A flawed yet good movie.
But not great, when it could have been.
The quick take is that if you like movies with a traditional linear flow then avoid this one. Also it’s three hours long and there’s two or three R-rated sex scenes: very unusual for director Christopher Nolan.
I have not read the biography upon which the screenplay is based, American Prometheus (2005), but I have read two earlier books that covered much of the same ground – The Making of The Atomic Bomb (1986) and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), both by Richard Rhodes, the former winning the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction – and although they focused on the projects, Rhodes included much detail about the people involved. The latter book in particular deals with the infighting over the H-Bomb and details the fallout that was Oppenheimer’s security hearing.
As such I could follow the movie and appreciate Nolan’s attention to historical accuracy, but woe betide anyone who knows little of this. Having said that, my daughter, who knew only some of this history, was able to follow the twists and turns just fine, and was able to obtain from Nolan’s screenplay the importance and weight of the scenes. YMMV.
Nolan has always been fascinated with time, starting with only his second major film, Memento (2000), and continuing on through SF movies Inception (2010), Intersteller (2014) and Tenent (2020). Even The Prestige (2006) could be considered to be about time, given its protagonist’s vanishing “act”. And even when SF and magic are not involved, Nolan wants to push the boundaries of time, as he did in Dunkirk (2017) with three plot lines running at different speeds (the fighter plane scene lasting no more than 10 minutes), intercut, and then coming together at the end, with the result that it’s more Art Movie than War Movie.
In fact the last time Nolan played it straight with time was in The Dark Knight Trilogy, and that’s over a decade in the past.
And that could have been done, in fact should have been done, with this movie. The link between the mid-50’s security review (really a trial) of Oppenheimer’s past that eventually resulted in the loss of his “Q Clearance” (the security level that allowed him to be involved with nuclear weapons research), his pre-war academic career, the Manhattan Project and his post-war fame and then fall, could have been kicked off with a brief introduction to that review as the hook for the audience to follow the twisting path that led to it.
Instead it constantly intercuts between those four major areas, from the start to the finish – three hours worth. To make matters even more complex, the 1950’s part splits further, into two trials, Oppenheimer’s in 1954 and the one in 1958 of his main antagonist, Lewis Strauss, as the latter tries to get through a Senate hearing to join President Eisenhower’s cabinet.
Moreover, none of these scenes has any dates or other information subtitled. Nolan simply leaves it up to the audience to figure it out, which is a bold move given that 90% of the events of the movie will be obscure to them. I assume that the reason he filmed the Strauss hearing in B&W while the Oppenheimer hearing is in colour was to aid the audience in distinguishing between the two, given that both are talky scenes of people making statements and asking questions? Otherwise I could see most moviegoers wondering what the hell they’re watching.
Some scenes are also not well handled because of the score crashing over the dialog, the worst one being where Oppenheimer is directly confronted by lawyer Robb as to his “moral qualms” about developing the H-Bomb. I could not help contrasting this with the famous scene from A Few Good Men where Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise) confronts Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson) and the tension and drama are all the greater precisely because of the lack of any background musical notes. I can only imagine how that would have worked when Robb points out that Oppenheimer helped select the atomic bomb target list in Japan and asks whether he would have approved Hiroshima for the H-Bomb, had it been available, only to receive the chilling answer: “The target is too small”.
As to the un-Nolan-like sex scenes, all involve Oppenheimer and his unstable communist lover, Jean Tatlock (who would commit suicide during WWII) and two of them are gratuitous in that they add nothing to the plot. Admittedly the one that does is a brilliant metaphor as to what is being done to him and his wife by the security people.
Finally for the negatives there’s a small, but annoying note arising from Nolan’s desire to have minimal CGI in his movies in favour of live, practical effects, something he shares in common with Tom Cruise, who very much tries to stay away from Green Screen action stunts. I can understand this, given the god-awful saturation of CGI via all the recent superhero movies, but Nolan has used it to great effect in movies where he had no choice, like Inception and Interstellar, and it was great in Midway. And it would have worked for the Trinity test in this movie. In fact the old film footage of that explosion is so well known that I think almost any movie goer would be puzzled by what is shown here, which looks like exactly what it is: a conventional explosion. Not impressive or awe-inspiring at all when the actual test certainly was – and still should be if you’re going to show the emotional impact on the people involved.
