Flasz On Film

The Manhattan Project was a monstrously complex venture which swallowed billions of dollars, committed hundreds (and eventually thousands) of people to work tirelessly for many years, all in an effort to translate a nebulous and at the time paradigm-shifting physical theory into a practical application – a weapon to bring victory to the Allied Forces fighting on the battlefronts of the Second World War. These people, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer (portrayed in the film by Cillian Murphy), worked tirelessly on something that even from the point of view of hard and fast mathematical calculations was a massive gamble. This whole experiment could just as easily end in either (1) expected success of producing the largest explosion the world had ever seen, or (2) a complete and utter failure where the theory would not translate into practice and the painstakingly and carefully enriched plutonium would end up scattered across the desert without generating any oomph whatsoever. Finally, the experiment carried a non-zero probability that the chain reaction triggered by reaching the critical mass inside the plutonium charge would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere and wipe out all life on the planet.  

Ironically enough, a similar gamble is found within the idea of producing a biographical account of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (based on the book Modern Prometheus) and elevating it beyond the parameters of a prestige December Oscar bait biopic aimed at geriatrics and Academy voters. Therefore, Christopher Nolan, for whom this movie marked his return to the screen after the infamously flobbed release of his Bond-movie-backwards Tenet, took it upon himself to reinvent the canonical biopic for the purposes of his vision and to hopefully imbue a straightforward piece of historical re-enactment with cinematic ambition and scale.  

To this end, Oppenheimer splits its narrative structure into three constituent strands, all woven together and advanced interchangeably so as to detach the narrative progression from any semblance of superficial linearity. Thus, we are asked to follow J. Robert Oppenheimer as he rises through the ranks in the scientific community, builds a theoretical physics division at Berkeley and lands himself a job helping the military win the war, all against the backdrop of his potentially controversial political convictions, extramarital affairs and connections to the communist underworld. At the same time, we are also progressed (subjectively) through Oppenheimer’s own account of what happened as we are periodically whisked from the world of traditional historiographical storytelling into a barren interrogation room where we are at the mercy of an unreliable narrator. And then, we are asked to assume a bird’s eye view over the whole affair, as Nolan weaves in elements of the Strauss Committee hearings and – despite the fact this sub-narrative is delivered in black and white – the filmmaker decides to add more colour to the proceedings by introducing even more facts and people.  

What results is a dense brick of a movie that is perhaps a good example of how difficult it is to translate what comes across well in written form into a digestible cinematic format. However, I would lie if I failed to acknowledge there are elements of Oppenheimer that succeed in this heroic attempt to breathe some life, scale and ambition into what could have been a movie essentially indistinguishable from The Theory of Everything or The Imitation Game. It turns out that by simply applying a New Wave methodology Steven Soderbergh used to champion in the 90s – the idea of fragmenting the narrative and subtly colour-coding it to allow the average viewer to keep up with the pace without feeling either patronized or alienated – Nolan was able to hide somewhat successfully the otherwise formulaic nature of the material he was dealing with. Let’s be honest, if you decided to re-edit the movie so that each narrative would be presented in an unbroken fashion one after another (and I am pretty sure someone will eventually do that to see what happens, just like what happened with Memento which you can watch forward if you so desire), then Oppenheimer wouldn’t be able to escape the simple realization that it is just as formulaic, dense and unnecessarily overstuffed with content as any other biopic contender for the Oscars would be.  

It’s a movie marred by an overabundance of narrative conveniences and broad characterizations that somehow fly under the radar because the viewer is too busy wrapping their head around everything else that’s happening on the screen. However, if you are at least fundamentally informed about this piece of WWII history, you will immediately notice how Albert Einstein conveniently materializes on the screen every time we need someone to push the story along or to get the narrative out of a bind. In one instance, he even seems to have been hiding behind a car while other characters were having a conversation! Also, the famous quote from the Baghavad Gita “I am become death, destroyer of worlds” conveniently makes an appearance during a sex scene when Florence Pugh’s character asks Oppenheimer to read a random passage from a book she finds on his shelf. It’s quite frankly ridiculous.  

Now, this isn’t exactly new for anyone capable of looking at Christopher Nolan’s work with a critical eye. He’s been known to indulge in narrative shorthand, expository conveniences and completely manufactured monologuing as useful tools to lay some facts on the table. However, even some of his most plot- and exposition-dense movies like Inception and Interstellar could get away with murder because they could successfully overshadow these screenwriting shortcomings with the sheer momentum of their spectacle combined with the prowess of their central human drama.  

