Jacob Juenger’s review published on Letterboxd:
I must admit (Why is that a running theme with me?) that I'm not well-versed in the movies of Christopher Nolan. The only one of his movies I remember seeing is Memento, and that was so long ago that I barely remember much about it. So I can't exactly vouch for the claim that Oppenheimer is his magnum opus. What I can say is that the hype is certainly real.
This is far from a traditional biopic. Much like Memento, this movie presents us with a non-linear narrative. Two of them, actually: one in the form of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) trying to convince what amounts to a kangaroo court to retain his security clearance, and the other - filmed in black and white - in the form of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr), the Naval officer who appointed Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project, during a Senate hearing for his nomination for Commerce Secretary in 1959. These may seem like an unorthodox pairing, but they do have common threads that build in a slow burn.
This whole movie is a slow burn in and of itself. It's three hours that hardly feels like it, unpacking as much as it possibly can about a complicated man. Yes, it has typical biopic beats, but all of them have deeper undercurrents to them, especially with that security clearance since many of these involve his ties to known Communists. And in a post-war Red Scare environment, that history would catch up with anyone, no matter their position.
Nolan doesn't try to untangle the paradox that was the man himself. Instead, he juxtaposes it with the very atomic bomb he helped create, a potentially unstable weapon from an undoubtedly unstable mind. This Oppenheimer has dreams - whenever he sleeps at all - of various nuclear reactions, has visions of nukes detonating and peeling off flesh, has guilt about the very thing he enthusiastically helped create.
All of these help build tension throughout the movie, not to mention the numbing feeling of when the test bomb, "Trinity", is about to be dropped in New Mexico. One part of you knows exactly where this leads, given everything that's happened in the years since, but another part still can't help but wonder if this will be successfully pulled off. All of this is aided greatly by the thudding score by Ludwig Goransson and the elaborate sound design, all of which would aggravate anyone's tinnitus if they're sitting in wrong spot in an IMAX theater, which is certainly the preferred way to go.
If one is up for a dense, talky movie with unsettling themes, then this is one that begs to be seen on the big screen.
