“I believe we did.”

A film obsessed with escalation and chain reactions, from the bookending motif of ripples in water to the theme of Oppenheimer and his scientists repeating the same mistakes on ever grander scales, building bigger and bigger weapons (beginning with a poisoned apple, both an impeccable use of foreshadowing/Biblical metaphor on Nolan’s part as well as an actual thing the real Oppenheimer did) with ever widening blast radii, to the dreamy imagery of microscopic particles, their movement and stray collisions informing our macro reality until the effect is visible from space, to the film’s time-compressing structure which depicts reality as a nonlinear two-way stream of cause and effect through Jennifer Lame’s deliriously impressionistic montage editing. Operating somewhere between an intimate, fragmented character study, a breathlessly gripping courtroom thriller and a mad scientist horror movie, Oppenheimer is an astounding achievement in both intuitive/poetic and intellectual storytelling on a budgetary scale that typically allows room for neither, evoking the classicism of David Lean and Paul Thomas Anderson alongside the elemental surrealism of Malick and Tarkovsky and packing the frame with so many famous character actors you can’t decide where to rest your eyes (Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Emily Blunt, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, Florence Pugh, Alden Ehrenreich, David Dastmalchian, Tom Conti and Robert Downey Jr. – who absolutely owns the last fifteen minutes of this thing – are just some of the actors giving richly detailed supporting performances here but Cillian Murphy towers above them all, embodying Oppenheimer’s transition from arrogance and naivety to bewilderment and horror with such considered nuance it makes most other biopic acting look like cheap theatre) in service of a heady three-hour epic chronicling the systematic weaponization of one man’s dream into a global nightmare.

Not only has Nolan’s visual style reached new heights of poetic sophistication here (helped in no small part by his partnership with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema) but this is also fairly easily his best script in terms of dialogue, utilizing his love of fast-paced technical exposition and overt philosophising in ways that feel more contextually appropriate than they did in, say, Tenet while conveying many of its most potent thematic conclusions through implied suggestion rather than having them spoken aloud. 47-year-old Cillian Murphy dressed as a preppy freshman getting yelled at by an angry tutor to pull his dang head out of the clouds and focus on labwork is the closest Oppenheimer gets to typical biopic schmaltz and it’s literally the first scene of the movie, the remainder of it is remarkably deft at avoiding tiresome Hollywood cliché despite Nolan’s continuing penchant for having his characters speak in snappy, overwritten exchanges (this isn’t meant to be a criticism, Nolan has proven himself to be pretty adept at modulating the idiosyncrasies of his writing style to best suit whatever project he’s currently working on). Equally impressive are the (almost exclusively practical) special effects, rendering whizzing neutrons and blossoming mushroom clouds as abstract vistas equally tactile and ethereal, and Ludwig Göransson’s score which oscillates between liltingly sweet and bone-chilling, though the latter is used far too liberally in the film’s first half with hardly a single scene not containing some degree of overbearing dramatic music; Göransson’s work on its own is some of his best but in such a dialogue-heavy film the way it’s utilized often comes across as unnecessary hand-holding, especially when every other aspect of production is working so hard to convey a sense of in-the-moment authenticity.

Still, whatever niggling complaints I had all but disappeared in Oppenheimer’s second half, which transforms cramped boardrooms and auditoriums into blown-out PTSD hellscapes of warped Americana and builds to such dizzying levels of tension and unease (the trinity test sequence, Oppenheimer’s victory speech and the final conversation with Einstein are among the most gripping things I’ve seen in a theatre this decade) it almost borders on Lynchian. Watching Nolan evoke a similar sense of scientific wonder as he did in Inception and Interstellar only to curdle it into something this cosmically bleak and paranoid is genuinely heartwrenching; a man who once saw visions of a microscopic universe buzzing with light and energy is left with haunted images of that same light expanding to consume the entire planet, leaving behind only a dark, irradiated husk, his passion for art and science instrumentalized into a weapon of mutually assured destruction by a shadowy network of venal bureaucrats who only care about its function in relation to their material status (considering all of his films are subtextually about the personal cost of making movies it’s possible to read Oppenheimer as Nolan’s mea culpa for the current state of the film industry – an artist whose work is funded by empty suits who commodified it into something lethal, his Dark Knight trilogy and popularization of the gritty reboot aesthetic arguably fueling Hollywood’s superhero/IP craze and the devolution of cinema from standalone theatrical events into interchangeable streaming content – and while I don’t think that was strictly intentional on Nolan’s part, the fact that he cast Iron Man as the main antagonist threatening Oppenheimer’s legacy and reputation is a pretty fascinating wrinkle). This might not be my favourite Nolan movie – I’ll probably always have a bias towards Inception personally – but I feel comfortable calling it is his most mature and, dare I say, “important” work to date, with levels of moral and aesthetic complexity most big releases can't even gesture at propelled by the kind of incisive anger usually reserved for an Oliver Stone or Spike Lee joint. Worth seeing on the most IMAX-friendly screen you can find to take in the immaculate sound design and visual invention, just make sure to schedule your double feature with Barbie playing first so you don't spend the majority of that film's runtime thinking about melting faces and war crimes.