A three-hour biopic about a physicist, in IMAX 70mm, that grossed a billion dollars. Cinema bent itself around Christopher Nolan one more time.
J. Robert Oppenheimer studies physics at Cambridge, Göttingen and Berkeley in the 1920s and 30s. He becomes the unlikely leader of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. The Trinity test succeeds on 16 July 1945. Hiroshima and Nagasaki follow within weeks. Oppenheimer becomes a national hero and almost immediately argues against further development. In 1954 his security clearance is revoked in a hearing engineered by Lewis Strauss, the AEC chairman.
Nolan's film holds all of this — pre-war science, the Project, the bomb, the post-war fall — in three braided timelines. The black-and-white sequences mark Strauss's 1959 confirmation hearing. The colour sequences are Oppenheimer's own subjective memory.
Nolan's screenplay structures the film as three concurrent inquiries: the Manhattan Project investigation (1942–45), Oppenheimer's 1954 security hearing, and the 1959 Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss. The film cross-cuts between them so the audience is always reading three timelines against each other. This is the same braided-structure technique Nolan used in Dunkirk and The Prestige.
What it does for Oppenheimer specifically is keep the consequences in the present tense. The film never lets you forget that the physics being argued in 1942 is going to be the politics being argued in 1954 is going to be the verdict being delivered in 1959.
Nolan filmed the Trinity test using practical effects and no CGI. The sound design — silence for forty seconds, then a delayed shockwave — is one of the most discussed sequences in 2020s cinema.
Equally notable is what the film refuses to show. There is no recreation of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The film stays inside Oppenheimer's perception, and Oppenheimer never went to Japan. Critics divided on whether this is moral cowardice or moral discipline. Nolan's argument is that recreating the bombing would invite the audience to look at a spectacle that should not be a spectacle.
Murphy worked with Nolan on Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), Dunkirk (2017). Oppenheimer is his first lead in a Nolan film. He plays Oppenheimer with a held, brittle quality — the wartime confidence and the post-war collapse are visible in his face but never overstated. He won Best Actor at the 2024 Oscars on the first nomination of his career.
Robert Downey Jr.'s Lewis Strauss is the film's other career-defining performance: a small, careful, malicious portrait of bureaucratic resentment, delivered by an actor most viewers had spent fifteen years watching play a superhero.