In July of 1942, a group of the leading scientists concerned with emerging fields of quantum mechanics and atomic theory convened in Berkeley at the behest of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In light of recent developments proving that atomic fission was indeed a harnessable force, the group had decided that a bomb designed to use its potential power to deadly effect was a “sure thing.” While they debated whether or not a bomb could be designed to theoretically utilize an even more powerful effect of atomic fusion, the Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller asked if these chain reactions could not go on to ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. While this immediately and gravely concerned Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, one of the only people at the conference that was skeptical about the bomb’s feasibility decided to run the numbers and found “unjustified assumptions in Teller’s calculations.” It was a dramatic possibility, but not one rooted in fact.
For a storyteller, it is too perfectly dramatic to be ignored, hence why it is something that weighs so heavily in American Prometheus, the Pulitzer-winning biography of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the story of a man who stole fire from the gods and gave mankind the ability to destroy itself. Bird and Sherwin’s book is spectacular—both in the literal sense of the sheer spectacle of the subject of the text and in their brilliant and feverous narration of it. It is a capital-G Great book about one of the capital-G Great men of the modern age. Like the terrible weapon Oppenheimer created, there is a strange, perverse beauty to the whirlwind life of such a figure. It is no wonder that Christopher Nolan, a filmmaker drawn to spectacle with a penchant for trying to tackle “Big Ideas” in the space of a summer blockbuster, would feel the immense gravity of such a story. Of course he would, if that is how the story is framed.
There are, in fact, two Oppeneheimers at play in Oppenheimer: the myth and the man himself. The myth of Oppenheimer is the polymath at the center of the revolution both scientific and political, a modern martyr whose regrets about his Faustian bargain turned him into a pariah by those much less aware yet much more powerful than himself. If his ego was big it was because he had earned it; he was a unique individual who had contemplated the full consequences of the terrible knowledge revealed to him by the secret world governing the nature of things. The man was someone who pursued knowledge not just in various fields of physics, but also the arts and humanities, although how firm his grasp on areas outside his expertise was always up for debate—in his mind, at least, he was ahead of those around him, much to their frustration. Rather than necessarily being the center of attention, Oppenheimer fought tooth and nail to be there. Opportunistically, being the jack of all sciences but master of none uniquely positioned him to be a leader of those better equipped to handle the details than himself, and his career naturally took a political and managerial turn, first by establishing California as the American hub for quantum physics, then leading the Manhattan Project, working on the Atomic Energy Commission and heading up the Institute for Advanced Study. Yet the public spotlight would eventually lead to his personal and professional downfall.
The balance between a “man” and an “idea” is one that has always shifted hard on the latter in Nolan’s films. His characters have always been defined more by their roles—detective, soldier, astronaut, magician, dream heist-er, Batman—than any complex or unique personal conflict. In fact, the internal strife in his protagonists is made up of little more than archetypes, and his antagonistic foils more often than not, function solely as psychological mirrors highlighting fears at the heart of the heroes. It is a penchant that has served him well critically and at the box office—the stories within his billion-dollar Dark Knight trilogy are nothing if not the embodiment of order fighting against embodiments of disorder, over and over and over again—yet it has also led to rather trite thematic results. There is not much to be gleaned from Nolan’s storytelling beyond the surface of the text, because his storytelling is more about structure than theme. His films state plainly, like they are demonstrating how magnets sometimes attract and other times repel, yet there is little analysis as to why. He is more than happy to show you the magic of a sudden transformation, yet the details are superfluous past their simple function. And when there are details providing purpose to the narrative or some real-world analogue, they tend to be deeply troubling, not through truth-telling but through their strange political prisms. Perhaps the lowest hanging fruit here is, again, the Dark Knight films, whose outright fascist plots center on a billionaire vigilante whose convictions are born by the murder of his Randian father, wherein he cleanses the streets from the criminals and insane anarchists whom the corrupt politicians have wrought. And for a time it seemed like Nolan was moving along without examination, pushing forward on the same iterations of narrative concepts and plot structures, focusing on expanding a language of montage meant to heighten experience above all else instead of taking time to think about what his movies might actually be saying. This apparently changed after he hit a box office nadir by trying to force people back into theaters during the height of the Covid pandemic, and he became obsessed with reputation.
According to his biography, The Nolan Variations, when he first showed his script for Tenet to his brother Jonathan, who had worked as a co-writer for most of Chistopher’s projects up through Interstellar, Nolan was worried that he was retreading territory he had already covered so extensively. Jonathan assured him it was not a retread, but an “apotheosis.” This narrative apotheosis paired with the biggest financial flop of his career was apparently liberating, and allowed Nolan to do something new based on things that had been rattling around his head since he was a child, when he first heard Sting sing, “How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?”
While many of Nolan’s films are made up of material sourced elsewhere, whether that be comics, novels, other films or even a short story his brother wrote, Oppenheimer is by far his most ambitious work of adaptation, working to condense 700-some pages of dense biographical material into a three-hour movie. The film moves at a rapid pace, covering multiple decades of scientific advancement, court-like hearings, communist subversion and, of course, the “race” to build the world’s first atomic weapon. Like Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line, the cast is filled over the brim with what feels like every male actor imaginable showing their faces for half a scene or giving a brief “my god” as they realize what they’re doing. To Nolan’s credit, his usual weakness—presenting a host of side characters that act as singular, reflective surfaces for ideas—works well when their conceptions, beliefs and values are laid out by real people in real history, and the iconography of the actors’ faces work as a vessel for these. Nolan often appears to give actors ample room to inhabit their characters, but their ability to inhabit is held back by the weakness of the material. When that substance is already established, it seems easy for them to play into it. The onus is on the actors: When the material is there (like for Cillian Murphy playing the titular character or Robert Downey Jr. acting as his foil, Lewis Strauss) the actors can really demonstrate their salt; when the script is lacking, so too are the performances. Much to the disadvantage of Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt, most accounts of Jean Tatlock and Kitty Oppenheimer seem to have about as much understanding of what made these women tick as the men in their lives did, leaving the actresses trying to pick up the pieces of poor biographical work that has relegated them to the service of someone else’s story.
