Movies You Gotta See: ‘Oppenheimer’ is Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus (for now)

I am a sucker for a “people talking in rooms” movie.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to see a dude wield a big cool sword, or a waiter drop a plate of spaghetti on a guy in a screwball comedy. But a courtroom drama, or a movie about a bunch of smart people sitting around a table, hashing out how to solve a problem … these things scratch a very specific itch in my brain.

I’ve written about a few of these movies for this column over the years. The screenplay for The Social Network is one of the best of the century. While a movie about a gaggle of high schoolers shooting the breeze in the library might sound like a snoozefest, The Breakfast Club remains one of the most enduring depictions of the trials and tribulations of America’s youth ever put to screen. And roughly 90% of Moneyball is just dudes talking about baseball, and it’s almost impossible to look away from the screen.

It’s hard to believe that one of these kinds of films was not only a box office smash, but a full-on cultural phenomenon – and this happened within the last three years!

Christopher Nolan’s 2023 epic biographical thriller Oppenheimer, which follows the life and work of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, grossed nearly a billion dollars. Yes, billion, with a “b.” When boiled down to its most literal aspects, this is largely a movie about scientists and government officials talking, and it was an absolutely massive commercial success. Oh yeah, and it was a critical darling, going on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

So how did this happen? How did a historical drama, which some might argue are, at times, quite dry, become such a colossal hit?

The easiest and most obvious answer is, “Well, because it’s a Nolan film.” This is a correct and fair assessment; arguably no other filmmaker over the past 25 years has better encapsulated the ethos of cinema being an art form with boundaries meant to be pushed, and because of this, the theatrical releases of his films have now become all-out cultural occasions. Nolan has continuously been on the cutting edge of what movies can be, utilizing ever-evolving technology and sheer technical brilliance to capture some of the most awe-inspiring visuals ever put to screen. The list of Nolan’s impressive in-film accomplishments is long: the man flipped a semi truck and trailer end-over-end in the middle of a dang street in 2008’s The Dark Knight; he staged a fight sequence in a spinning hallway two years later in Inception; he depicted a black hole so accurately in 2014’s Interstellar that astrophysicists gave him props; and his (very underrated!) 2017 World War II film Dunkirk is chock-full of some of the most ridiculously cool practical effects in modern cinema. For two decades, Nolan’s been working on a level possibly only rivaled by Denis Villeneuve’s (outstanding) Dune films. Nolan’s got The Goods, plain and simple.

Enter Oppenheimer, Nolan’s most recent film. Cillian Murphy stars as our titular physicist, who’s chosen to be the lead scientist on the Manhattan Project – the World War II program to develop the planet’s first nuclear weapons. Although Nolan’s focus is mainly on Oppenheimer himself, the film still operates on a grandiose scale, as to be expected from the filmmaker, and it builds towards one of the most ambitious and classically Nolan-esque set pieces of all-time.

I will never forget being in the theater and witnessing Nolan’s depiction of the Trinity atomic bomb test. The deafening roar of the explosion, the fire, the cloud, all created with practical effects – it really is Movie Magic, folks, and Nolan might be the only person alive who could’ve pulled it off, let alone attempted it. When it was announced that Nolan was going to try to recreate a nuclear bomb going off using practical effects, the internet had some fun with it; I mean, of course Nolan’s going to try it, because he’s a maniac with an insatiable hunger for doing the most insane thing imaginable (complimentary). And God bless him, he genuinely has what it takes to execute them.

One of the recurring themes found throughout Nolan’s films is time, and one of his main fascinations is how to bend and reorder it within the framework of telling a story. Nolan adapted the film’s screenplay from the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (and won an Oscar for it), and with his script, he gets a little weird, as he likes to do. Instead of just going straight from Point A to Point B, he opts to bounce around among several key stages of Oppenheimer’s life, which helps clue us in on the struggles he’ll face in his later years, and how impactful they were on him. I have to tip my cap to Nolan here; while this is an admittedly somewhat confusing way to structure a film, it places Oppenheimer the man, rather than the Oppenheimer the physicist, at the center of the film, which is another crucial factor contributing to the movie’s juggernaut status.

