'Oppenheimer' PEOPLE Review: Christopher Nolan's Epic About the Father of the Atom Bomb Is Stunning

Cillian Murphy stars as the towering but tormented J. Robert Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, starring Peaky Blinders’ Cillian Murphy as the man known as the Father of the Atom Bomb, is much like the director's last film about a turning point in 20th-century history, Dunkirk (2017). Which is to say it’s an astonishment, a colossal cinematic epic that bears down on you with immense force.

You may be rattled for hours.

Dunkirk, however, achieved its power with the mechanical thunder and roar of actual warships and planes. This new film, about the moral tragedy of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), all but overflows with articulate, urgent talk and argument — three hours’ worth — about quantum physics (of course), but also arms control, foreign policy, politics, Einstein, communism, hydrogen, loyalty and quite a few other things.

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Even the film’s world-changing central event — the United States’ detonation of the first A-bomb on July 16, 1945, several hundred miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico — is dramatized with grave, deliberate understatement.

This isn’t the nuclear equivalent of Charlton Heston parting the Red Seas in The Ten Commandments or the White House being blown to smithereens in Independence Day. It's about the birth and life of a thought that ends in death: When all is said and done, that rising fireball and mushroom cloud represent an idea, a mathematical proposition that has found its full practical application — this, despite the fact that there exists a slim but perilous chance (near zero, the experts at Los Alamos reassure themselves) that an unstoppable chain reaction will be triggered that ignites the atmosphere.

It’s the brain, not the A-bomb, that’s terrifying. What sort of mind, having perfected and produced a weapon, doesn't imagine or contemplate using it? Or making it even more perfect, somehow?

On the other hand, what sort of civilization can exist without logic and thought, rigorously and honestly pursued?

If you don’t find these questions unnerving, then just leave it to Nolan, who wrote the screenplay based on the Pulitzer-winning biography American Prometheus. A formidable technician, Nolan cuts across both storylines and time frames. He jumps from scenes in black-and-white to scenes in color, and from vast landscapes to immense closeups.

He also adds an occasional popcorn-spilling sonic flourish, a giant BOOM on the soundtrack. He's so dexterous, and so in command, you never stop gripping your seat. (The film should be seen on the largest screen you can find, optimally IMAX 70mm.)

Oppenheimer could be thought of as Warren Beatty’s Reds on steroids, but it plays more like an action thriller. It’s as if Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One were actually a serious reckoning with death: Tom Cruise's parachute doesn't open. His motorcycle lands wide of the train. The train goes over the cliff, taking every last passenger with it.

Looking like a beautiful, reed-thin wraith trapped among the living after the conclusion of a seance, Murphy plays Oppenheimer from his student days in England, quietly pleased at being the smartest whip on possibly several continents,  through his final years, when he's haunted by his role overseeing the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb.

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Oppenheimer famously claimed that he remembered a line from Hindu scripture after the successful New Mexico test — “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — but it turned out he wasn’t really cut out for the job.

Oppenheimer’s genius hadn’t given him much insight, or foresight, into the bomb’s quickly shifting, growing strategic value. Designed to defeat Germany, it instead became the instrument of annihilation responsible for Japan’s surrender, then the United States’ ultimate check on Russia in the arms race.

When Oppenheimer argued after the war that nuclear information should be shared, his position triggered a different kind of chain reaction. Attacked with the weaponized ideas of the Red Scare, he was accused of being a traitor who had never outgrown his youthful sympathy for the Communist cause, who possibly even knew of Soviet moles.

If Oppenheimer was naive — he once said he had never learned a “normal, healthy way to be a bastard” — he was nonetheless treated brutally, and unjustly, by Washington.

Well, that’s a complex man and his role in America — an America he helped transform — reduced to a few sentences. (The e-book is 736 pages.) We apologize. Narrative boilerplate can't convey how much emotion Murphy is able to suggest with just his startling, staring blue eyes and slight but alluring chilliness, or how he expresses searing inner suffering while showing almost nothing externally.

And then there's the intelligence, ingenuity and care with which Nolan's film has recreated the circles through which Oppenheimer moved and, finally, stumbled.

Everyone in Hollywood seems to have been cast in this movie, from Gary Oldman, who has one acid-etched scene as President Truman (he dismisses Oppenheimer as a crybaby) to Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife Kitty, loyal even as life slowly and thoroughly roasts her like something on a rotisserie spit.

The most significant supporting role, though, is Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, played by a superb Robert Downey Jr. Strauss is Oppenheimer’s emotional and intellectual counterpoint — a careerist, shrewd, glad-handing and ruthless.

In a sense, the two of them, Strauss and Oppenheimer, collapse together into a black hole, one that consumes and crushes both pure ambition and pure thought, the cynic and the idealist alike.

Oppenheimer is in theaters Friday.

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