Packing in dozens of years and many dozens more scientists, politicians and military men does have an obvious, pressing goal, the thing the audience really came to see: The detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb, rendered in the largest, crispiest images cinema can produce. There is a race to fit as much plot as possible in as little time as possible, not unlike the neuroticism that was guiding the mania to finish the bomb at Los Alamos.
Nolan’s technique of running scenes so fast that they are almost cut like trailers plays well in the breathless narrative. Oppenheimer accelerates like particles shot through a cyclotron, until it breaks apart like the atoms in the “Gadget” and the whole earth stands still. It is incredible that Nolan makes the most expected moment of the film also the most shocking in his career—the atom splits with it the image and sound, breaking the cacophony of strings, metal and shouts that have filled every inch of the film so far; it is a prolonged and beautiful silence as they stare into the flames of hell. Then the shockwave reaches them, the ceaseless, low screaming wind of death that breaks the spell, one the audience has already been trained to anticipate every time they’ve seen an explosion on screen. They should have seen this coming.
It cries out that the fascination is morbid after all. It’s a trick that works only because of Oppenheimer’s perspective, because if one were to step outside the narrow lens of those involved, everything immediately becomes dastardly morbid. And if anything, history has completely vindicated those who fought against the “moral” arguments for the bomb: The Nazis didn’t have an effective program, it was used to viciously and needlessly murder hundreds of thousands, it did become a political tool for vindictive people to prove who could wipe out humanity the fastest. However, what is most important about comparing historical perspective against the actions and experiences of those living through it is what information was available to them at what time.
This is where Nolan falters the most, and it is in part due to how the sensational approach in American Prometheus fails itself. Bird and Sherwin tend to emphasize Oppenheimer’s more bohemian qualities—how sharply he dressed, his café society conversationalism, how he could woo a lady. Its myth-building is innate to how fascinating the authors think he is compared to the perception of what a top scientist looks like. Its apocrypha is stunning, like how Oppie and his brother Frank would ride out into the mountains of New Mexico during a thunderstorm with nothing but chocolate bars and whiskey as rations, but it is little questioned.
Other biographers have sought to amend this veneration, most notably Ray Monk’s brilliantly thorough Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, which paints a portrait of a man even more deeply conflicted than in American Prometheus, often bouncing between awkward and abrasive as he tries to position himself as a leading mind in his generation. Take, for example, the anecdote of Oppenheimer reading all three volumes of Marx’s Kapital on a train ride from California to New York in the original German. In American Prometheus it is presented as a story told by friends, an example of what kind of guy Robert is. In A Life Inside the Center, Monk points out that if Oppenheimer did in fact do this, then Kapital did not make much of an impression on him, because he never seemed to talk about it substantively at any point in his life, at least not that anyone can remember. This is an important distinction. It is like the idea that a fission chain reaction might never stop and ignite the atmosphere—in Oppenheimer, it is the thematic crux, but in real life, it was a bit of a joke. Examples of these details, that seem slight in the broad narrative but add nuance that change how it can be understood, are numerous, from his complex relationship to Jewishness and American patriotism, to his specific scientific interests and advancements along with (most hilariously) the fact that he was almost certainly not the “ladies man” that Nolan, Bird and Sherwin make him out to be.
This is the kind of biographical detail that gets twisted for narrative gain all the time, the only difference is that the story it is a part of has to do with some of the most horrific acts of violence in human history, which capped the most violent, genocidal and devastating conflict of all time. Oppenheimer, like Oppenheimer himself, comes down firmly against the bomb. The fundamental problem is how the story wraps itself around the knowledge, perspective and actions of those at the time; people were trying to stop the bomb before, during and after it was built out of worry for its fallout, even when there was a “race” with the Nazis. And the film certainly portrays it, but in Nolan’s classic determinism, the outcome is already made up, things are going from A to B no matter what and there isn’t much room to examine why that is. That is what makes the last hour of Oppenheimer so interesting.
After the bomb goes off, Nolan’s natural drive is over. All that’s left is the consequences. It is probably the most mature thing he has ever filmed. It feels ridiculous to compare Nolan to Fellini, but is there any easier way to describe the jump from Tenet to Oppenheimer like the grand culmination of La Dolce Vita being followed by the self-examination of 8 ½? Filmmaker and critic Scout Tafoya pointed out that Nolan’s Batman films sent a shockwave through a movie market that has hollowed out Hollywood and led to what feels like a doomsday scenario for cinema. Oppenheimer is racked with regret, with the main character’s conscience reflecting in the most dramatic, apocalyptic way possible that of the director’s. In this sense, it may also be Nolan’s first personal film (and that is to say nothing on how it could be related to his own pariah brother).
Oppenheimer ends with that typical Nolan unambiguity, but it escapes his worst tendencies of falling back on faith and institutions, and instead offers a deep, sincere rebuke to the ideas that have governed his filmography to this point. In this sense, one could argue that the film about the man that made the most terrible weapon in history—directed by the man that initiated the most destructive filmmaking paradigm in Hollywood’s hundred-some years—tries to have its cake and eat it too. Perhaps what draws Nolan to Oppenheimer so much is that, in both of them, even their best works fall into a trap entirely of their own making.
Alex Lei is writer and filmmaker currently based in Baltimore. He can usually be found on Twitter.