I’ve seen Oppenheimer twice now, but I suspect I’m not done with it yet, or it’s not done with me. Of all the films being released this year, this is the one I was anticipating the most. And with Universal’s extensive marketing campaign, I knew it was coming long before it got here. Going back months, a large stand-up advertisement with a digital clock counting down the months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds to the July 21 release date was in the lobby of the AMC Lincoln Square theater at 68th and Broadway here in Manhattan. This certainly created an “event” feeling. Every time you went through the lobby, you saw it.

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Prior to this, I would have said Dunkirk (2017) was Christopher Nolan’s best film, but I think Oppenheimer is bigger, more important, and more of an achievement. I feel that he’s a director who has control over every aspect of what ends up on the screen. That’s especially true with Oppenheimer. I kept checking the AMC website on a daily basis, wanting to make sure I’d be able to order an IMAX ticket as soon as they went on sale. I was still a day or so late, but got a ticket on June 4, a full seven weeks before it opened. It’s a good thing I did, because a few weeks later, when my wife told me she was interested in seeing Oppenheimer, I checked for IMAX tickets and found that every show for weeks to come was basically sold out (and still is). We ended up seeing it in 70mm on another screen in that multiplex, but not IMAX. It was fine.

It turns out there are only 30 movie theaters in the world that are capable of projecting Oppenheimer in the full 70mm IMAX format, 19 of them in the United States, and one of those here in Manhattan. So I can feel like I belong to an exclusive club that gets to see this film in the optimal way Nolan intended, and the cachet that goes with that. Well, okay, but I’ve come to realize that any IMAX theater showing the film digitally would have the same screen ratio as in 70mm (at least I think so). But am I glad I saw it in this format? You bet I am. Though I know that’s also a status thing, and at the end of the day, so what?

Oppenheimer has so far grossed $188 million in the U.S. and $312 million overseas. Barbie, released the same day, has just surpassed $1 billion dollars globally. I suspect one reason both films are doing so well is because they aren’t sequels or superhero blowouts. They feel fresh and new, and aren’t tired retreads.

The Flash is (in my opinion) is a good example of everything that’s wrong with these Marvel/DC superhero spectaculars of late, i.e. bloated, incoherent, and meaningless. I should say that I’ve really liked the Nolan Batman films, Captain Marvel, Logan, the first Wonder Woman, and numerous others. My interest in The Flash was primarily Michael Keaton returning to his Batman role and hearing him say the line, “I’m Batman,” He provided the only spark, but it wasn’t enough. The gimmick of The Flash/Barry Allen going back in time to save his mother from being murdered and his father from being falsely convicted and going to prison for the crime has already been done in The Flash TV series and I think in the comics as well. I’d looked forward to seeing an 80-year-old Harrison Ford back in the saddle as Indiana Jones, but he seemed as tired as the idea of having Indy still fighting Nazis, plus I found Phoebe Waller-Bridge to be especially annoying. I was also looking forward to the new Mission Impossible film, having liked the last several, but other than several impressive set-pieces and Tom Cruise running, it really felt like been here-done that.

After that digression, I should also go on the record as liking Barbie a lot. When I first saw trailers, I had no intention of seeing it, but learning that Greta Gerwig was directing and co-writing (with Noah Baumbach), I got interested. Glad I did, because it’s sharp, edgy, and unexpected. There is some really weird stuff in Barbie.

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Back to Oppenheimer. It opens with these words on screen: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.” Whew! Tortured for eternity is pretty heavy duty. It does not bode well for J. Robert Oppenheimer. That feeling led me into the film.

The performances are, without exception, outstanding. Everyone has brought their best, rising to the challenge of making this film. Cillian Murphy (below right) seems perfectly cast as Oppenheimer. His look is eerily evocative of the real Robert Oppenheimer. Murphy says that Nolan also sent him photos of David Bowie from the late 1970s as inspiration. More than that, he’s excellent in the role.

