Oppenheimer is too important a film. From those who drain you of everything: words, breath, even emotions. Because it guts you completely, and what leaves you behind is a nuclear explosion in your stomach. It’s pure, visual, sensory, emotional ecstasy. AND a love letter written by Christopher Nolan to cinema (his own and that of others), but also a cry of hatred that he lets out at the world. It’s the film that makes you think about how beautiful cinema is. In fact, that’s what cinema should be.
The man behind the bomb
It is the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist – actually the man – who invented the atomic bomb. It’s a long, dense, layered three-hour story punctuated by three sacred acts that cover three crucial phases in a story that shocked mankind: the creation, the outbreak, and the world’s aftermath.
Three hours full of dialogues, looks and decisions that shaped the course of a war, but also of a civilization. 180 minutes that never end, a look back and back in time. Time, the compass Nolan has always used to direct his cinematic gaze: a non-linear narrative, which in turn is divided into three moments that the director looks at with different filters. A past where the colors are warm and soft, a time in between where there is the cold and gray purgatory just after the storm (hell indeed), a present where the colors are dying because the world has lost its color since that eruption. where everything is dead As Oppenheimer, From Prometheus, who gives fire to men, he becomes Death, the destroyer of worlds. Or rather, the world. A very perfect plot whose only limit is the calm rhythm with which the first part of the plot advances before the explosion; But when everything explodes, it runs, doesn’t stop, and throws at you all the pain, all the rot, all the ashes of a fire that can’t burn anymore because there’s nothing left to burn.
A story full of contradictions and opposites, political disputes and inner struggles. All or almost all lived from the blue eyes of Cillian Murphythat shine to reflect the emptiness. The best performance of his careerthat of a man divided between two worlds, two ideologies, two countries, two hearts, two women (Florence Pugh On the one hand, who plays the role of lover Jean TatlockAnd Emily Blunt than his wife Kitty, both beautiful and intense). A story that, by the definition of its protagonist, leaves you stunned, halfway between horror at a monster and compassion for those who have repented too late.
A woven son of exquisitely Nolan cinema, non-linear and designed to mesh, but disturbing enough to put the puzzle together and ponder the absolute value of an all-encompassing work. And therefore, in general, a film that is the synthesis of its author, the “sum” of its demiurge in terms of form and content: the testament that Nolan bequeaths to himself and to cinema, to the point that If this were his last work, it would be the perfect curtain.
Nolan beyond himself
It’s hard for me to think of a film by Nolan who takes so much pride in being a cinema lover in the truest sense of the word, even among the author’s old masterpieces. Because perhaps the director of milestones like “Memento,” “Inception,” and “Interstellar” has never cried out so much love for the medium. Never before has he been so keen to experiment with framing and symbolism. He who always remained concrete, realistic, pragmatic even in Oneirism. Oppenheimer is Nolan, who plays with cinema, with everything that makes cinema unique: with faces, with images, with sound.
He makes the best of the dialogues, catches the essentials with the looks, molds the talent of his actors (even). Robert Downey Jr. He’s highly impressive, despite fears that Iron Man has stunted his acting skills. Capture unforgettable images, accompanied by music signed by a Ludwig Goransson that literally never stops, except in the current moments. Then there’s the explosion: moments when time, music and beats stand still and the only sound that matters is the incessant breathing that marks the seconds that changed humanity.
And there is sound. Devastating, enveloping, total. Perfect. A whirl of noise, noise and disruption that amplifies anxiety and dramatically increases involvement. An extraordinary work, because it couldn’t be more artisanal: zero CGI, practical effects, recorded in the precious 70 mm format who deserves every effort in the world to be seen on the biggest screen possible. Great cinema, marked by masterful use of editing, complemented by a refined direction that marks a new and more complex maturity for Nolan himself (for Paul Schrader, Oppenheimer is the most beautiful film of the century).
This has never been so controversial, angry and demonstrative. Politically: his cry of lamentation against an America guilty of reinventing death, his cry of protest against a world that feeds those flames instead of quenching them. A warning about fear, guilt and resentment that is still very much relevant and always will be. At least as long as we exist. Until the next Prometheus arrives.