Team FC
Oppenheimer is one of Christopher Nolan’s most staggering achievements – a thudding, thrilling, tremendously intimate story about a scientist who sometimes can’t see his own greatness, often can’t see past it, and tragically, can’t persuade people to believe him when he does.
The director’s films have, in some way or the other, been about men attempting to exert control over vast cosmic forces so much greater than they are. Over his past few films, he’s broadened his focus, moving from individual obsession to widespread planetary destruction – climate change in Interstellar (2014) and Tenet (2020). Oppenheimer fuses both his thematic preoccupations
The film plays out in three major parallel tracks. Questions posed in the future are answered in the past. The same sentence uttered to different people at different points in time is both, a promise and an accusation. Events are revisited and recontextualized with striking clarity.
Nolan isn’t interested in using the full scope of his technical prowess to bring fire and fury to the screen, present it as any sort of heroic spectacle or scientific achievement at all. It’s telling that the film’s most compelling stretches are those set in small rooms, in which conversations that determine who lives and who dies play out with a casualness that only reinforces their cruelty.
So much of Nolan’s filmography is about time lost, moments left unseized, opportunities that have slipped by, but not Oppenheimer. In presenting events and then flashing forwards, the director reveals truths that weren’t evident at the time.
He reaches into the future to wring absolution and justice for his protagonist. He makes things right. Then, in one of his finest climactic sequences yet, he underlines how all it took was for one man to get it horribly, horribly wrong.