After nearly six months, I finally got around to seeing 2023’s “Oppenheimer” this past week.  It’s not that I was avoiding it, it’s just that I haven’t fully regained my moviegoing mojo following the COVID pandemic (I have only seen a handful of movies theatrically this past year, including “Barbie”).  Getting my old, arthritic butt to sit in a theater for over three hours these days is a formidable challenge, as well as a significant time investment. 

I can understand the perceived advantages of seeing “Oppenheimer” in an IMAX presentation, but having embraced at-home digital projection during the pandemic, I realized I can have just as immersive an experience sitting in a darkened room of my own house, watching movies on a 7 ft/2 meter collapsible screen with my current laser projector. Forking over $15-$20 to watch a movie once in a theater just isn’t as appealing these days.  So, I ended up buying a digital copy of “Oppenheimer” for $20 to watch at home. With a large, crystal clear image and rich Bose sound, I was good to go.

The details of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life are readily available, and writer/director Christopher Nolan’s movie stays true to them, with added cinematic flourishes. I won’t get too deeply into every significant moment or character within this lengthy movie; this column will be a series of sketches rather than a formal portrait. 

“Oppenheimer” (2023)

Through a dizzying maze of time-jumps (mostly in black & white), we are presented with a nonlinear narrative that begins with young Julius Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as a heckled postgrad genius studying at Cambridge, who manages to sneak into a lecture by Nobel Prize-winning Dutch physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). Bohr later urges the young Oppenheimer to further his cutting-edge studies in quantum physics at the University of Göttinghen.  

Later, during Oppenheimer’s teaching career at Caltech, the academic quickly becomes practical in 1938, as the first successful tests of atomic fission are verified.  Soon, the Second World War forces America and Germany into an arms race, with teams of scientists rushing to develop a nuclear fission bomb before one side or the other can gain this doomsday weapon. Naturally, the Soviet Union also wants in on the atomic action, but they are conspicuously shut out, despite their critical importance to Allied forces. This, of course, forces the jilted Soviets to begin their own program (with the help of sympathetic western spies).

Oppenheimer, who is Jewish, feels a looming personal threat coming from Hitler’s deadly anti-Semitism, and he’s soon recruited by refreshingly candid US Army General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon). Groves makes Oppenheimer an offer to supply the scientist with anything he needs to build an atomic bomb for the United States first. Cost is no object. Oppenheimer’s life soon becomes a revolving door of future physics legends as he tries to recruit them for the government’s Manhattan Project, including Enrico Fermi (Danny Deferrari), Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), Richard Feynman (Jack Quaid) and many, many others.  Oppenheimer and his wife Katherine (Emily Blunt) relocate to the newly-minted, sequestered community at Los Alamos, New Mexico to begin in earnest.

Note: The movie is a veritable who’s-who of physics greats. You almost need a spotter’s guide to keep track of them all. Such high-profile scientific name-dropping is unavoidable in any movie dealing with the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967).

Despite lots of infighting, bruised egos, and moral objections from within this isolated community of scientists and engineers, as well as the US government’s deep distrust of Oppenheimer’s association with the American Communist Party, the Manhattan Project successfully culminates with the earth-shattering “Trinity Test”—a moment brought to vivid reality, with nerve-wracking suspense, despite the audience’s 20/20 hindsight of its conclusion.  

Note: Such historical hindsight didn’t hurt James Cameron’s “Titanic,” either. Needless to say, the Trinity Test, coming at roughly two hours into the film, is one of its most powerful moments (literally and figuratively).

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki lead to the official Japanese surrender in August of 1945, Oppenheimer experiences random waking daymares of his colleagues and other associates burning to death from an atomic blast, right before his eyes; a literal attack of conscience from the man history would remember as the ‘father of the atomic bomb.’

Note: This is one of the ways the film tries to get us inside of the titular character’s mind, beyond his private admissions to colleagues. Beyond these fleeting insights, the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer remains largely opaque and enigmatic, despite Cillian Murphy’s Oscar-baiting performance. Also of note, I think the recent “Godzilla Minus One” (2023) did an arguably better job at conveying the horror of post-atomic devastation than the more artful “Oppenheimer.” If “Godzilla Minus One” didn’t have ‘Godzilla’ in its title, it’d give “Oppenheimer” some serious competition at Oscar time…

With the war over, the guilt-stricken Oppenheimer is dismissed as a crybaby by President Truman (an almost unrecognizable cameo by Gary Oldman) and is being clandestinely hounded by the duplicitous Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr); a high-ranking member of the US Atomic Energy Commission, whom we meet much earlier in the film, through a series of black & white time-jumps. 

