Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer (2023) is not about building the atomic bomb. It is about what happened to the man who built it, afterwards. Its source is American Prometheus, the Pulitzer winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The Prometheus of the title matters: the figure who steals fire, gives it to people, and is punished forever. The film interleaves three periods. The Manhattan Project, the security hearing of 1954, and the Senate confirmation of Lewis Strauss. The bomb goes off in the middle of the film and the remaining hour is entirely about consequences. The cleverest formal decision is colour. The colour sections are told from inside Oppenheimer's perspective; the black and white sections are from outside it, on Strauss's side. Colour tells you whose scene you are in. Nolan wanted to shoot in IMAX, and black and white IMAX film stock did not exist. It was manufactured specifically for this production. The Trinity test was not done with computer effects. Nolan had the explosion staged practically. It won seven Oscars including Picture, Director, Actor and Supporting Actor. It runs 181 minutes. Good for: history, biography, and Nolan. Less good for: it is long and dense with dialogue and names; viewers without some grounding in the science or the politics of the period will struggle. There is nudity and a suicide.