Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin
Stars: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon

It is perhaps fair to assess that Christopher Nolan has made his magnum opus with Oppenheimer, a film dedicated to unraveling the tragic genius of the most fatally curious scientist of our modern age, weaving through his various exploits in non-linear framing that proves the culmination of Nolan’s previous endeavors.

Nolan’s penchant for editing nonlinear stories into a stack of weighted scenes that uniquely influence one another can be trying, particularly in his works that seem more obsessive over concept than character, but here everything tracks marvelously.

This is a credit to Nolan’s sublime script work, translating Oppenheimer’s mind into a first-person narrative (a true joy to read for any cinephile curious enough) only to then transition to a more objective and traditional third-person narrative.

The weight of Oppenheimer’s exploits can be mystifying. From a mere examination of the facts, Oppenheimer never did sign the petition against the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from this simple fact alone, it could be easy to conclude that Oppenheimer was evil.

Nolan works with this concept delicately, and as he weaves the complex tapestry of discovering who Oppenheimer was, it becomes abundantly clear that this gifted mind was plagued with insurmountable guilt.

Does it excuse the creation of such ruinous means?

That is left for the audience to decide. This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg in identifying Oppenheimer’s themes. Through Lewis Strauss and President Truman, we see a much more sinister uncovering of the world, a depiction of American ego as being the true destructive entity of politics.

Through Leslie Groves, we see a dutiful dismissal of individual moral ideology for a perceived greater good. Through Kitty, we see an unending loyalty and frustration that the greatest mind of the modern age succumbs to his own guilt and allows his private life to be picked apart in the hopes that his suffering will absolve him.

This is some of the most detailed character work that Nolan’s pen has ever endeavored, and as a result, Oppenheimer becomes one of the most well-structured and detailed scripts of the year.

But a script is merely a blueprint. Oppenheimer succeeds in execution as well as planning. Nolan’s signature exemplary visual effects and sound design are on full display here, but with Oppenheimer, there is a notable restraint that makes them succeed in epic fashion. Rather than crafting a spectacle piece that overstuffs the film with a robust display of imagery and technicals, Nolan dials back and allows the characters and story to clear the way for epic sequences.

The Trinity Test becomes one of the crowning jewels of Nolan’s achievements in cinema, showcasing some of his most daring and exciting effects work as the story propels us to this iconic visual, rife with tension and suspense as anyone would expect from this master storyteller.

But it is a moment that immediately follows, the gymnasium sequence, which layers together the most acute and harrowing depiction of sound design that I have ever seen. Oppenheimer’s subjective perspective allows us to see a fold in the world, opening a door into the recesses of his mind as the gravity of his creation throttles itself into focus.

True, Oppenheimer does not ‘necessarily’ show the details of the consequences of the atomic bomb, but much like another great film from this year, Zone of Interest, we walk away from this calculated avoidance with a visceral understanding of the cost that doesn’t endorse the actions but rather admonishes them.

Oppenheimer’s greatest struggle is its runtime. It’s an airtight edit that makes every sequence necessary, but one does hesitate to think if the third act, in its entirety, wouldn’t be better served in a separate story. The revelations surrounding Strauss, while magnificently performed by Robert Downey Jr., showcase as a surprise to an audience that should see them coming from the very outset of the film.

This adherence to a contrived plot twist over-embellishes the necessity of creating a sort of antagonist for Oppenheimer, and one wonders if the story wouldn’t be better served to sideline Strauss to a more peripheral character as we saddle deeper into Oppenheimer’s psyche.

It’s a nitpicking point when considering some of Cillian Murphy’s very best work lies in this quasi-epilogue, seeing his unraveling anguish over his trial, his awe over the fortitude of his wife and friends, and even his final conversation with Albert Einstein.

Oppenheimer is uniformly excellent in every sense of the word. If film’s aspiration is to combine all of the artistic forms available from music to art to writing to performance and fuse them into a cohesive whole better than the sum of its parts, then Oppenheimer is perhaps the best film of the entire year.