![]() ![]() It also isn’t a story that builds gradually rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements) Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology - it is a lot. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. ![]() Most are in lush color others in high-contrast black and white. It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan - who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium - has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. The story tracks Oppenheimer - played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy - across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. The movie is based on “ American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. ![]()
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