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Matt Damon is great as General Leslie Groves, who picked Oppenheimer to head the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. He brings something extra to everything I’ve seen him in, from the Bourne films to Ford v Ferrari (2019) and Air earlier this year. He gets deep into every character he plays.

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The most startling transformation in the film has to be Robert Downey Jr. as Oppenheimer’s eventual adversary, Lewis Strauss. His appearance makes him nearly unrecognizable and his performance is like nothing he’s done before. It’s blistering. He really inhabits the character, and dominates nearly every scene he’s in.

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Two key roles are played by Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, whose affair with Oppenheimer and her Communist Party connections cause serious problems for him later on. (Florence Pugh, left and Emily Blunt, right)

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Hoyte van Hoytema, a Dutch-Swedish cinematographer, had shot three previous films for Nolan: Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), and Tenet (2020), as well as Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), Sam Mendes’ Spectre (2015), and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008). As Bilge Ebiri wrote in New York Magazine, audiences aren’t used to the frame-filling close-ups of Cillian Murphy in IMAX, because the format wasn’t designed for that. Van Hoytema says, “You could never, ever put your camera as close as you wanted to your subject in order to get the close-up. So we started to build lenses that gave us that technical possibility to get much closer.” Many scenes in Oppenheimer are in black-and-white, for which Kodak created special stock for Imax.

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Hans Zimmer had scored seven films for Nolan prior to Tenet. When he was unavailable for that film, Nolan brought on Swedish film composer Ludwig Göransson, who has now created an amazing score for Oppenheimer. I don’t think I was as aware of just how important and integral his music was to the film until I saw it again. For one thing, there’s a lot of it — two and a half hours of the three hour running time. The music is as important as the actors, it’s like it is an actor. Nolan wanted the violin to form the basis of the score; violin is present throughout almost the entire film. A friend of mine in Minneapolis, Ed Hewitt, after seeing Oppenheimer there, texted me this: “It (the music) was there all the time, but it wasn’t there.” I like that. The music is practically wall-to-wall, but it’s never overwhelming, until it is.

The following selection of scenes, released by Universal a week before Oppenheimer opened, contains Göransson’s music.

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This cut, “Can You Hear the Music,” accompanies a scene early in the film when Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) tells Oppenheimer that it’s more important to “hear the music” of theoretical physics instead of worrying about the math. This brief (1:50) piece has 21 tempo changes. I don’t know much about music, but I gather this is somewhat unusual. It took three days to record, and like the rest of the score, is pretty amazing.

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I think this lengthy piece (7:52), “Trinity,” is the high point of the entire score. It accompanies the Trinity test itself, when the result of several years of planning and effort will be revealed. Will the “gadget” successfully detonate, will it be a dud, or will it detonate and set fire to earth’s atmosphere, destroying the world? This last was a theoretical possibility. The sequence is incredibly intense. Göransson’s music just keeps building and building and building, winding tighter and tighter. It actually makes me feel anxious just listening to it, even apart from the film.

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A scene I love is set at Los Alamos. For the first time, Oppenheimer is wearing an Army uniform. One of his colleagues, physicist Isidor Rabi (played by David Krumholtz), asks Oppenheimer why he’s wearing that and suggests he get rid of it. We cut to Oppenheimer standing in front of a mirror that’s part of his dresser. He’s now wearing a grey suit. He may also be holding his pipe; I can’t remember. On the dresser is what we’ve come to know as his trademark flat-brimmed hat, also gray. He picks up the hat and puts it on his head. For me this was a stunning moment that took my breath away. It’s like a superhero origin story, where we see Batman or Superman in his suit for the first time. So maybe Oppenheimer is a superhero movie after all.

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“They won’t fear it until they understand it. And they won’t understand it until they’ve used it.” – Robert Oppenheimer

“It’s not a new weapon. It’s a new world.” – Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) to Oppenheimer.

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” – Hindu scripture that went through Oppenheimer’s mind on witnessing the first atomic bomb detonation.

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Supplemental materials to follow shortly. Stay safe. — Ted Hicks

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