Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.
Bleak and beautiful, Oppenheimer tells us about our apocalyptic future and pulls no punches in its fatalistic look at the nuclear age. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.
The events in the film are impressively faithful to history, with Nolan moving back and forth in time, on either side of the historic 1945 firebreak. We’re presented with Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a young scientist, lonely and unhappy, electrified by the new developments in quantum mechanics – the young leftist who never became a Communist party member but whose anti-fascism galvanized his desire to develop the bomb before the Nazis could, directing the work of hundreds of scientists.
Actor Cillian Murphy is an eerily close lookalike for Oppenheimer with his trademark hat and pipe, and is very good at capturing his sense of solitude and emotional imprisonment in an Oscar-worthy performance.
The main event in the film is that terrifying first demonstration: The Trinity nuclear test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, when Oppenheimer is said to have silently pondered (and later intoned on television) Vishnu’s lines from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds …”
As Nolan reminds us, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.
Oppenheimer, rated 14A, plays at the Patricia Theatre (5848 Ash Avenue, Powell River) from September 8 to 14 at 7 pm, with a matinee on Sunday, September 10, at 1:30 pm. Running time is two hours and 57 minutes.
Gary Shilling is executive director of qathet Film Society.
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