Oppenheimer Review – Christopher Nolan's Big One

Oppenheimer is not an easy film to write about after one viewing. It’s a massive movie both in terms of its length and in terms of its intricately and painstakingly laid-out story, which defies all of Hollywood’s rules for biographical and historical films. Christopher Nolan, as always, is doing things his way. And it’s going to take the rest of us a minute to catch up.

Despite what you may have heard from some vociferous Batman fans, Christopher Nolan doesn’t make perfect movies. Not because he screws them up, but because he only takes aim at targets that are immensely difficult to hit. The climactic “temporal pincer movement” of Tenet, for example, is incomprehensible and doesn’t work–but it was also a paradoxical concept to begin with that might simply have been impossible to portray in live action. He took a big swing and he missed pretty hard, but how many other filmmakers would have even been able to try something like that? Not many.

By contrast to Tenet, a high-concept sci-fi action flick, Oppenheimer does seem a bit mundane. It’s just a movie about the guy who ran the Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bomb during World War II. It’s the most grounded subject matter he’s ever had for a movie, but that didn’t stop him from bringing the exact same intensity and epic feel that his action movies have.

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