narratives portentous-sounding titles (“Fission” for the color; “Fusion” for the black and white) that end up contributing nothing to our understanding of the events portrayed in each confirms that Nolan suffers from questionable artistic judgment that continually threatens to trip him up as a filmmaker.

There are other problems as well—an incessantly intrusive (overused) score by Ludwig Göransson; overactive editing that just won’t allow the movie to sit still and breathe; and a final hour in which a fairly trivial series of events (Oppenheimer having his security clearance revoked, and the person who orchestrated the revocation receiving his comeuppance) is, more than a little bizarrely, dramatized in the same tone of High Seriousness the film uses in recounting the story of the race to beat Nazi Germany in developing the first atomic weapon.

Yet the movie still manages, for the most part, to work. Nolan was aided here by a strong cast of charismatic actors (none more so than Cillian Murphy in the title role) who help to lend gravity to nearly every scene, whether it’s attempting to explain some of the more easily digestible aspects of quantum mechanics or contributing to advancing the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and work, and how they intersected with what one character, with some justification, describes as “the most important fucking thing to ever happen in the history of the world.”

More than anything, I’m impressed that Nolan managed to hit on just the right notes of ambivalence in judging Oppenheimer the man.¹ I didn’t expect such a nuanced take from Nolan. It’s possible he’s merely translating the fittingly complex outlook of his source material, which I haven’t read, onto the screen. Though this rather simplistic New York Times op-ed by co-author of that source material leads me to resist placing the credit there. It may well be that Nolan alone deserves to be recognized for these strongest aspects of the film, and if so, I’m happy to bestow it on him.