The scale of Oppenheimer feels so enormous in part because the Manhattan Project was a mind-bogglingly massive undertaking; nearly 130,000 people were involved in some capacity at its peak. Nolan captures the daunting task in several ways, the first of which being the assembling of a very large and very awesome ensemble cast. Nolan is one of probably a handful of directors who could bring together such a staggering team. Along with Murphy (who we’ll talk more about in a minute), you have Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr. (in an Oscar-winning role), Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke, Matthew Modine, David Krumholz, Dane DeHaan, David Dastmalchian, James D’Arcy, Tony Goldwyn, Alden Ehrenreich, Josh Peck, Scott Grimes, Jack Quaid…it’s just a ridiculous lineup that seemingly doesn’t end. Anyone who isn’t an immediately recognizable star is a “Hey, I know that guy!”-type of actor. Nolan not only gathers a phenomenal cast, but he deploys pretty much every actor in a way that plays to their strengths, and in some cases, lets them flex muscles we might not have known they had.

The Manhattan Project was made up of many brilliant scientists, but it all revolved around one man: Oppenheimer. The same can be said for the film; while the ensemble is lights out, Murphy, who cruised to a Best Leading Actor Oscar, is in the driver’s seat, and he has complete control over the character, and the movie. Murphy is note-perfect as a young, ambitious physicist who later becomes a man tormented by the consequences of his genius. After President Harry Truman drops the atomic bombs on Japan, thus ending World War II, Oppenheimer reckons with his creation; he feels he has blood on his hands. Oppenheimer confesses this to Truman, who is coldly dismissive. Truman firmly tells Oppenheimer that the Japanese don’t care who built the bombs – they care who dropped them. This, however, does little to ease Oppenheimer’s guilt, and in the years that follow, his professional career and reputation are systematically dismantled by scorned scientists and bureaucrats who clashed with him on America’s post-war atomic energy policy. Some of the attacks leveled at him are rooted in petty, long-held grudges, and others (in an arguably cynical manner) key in on Oppenheimer’s past political views. Ultimately, Oppenheimer could’ve fought back to try to salvage his career and image, but he allows these things to happen to him, likely seeing it as penance for the many thousands of people killed by the atomic bombs. He martyrs himself in a final, desperate attempt for forgiveness as mankind enters an arms race that could lead to its own destruction – a race he himself started. Murphy captures Oppenheimer’s academic, professional, and personal journeys and struggles in a way few actors could. Only a few others – Marlon Brando and Daniel Day-Lewis, to name a couple – have possessed the skill necessary to disappear into a role the way Murphy does as Oppenheimer. It’s the performance of a lifetime.

At one point in the film, Oppenheimer says, according to quantum physics, light is made up of both particles and waves. It’s paradoxical; it shouldn’t work. Yet, it does. The film, too, is a bit of a paradox – people in courtrooms and classrooms and various other types of rooms, throwing out line after line of scientific and legal and governmental jargon, somehow makes for one of the most thrilling movies of the century. It shouldn’t be possible – yet it is.

Oppenheimer is Nolan’s magnum opus – but that might not be the case for much longer. Our guy’s got a new movie coming out this summer: an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey. Like Nolan recreating a literal nuke in the desert, this is objectively pretty funny; who else but our resident lunatic (again, complimentary) would try to pull off The Odyssey? But this is the thing: Who else even could pull it off? I’d argue: no one! Nolan might be the only filmmaker alive who could successfully bring something so wildly ambitious from page to screen, and the fact that he’s even attempted it shows how committed he is to his ongoing project to try to reach the ceiling of cinema’s potential, and break through it. It’s human nature to want to find our absolute limits, and at some point, you have to push all your chips to the middle of the table and find out what’s really possible. Because after all, theory will only take you so far.

Jalen’s columns, “Movies You Gotta See” and “The Free Play,” can be found online at www.medium.com/@jalenmaki.  

Follow Jalen on Letterboxd at www.letterboxd.com/jalenmaki182/ to see what he’s been watching.