Oppenheimer: Nuclear bomb epic is a timely masterpiece

Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb, was aptly titled American Prometheus. No single man’s relationship to the twin forces of technology and ideology that came to control most of the history of the 20th century reflected this battle more than that of Oppenheimer. After unleashing the power of  nuclear hellfire on the world, Oppenheimer spent the remainder of his life trying to control it, much to the detriment of his reputation and leading to his fall from public grace at the hands of a gung-ho, hawkish, anticommunist postwar world, which had no patience for his belief that using the bomb to end World War 2 was the way to ensure peaceful coexistence for the world.

Christopher Nolan’s epic, three-hour, IMAX-intended drama about the life and times of Oppenheimer and the world that he changed uses Bird and Sherwin’s biography as its source material and begins with a reminder that Prometheus’ punishment from the gods for stealing the secret of fire, was eternal torture.

In Oppenheimer’s case that torture came in the form of the racking guilt he felt at what happened when two nuclear bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, and later in 1954 from a McCarthy-era tribunal hearing into his communist associations and left-leaning past orchestrated by his vengeful former boss Lewis Strauss, who the physicist had publicly humiliated and who had never forgotten it.

This being a Nolan film we are immediately submerged by image, sound and editing into a time-jumping narrative that weaves links between Oppenheimer’s past, his pivotal period as the scientific head of the Manhattan Project, the 1954 kangaroo court hearing and Strauss’s 1959 Senate confirmation hearing for his possible job as secretary of commerce. All of this complicated narrative is communicated through brief vignettes told predominantly from the perspective of its protagonist. Boundaries between the physical world and the quantum world, which obsess him, are broken down through the interruption of frenzied visualisations of atoms, particles and black holes.

In the film’s second hour we settle into the meat of the many scientific and moral challenges that Oppenheimer faced when he was improbably chosen by Gen Leslie R Groves to marshal the many egos of the scientific prodigies tasked with turning the theoretical possibilities of nuclear fission into horrifying reality. The climax is the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert on July 16 1945 and Nolan, who knows we are expecting this to be a moment of big screen fire, brimstone and earth-shattering explosion, delivers as no other director has before.

But this is no bombastic spectacle-over-substance blockbuster, it is an urgent reminder and dramatically complex tale of humanity’s Faustian bargain with technology and its ability to turn those who dared unleash its potential on the world from dedicated scientific pioneers into Oppenheimer’s Bhagavad Gita lines: “Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The successful achievement of the mandate of the Manhattan Project — the $2bn US government investment was the most expensive scientific undertaking in history — was the beginning and the bomb’s use on Japan was not the end of its story, nor that of the man credited as its single most important driving force. In the film’s final hour Nolan makes the far-reaching and timely points about the consequences for history and our present that turn Oppenheimer into one of this century’s best films and one of cinema history’s most accomplished biopics.

Nolan’s film is easily his most coherently realised and accomplished to date and it would not succeed in conveying all of these vitally resonant ideas without the visually awesome contributions of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the urgent impending drama of Ludwig Göransson’s score and most importantly the devoted performances of its myriad of talented actors. They are led by a standout Cillian Murphy, vulnerable and empathetic as he makes Oppenheimer not just a man of his time but a tragic hero for the ages, and Robert Downey junior who gives his best performance in decades as the slippery villain Lewis Strauss. Go and see it on an IMAX screen as intended, immerse yourself in the ambitious scope of its technical achievements and dramatic impact and then go back and watch it again and consider its often uncomfortable philosophical and moral provocations.

Oppenheimer’s mea culpa, his unsuccessful objections to the development of the thousand times more powerful hydrogen bomb, championed by his scientific rival Edward Teller, and his failure to see how the power of the nuclear bomb would be used to accelerate the bullying approach to global affairs epitomised by hawks such as Strauss, reminds us that though the Cold War and its omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation at any minute may have passed, the nuclear age that he ushered in is still very much with us.

Rather than Trinity having terrified the world into a cessation of hostilities, it galvanised it into a hardening of ideological differences, enforced through the threat of the power of nuclear weapons to blow us all up at a madman’s touch of a button.

That all of this happened because of the particular mercurial intelligence and unifying abilities of a scientific prodigy who was also a committed humanist and lover of poetry, languages, culture and metaphysics makes it more tragic.

• Oppenheimer is on circuit.