“Oppenheimer” seeks to match the mythological nature of its central theme – an “American Prometheus,” punished for bringing humankind the seeds of its potential destruction – with a movie of equal heft, scale and (most of all) length. Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s epic film essentially consists of three chapters, with the middle, Atlas-like, holding up the weaker, drawn-out beginning and end.
“Oppenheimer” seeks to match the mythological nature of its central theme – an “American Prometheus,” punished for bringing humankind the seeds of its potential destruction – with a movie of equal heft, scale and (most of all) length. Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s epic film essentially consists of three chapters, with the middle, Atlas-like, holding up the weaker, drawn-out beginning and end.
In a way, this biography of Robert Oppenheimer, who came to be known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” serves as a sort-of World War II bookend for Nolan, along with “Dunkirk,” around his jumbled “Tenet.” Yet where “Dunkirk” possessed crisp economy, “Oppenheimer” sprawls out with a giant cast and back-and-forth structure that takes some time to settle in, and even then will likely leave many viewers rushing to Google to flesh out its details.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and concerns about the latest war in Europe involving a nuclear power feed an unsettling “The past is prologue” sensation watching the movie, made more sobering by its protagonist’s naive hope that nuclear deterrence will make war “unthinkable.”
Still, Nolan juggles a lot, in a way that somewhat works to the movie’s detriment. The excellent midsection proves fascinating, in which Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) guides scientists and the military in a desperate race to catch the Nazis – told, rightly, that he has become as much a politician and salesman as a physicist.
