Oppenheimer

Sam Burnham, Curator

Energy. It’s a single word that encompasses the entire experience. Go back in your mind to elementary school science and recall all the types of energy that you learned about. The scientists that gathered at Oak Ridge, the Benton Site, and Los Alamos had to harness energy in all those forms to make the Manhattan Project a success.

In Hollywood, a bomb is not usually what someone aspires to create. But just as J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team set out to do something no one had ever done before, Christopher Nolan assembled a team to make a Hollywood bomb and for that to be a good thing.

Oppenheimer and Nolan both succeeded.

Components, timing, theory, practice, energy, and the all critical chain reaction. That describes the bomb and the film.

Cillian Murphy wowed me as Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders. I had a hint of worry that I wouldn’t be able to set that aside. He proved me wrong. He disappeared off into the character and his performance is indistinguishable from any of the Oppenheimer interviews I’ve seen. He should be a shoo-in for Best Actor.

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Robert Downey Jr. Wow. You’ve seen his range, the amazing roles he has played, his skill on screen. He was incredible. I cannot imagine anyone topping him for best supporting actor.

But there are so many other strong performances in this film. Many are small in screen time but huge in the story. Three immediately come to mind, actors known for their dynamic leading roles who played smaller but crucial roles in this film: Rami Malek as David Hill, Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, and Gary Oldman as Harry Truman. There are so many others, too numerous to mention them all here. It is truly one of those casts that you can’t imagine anyone being able to assemble.

But the cast was supported with brilliant writing and the lighting and sound pulls you into Oppenheimer’s mind no one has to explain what he’s thinking or how he’s feeling. You hear it. You see it. You feel it. It is the bomb. You hear the volatility of the material; you can feel the particles colliding and this chain reaction is just getting started as Fat Man and Little Boy detonate over Japan.

​A few side notes on the cultural impact of this film:

Kudos to whoever brought the gifted James Woods on as an executive producer. We may never really know the impact this blackballed genius had on this masterpiece.

There has been a lot of opinions in the various media about the absence of the Japanese victims of the bombs. This film is a biopic about a man who has no access to the vast majority of the media we have today. Nolan took on the challenge of showing us how those victims weighed on Oppenheimer. Each and every victim is in this film. You see them in his eyes. You feel the weight of them on his soul. There’s the very real presence of a quarter of a million people that he never saw but whose image were woven into his very existence for the rest of his days. He never saw them. He would never unsee them.

This is a masterpiece of our time.

(Note: there will not be a Barbie review on this website.)