Note: Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, an MIT graduate himself, is the closest thing Oppenheimer has to an Antonio Salieri in this film (see: “Amadeus”); the jealous mediocrity who seeks to bring down the undeserving genius.

Having been previously humiliated by Oppenheimer during a Senate committee meeting on the sale of atomic materials to US allies overseas, Strauss becomes a cloak-and-dagger antagonist who uses machiavellian political plotting and anti-communist hysteria to revoke Oppenheimer’s postwar security clearance and undermine his legacy; largely because he was shut out of Oppenheimer’s inner circle of geniuses, which include a perceived snub by no less than Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). 

Strauss turns the screws, as friends, lovers and former colleagues of Oppenheimer’s are forced to answer damning questions about him—each apologizing meekly, as they exit the deposition room.  Near the end of the film, an older Oppenheimer is given the Medal of Freedom by president Lyndon B. Johnson (Hap Lawrence), though his bitter wife Katherine is less forgiving of the many hypocrites she sees in attendance. Of all the women in his life, Katherine is the closest Oppenheimer has to a true defender, at least according to the screenplay. 

Throughout the movie, we meet other women in the infamously womanizing Oppenheimer’s life; including ill-fated hardline communist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and with Ruth Tolman (Louise Lombard), the wife of Richard C. Tolman; science advisor to General Groves, no less.  Of the three women seen in the film, most of the focus is on the tumultuous Tatlock (Pugh steals every scene she’s in) and long-suffering Katherine. Katherine is the woman who bears Oppenheimer’s two children, and who sees her husband’s imminent political threats with far greater clarity than he can. 

The final scene of the film bookends with an earlier moment where Oppenheimer is having a private conversation with Albert Einstein in a quiet patch of wilderness.  This final scene allows us to be privy to that conversation, where Oppenheimer conveys his private fear to Einstein that his invention will indeed destroy the world, albeit in a different manner than predicted.

The End.

Summing It Up

“Oppenheimer” is a beautifully shot, well-acted, well-intentioned movie that is, unfortunately, edited to death; flashing back and forth between his linear life story and his eventual persecution by the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC) during the McCarthy era of American politics (that fevered chapter of American history where anti-communist hysteria needlessly destroyed many careers and lives). In fact, it’s the communist witch-hunting angle that dominates much of the movie’s three-hour running time. 

No doubt the film (shot on actual IMAX film) will sweep this year’s Oscars, just as it won eight major award categories at the recent Golden Globes.  The acting by Cillian Murphy (from Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy), Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and rest of the cast is unsurprisingly top-notch.  The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema is gorgeous, even when showcasing the world-altering horrors of the atomic bomb.  The musical score by Ludwig Göransson (“The Mandalorian”) elegantly dances between clockwork and chaos.

My most nagging issue with “Oppenheimer” is with its maddening, scattershot editing (credited to Jennifer Lame). Cut together like a three hour trailer rather than an actual movie, this nonstop time-jumping—switching from color to monochrome—calls far too much attention to itself.  This lack of editorial tranquility also keeps the movie’s subject at arm’s length, never fully allowing us inside his headspace.  Such deliberate opacity is perhaps fitting for the enigmatic father of the atomic bomb, but at three hours, it also becomes tiresome. This conspicuously-stylized approach sometimes makes “Oppenheimer” feel like a lost Oliver Stone film from the 1990s. 

There’s no denying that writer/director Christopher Nolan makes dazzling motion pictures, and his trademark levels of uncompromising expertise are on display, but as much as I wanted to love Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” I wound up merely liking it.  I just can’t shake the feeling that with some editorial restraint, it could’ve been a classic.

Where To Watch

As of this writing, “Oppenheimer” is still playing in a few select theaters. The movie is also available for streaming rental and purchase from PrimeVideo, iTunes, YouTube Premium (where I bought my copy) and others, with prices ranging from a $5.99 rental to a $19.99 purchase. It is also available to purchase on DVD/BluRay and 4K (prices vary by seller).  Peacock will also begin streaming “Oppenheimer”on February 16th.