Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023)

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023)

 

Robert Oppenheimer was an enigma,” Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin tell us in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (London: Atlantic Books, 2005). The book is the account of Oppenheimer’s life and works on which Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer, a biopic of the physicist who gave us the terror of the atomic bomb, is based.

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Oppenheimer’s life was one lived, as Bird and Sherwin recount, as “a theoretical physicist who displayed the charismatic qualities of a great leader, an aesthete who cultivated ambiguities,” and yet he was at once also, in the years since those first bombs exploded in Japan and continuing decades beyond his death, a person “shrouded in controversy, myth, and mystery.” He was “a symbol,” fellow physicist Hideki Yukawa, Japan’s first Nobel Prize winner said, of the “tragedy of the modern nuclear scientist.”

Nolan’s masterful film is not an enigma, thankfully, even if Oppenheimer was. It is instead a beautiful virtuosic piece of dramatic cinema capturing all of this and more about the man, his work, his professional and personal relationships, and his legacy, and with all the seriousness and characteristic flare of a Nolan film project that should appeal to virtually any viewer regardless of interests.  I, being scientifically minded since early childhood and especially regarding physics, found the film positively riveting – all 3 hours of it.  I recommend it heartily, like many other reviewers giving it universal acclaim, and for a variety of reasons, most of them surely relevant to us all.

Photo: Universal Pictures