Christopher Nolan is properly the best-regarded director in the last 20 years along with Tarantino. He has a way of blending incredible blockbusters with thought-provoking ideas. He has made a bridge between the arthouse fans and the modern moviegoer. He has breached the gap between deep thought-provoking themes and great action set pieces with a minimum use of CGI. He also brought Batman back from the dead and paved the way for superhero movies.
Everybody has their own favorite Nolan film. His films seem to resonate differently with different people, which is funny since they feel similar in many ways. He has a way of jumping in time and space. The music in his films is also similar.
Which brings us neatly to his new film Oppenheimer.
A biopic about the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer. On the surface, it feels like a strange project for Nolan to take on. He is not the straightforward narrative kind of guy, so a simple biopic seems off for him. This is of course not a simple biopic, the narrative goes back and forth in time, creating a nonlinear sequence of events, I would not expect anything else from Nolan at this point, but is it necessary?
In Memento the main character suffers from amnesia, he can’t create new memories and thus the nonlinear structure of the film serves to confuse the audience as much as the main character. Putting us neatly in his head.
You could easily tell the story of Oppenheimer without jumping around time and space. However, it does add a bit of tension to some scenes since some information is kept from the viewer and used cleverly later on. Like the scene with Einstein. Some sections are in black and white like in Memento, which also adds to the time period in a way.
Nolan also uses sound perfectly in the film, especially during the first test exposition of the bomb.
The film also has some scenes straight out of an arthouse film where Oppenheimer is attending a hearing and his wife is in the background.
Performances across the board are good, but you don’t really go to a Nolan film for performances since Nolan has always been more interested in big ideas and how to express them rather than characters.
The important point to note regarding Oppenheimer is that at its core it’s a political thriller. Different investigations are being conducted and the audience never knows who to trust. There is a political game underlining the film and that game is most present during the last hour of the 3 hour film.
The movie has been criticized for not being historically accurate. The problem is that all movies are a work of fiction, even biopics and historical fiction. Unless you make a documentary you are always guaranteed historical inaccuracies. The question is how many of them can you stomach before it gets annoying?
The film is a work of fiction depicting a man’s struggle with his own creation and the political game unfolding after the project is done.
Overall Oppenheimer is an interesting movie with a lot of different elements that work well together, but as a whole, I am left just a bit unsatisfied.
The sum of its parts is better than the film as a whole.
It is worth watching at least once.
However, as time pases I suspect this film to be less and less impressive in my mind and don’t see it being a classic for years to come