Cillian Murphy did a wonderful Nice Peter playing J. Robert Oppenheimer performance.

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is visually stunning, its sound is tremendous and the performances across the board are total brilliance. Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. are being widely praised and rightly so, they are magnetic to watch. This film is a technical marvel and undeniably impressive.

I also found it personally difficult to grapple with its subject matter, I believe this was intentional. The film is as conflicted about the events as its lead. Nolan jumps back and forth through time frequently and I found some of the events hard to place in timelime order until they were recontextualised in later scenes, as the narrative is largely non-linear.
There are dozens of characters surrounding Murphy's Oppenheimer and many of them are recurring, the cast is stacked full of memorable actors and the sheer amount of people involved with the plot demands attention from the audience. I certainly lost track of a few players and their roles, but I find large ensemble casts tough to follow anyway. Neither this nor the non-linear structure are faults with the film, more faults with my brain not being good at retaining a large amount of faces in a small amount of time.

The most harrowing stretch for me was the anxiety-inducing test of the bomb and the horrific discussions thereafter. I was vaguely aware of the history but never having looked much into it, the film left me feeling fairly distressed. The very frank talks about which Japanese cities to unleash their destruction on were infuriating, that so many innocent people lost their lives and the fact that this was a real thing that happened left me feeling deeply saddened. I was admittedly ignorant to a lot of this. History taught in school is sanitised and whitewashed anyway and, as someone who is English, a lot of the horrendous shit Britain has done over the years was never even acknowledged in our classrooms. I shouldn't be surprised that our World War Two history lessons didn't cover the deaths of nearly 230,000 innocent people at the hands of the "good guys", maybe because it is "American history", but maybe not.

I have found that Oppenheimer is difficult to review, largely because the topic of the film is real world history I know staggeringly little about, but also because the entire thing left me feeling incredibly pessimistic about the people in charge both past and present. The final scene in the film feels excruciatingly prescient when the war in Ukraine rages on and the use of nuclear weapons remains a frighteningly real possibility.

This movie was excellent but it fucking bummed me out, I doubt I'll ever watch it again.