Unfortunately, this is where the problem is because Oppenheimer comes up short in both departments. Despite the fact Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh turned in inspired performances, the central drama in the movie is just as fragmented as the narrative structure, which – sadly – is completely counterproductive. The focus constantly shifts between Oppenheimer’s internal struggle with having played an instrumental part in what amounted to a massacre of innocent civilians, his role in inadvertently triggering the arms race between the USA and the Soviets, and his domestic drama involving affairs, parental absenteeism and marital neglect. And consequently, it is rather difficult to lose yourself in this man’s internal tragedy because we are constantly asked to ingest more facts and never get enough room to take a breath, let alone exist within Oppenheimer’s headspace for more than a few seconds at a time. Which invariably leads us to pay more attention to flaws we would otherwise happily overlook.  

Moreover, thanks to the film’s relentless marketing insisting that we definitely should head out and see Oppenheimer in IMAX and experience that nuclear test (shot in camera using cool tricks, as other bits of marketing will have you acknowledge) in a way you’ve never seen before, the movie has cultivated quite a bit of hype around its spectacle… which I can only describe as a serious mistake. Human imagination is a wonderful creation whose powers cannot be matched by anything we’d ever see on the screen. And if you consciously decide to amp up my expectations, chances are it might backfire, based on what Stephen King refers to as the monster behind the door problem. The longer you keep a monster hidden away behind closed doors and the more you build up its frightfulness, the more it is likely you will be underwhelmed when you actually get to see it. Therefore, when we finally – after nearly two hours of build-up within the film itself (and following weeks of antecedental hype) – see the blast, it just doesn’t come close to what we were led to believe would happen. It’s alright. But “alright” is Nolanese for “failure”.  

And it’s only downhill from there because once the narrative ties up the biopic part of the proceedings and fully commits to inhabiting the fractured mindset of Oppenheimer struggling with his moral compass, we are left with nearly an hour of running time – an hour which could be easily trimmed down to a short coda. But no! We are dragged through every other angle of Oppenheimer’s internal struggle with little to no consideration if it is even relevant to the story. I strongly believe that Oppenheimer would have amounted to a much more cohesive and dramatically investable experience if the filmmakers had decided to shelve at least one of those angles. It’s not Wikipedia. We can get ourselves educated elsewhere on Oppenheimer’s view of the development of the hydrogen bomb, back then called The Super, and how he may have been implicated in these plans being leaked to the Soviets. Again, it may translate better to the reader when it’s on the page, but as a movie, this is a distraction served exclusively to confuse and discombobulate the viewer into believing that the filmmakers are visionaries because they spin so many plates and use long words.  

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but Oppenheimer just doesn’t live up to the hype. I realize it may be an unfair statement to make but we live in a reality where Christopher Nolan has cultivated a certain level of expectations whenever he decides to make a movie. He’s not known for occasionally scaling back down and turning in a conventional piece of drama. No! By his own admission, even when he steps behind the camera to produce a prestige biopic, this prestige biopic needs to knock your socks off and pummel you with its ambition. Sure, the movie is an ambitious and dense narrative puzzle box disguising an otherwise formulaic narrative someone like Bob Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg would have turned in “as is”. But is it enough to give it a stamp of approval?

And this is the gamble. Like one of the central engineering assumptions underpinning the creation of the atom bomb where Oppenheimer and his people assumed a conventional charge would compress enriched plutonium enough to precipitate a nuclear chain reaction, Nolan thought it was enough to fragment an otherwise superheated with plot and utterly dense prestige biopic to convert it into a blockbuster. Well… Oppenheimer’s gamble paid off. He produced the largest explosion the world had ever seen. He single-handedly changed the course of history.  

Nolan’s gamble did not pay off, however. Instead of producing a nuclear chain reaction, his charge fizzled out and scattered radioactive plutonium all over my seat. Oppenheimer is still a prestige biopic, marred with everything you’d ever expect a biopic to be marred with, from narrative conveniences to unfortunate inaccuracies and broad characterizations. What was supposed to be an awe-inspiring nuclear detonation, ended up everything but. Interestingly, the online commentariat busy singing praises for this movie may not be aware that the explosion didn’t materialize. Only the radioactive fallout did.