Oppenheimer should have been less epic
The Best Picture favourite had a lot going on. Perhaps a bit too much
I watched Oppenheimer on the weekend and have been thinking about it a lot since, which is a pretty solid indicator of a good movie.
By contrast, I once watched the most recent Jurassic Park (Lost Kingdom? Fallen World?) on a long flight and literally could not remember it after landing. Someone asked what I had watched, which is what you do while standing by the baggage carousel, and I honestly could not recall. Weeks later, it hit me, but I still remember almost nothing about that film other than that it involved dinosaurs. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard were … protecting a girl for some reason? She was their daughter maybe? They lived in a cabin in the woods, I think. I am stretching here.
Anyway, Oppenheimer. There was much to admire about it. I went into it knowing that it was an unexpected box-office smash, a three-hour biopic (sort of) that was turned into a phenomenon at least in part because it was fun to say Barbenheimer. It cleaned up at the Golden Globes and is the presumptive Oscar favourite. I also knew that despite its success, I hadn’t really heard much about it. Why was it three hours? What made the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, worthy of such a thorough examination? I had heard that the visuals were striking, which again seemed odd for a film that sounded like it involved a lot of dudes in suits talking.
Conveniently, that last part was explained before the opening sequence finished, a roiling explosion providing a thunderous, room-shaking opening to the film. Christopher Nolan, the writer/director, does not screw around, delivering that opener almost as a preview of what’s to come: there’s going to be a lot of fast-talking now, but don’t you worry some stuff is going to blow up real good eventually.
But I still have a lot of questions.
Much of the film was engrossing, following the story of Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), as he leaves the United States to study abroad, except instead of backpacking through Europe he’s on a tour of the continent’s Theoretical Physics All-Stars and teaching himself to learn Dutch just for kicks. He returns home and is recruited to head the Manhattan Project in a sprint to develop the bomb before the Nazis do. Having spent time with the very Germans that are doing Hitler’s bidding, he knows that his team is starting the race at least a lap down. He assembles a crack squad, like the Avengers but their super power is being really smart, and they set up at a secret military installation in the New Mexico desert and try to devise the greatest weapon ever created while also hopefully not destroying the world in the process. It’s a big ask. The story hums along through most of this, the cast so packed with recognizable faces that it’s almost distracting. Hey, there’s Rami Malek holding a clipboard and looking pensive! Kinda weird that he doesn’t talk! (He does, eventually.)
When the story does get to the payoff in the desert, it doesn’t disappoint. The scene of the first test is fraught with tension, and then a massive release. It’s tremendous filmmaking. Great job, everyone.
And then I hit pause on the remote and was surprised to discover that there was still an hour to go. An hour! Shouldn’t we be getting the epilogue right about now?
But, no. The last stretch of the film is the metaphorical fallout. Oppenheimer is not too jazzed about the idea of a nuclear arms race with the Soviets, he has his loyalties questioned due to his leftist pre-bomb days, and while he fights to maintain his security clearance a parallel thread follows the Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), who was introduced way back at the start when he recruited Oppenheimer for a teaching gig and who has been a sort of narrator throughout, looking back at the events portrayed as he readies for the hearing with the Senators. Oh, and he got a stink-eye from Einstein for some reason.
It wouldn’t be a Nolan film without some complicated narrative layering, so we switch back and forth between Oppenheimer and Strauss in their own courtroom dramas, in which neither is in an actual courtroom.
There’s still an awful lot going on after the BOOM, is the point. I’m just not sure what it was trying to say. Bureaucracy sucks? Politicians can be self-interested? These do not seem like the kind of surprising lessons that would underpin the final third of an epic. Or maybe the point was that even as someone like Oppenheimer was achieving a triumph that changed the course of the world, he was unable to stop the ground from shifting beneath his feet because in the end, humans are humans. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s target.
If this reads like nit-picking, that’s fair. Few films even attempt something as sprawling as Oppenheimer, which explains history while being a thrilling spectacle, and didn’t even need Tom Cruise to ride a motorcycle off a cliff.
And in the end, we got to find out what Einstein was so huffy about, which was cool.