Like the brilliant scientist it takes as its subject,Oppenheimerarrives at a crucial moment in history.
For most of the three-hour runtime, Nolan places the viewerinsideOppenheimer’s prodigious brain.
YetOppenheimeralso has aspects of a memory play, or at least an exhaustive biography cut up and shuffled around.
Cillian Murphy in ‘Oppenheimer’.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
Rabi is more skeptical: “I don’t want decades of physics to culminate in a bomb.”
By the time the film ends, Oppenheimer will understand how he feels.
The Manhattan Project was mostly a boys' club, as many of Nolan’s past movies have been.
Robert Downey Jr. in ‘Oppenheimer’.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
The other primary female character in the film, Jean Tatlock, is played byFlorence Pugh.
The film’s attention to political history contributes to its sense of timeliness.
(The stars evenleft the film’s glitzy premiere as soon as the SAG-AFTRA strike began.)
Cillian Murphy in ‘Oppenheimer’.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
But the film explains these ideas in ways more creative than the exposition dumps ofInceptionor the just-roll-with-it chaos ofTenet.
When Oppenheimer first meets Kitty, she asks him to explain quantum physics.
Her life, which seemed solid, was completely undone by a single tiny bullet.
Communism, too, is often divided into theory and practice.