Also, since intercuts are his thing anyway, during the scenes where Oppenheimer and all of Los Alamos wait in tension for the atomic strike on Japan, Nolan also could have done the Hiroshima bombing as flashbacks, at least from the point of view of setting up the bomb on Tinian island, the flight of the B-29, Enola Gay, and the crew’s reaction (though without any CGI of Hiroshima taking the hit, since nuclear attacks on cities have been done many times by Hollywood.)
The movie needs the sort of editing makeover that turned Star Wars from a pile of Lucas’s incoherent crap into a giant hit (Thank the Editor). For a start chop the first twenty minutes showing the mental and psychological struggles of the young university student Oppenheimer, then turn those intercuts into linear acts. Also cut out the background score in some of the talky scenes.
As to the good stuff, well, the movie does force you to think and remember. You have to do so or else you might as well just walk out halfway through.
The characters are not played as simple Good and Evil types (Oppenheimer at one point admits that he and his wife are “selfish and awful” people). Nolan got a great cast, with his long-time collaborator, Cillian Murphy, being a great pick for Oppenheimer. Also Emily Blunt as his wife Kitty, Matt Damon as General Groves and an almost unrecognisable Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss. It says something about the respect Nolan has in Hollywood that even a Best Actor Oscar winner like Rami Malek is willing to play a very small role, and similarly Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr. There are also many other actors that you’ll recognise and who might be called “B-Grade” but who bring a lot to their supporting roles (such as Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Tom Conti, Mathew Modine, Jason Clarke).
The cinematography is often stunning and the quiet background visuals are detailed and often sumptious in the manner of LA Confidential.
And between the intercuts the story does flow well in almost every scene, which only makes me yearn for what could have been. Perhaps in later years even Nolan might be tempted to do a Directors Cut and use that to perform a serious makeover along the lines I’ve suggested.
Now that’s a movie I’d be willing to see again, which is the benchmark for all the great movies. This one? Not so much.
============================
SIDE NOTE:
Our world today. The movie had the same opening day as Barbie, a PG13 comedy running under two hours which could not be more different, and which has thus led to tens of thousands of Americans booking tickets for back-to-back showings of both movies – with many guys wearing business suits to the showings as part of the Barbenheimer meme.
No Minister 
As an unrequited history buff my first intention is to bypass Holywood’s interpretation of such a pivotal bit of world history leaving Hiroshima and Nagasaki still, almost eighty years on, as the only civilian targets for nuclear weapons.
Yes there were breaches but the overall security of “Los Alamos” and The Manhattan Project was almost a “Holywood” in itself.
Thankyou for your service Tom, will need four hours respite care to view it myself.
The biggest breach was because the Americans didn’t vet the British team as hard as their own, leaving it to British Intelligence, who had their own problems with the likes of Kim Philby inside.
So Fuch’s, who was a full-blown communist, not only got into the Manhattan Project but was inserted at the literal heart of the bomb, working the calculations for the core of the Plutonium “Fat Man” weapon, the exact copy of which the Soviets exploded in 1949. Fuch’s information undoubtedly cut years off their program, plus he would have had some insight into the problems the Americans solved with their nuclear reactors that produced the plutonium (they didn’t have the resources to build something like the Oak Ridge uranium plant and take that path to Little Boy).
And Fuch’s was not revealed as a traitor until years after the war ended, when he was back in England, although admittedly due to American cypher cracking.
Of course it was Oppenheimer’s decision to place Fuchs in that job, but only after Teller got bored with and quit to work on his beloved Super Bomb (the H-Bomb).
Just as an aside, Fuch’s apparently said before the war that once his beloved communism was established globally he would have a talk with Stalin about what was going on in the USSR – as clear an example as you can get of having a high IQ but still being a fuckwit.
The two books by Richard Rhodes on the bombs – the first one is on the atomic bomb – are well worth reading. Heavy going and it helps to have reasonable physics/ chemistry knowledge, but they give a very thorough understanding of what happened and why.