Locke’s review published on Letterboxd:
- Once it's used, the very idea of nuclear war, of any war, is unthinkable. Our work here will ensure a peace mankind has never seen.
- Until someone builds a bigger bomb.
That the architects of the atom bomb's pliable, but never unaffirmative, public image justify its existence and ownership by declaring it the most definitive, most authoritative agent of global peace does not signify that it is one. Its peace is one which places the entire remainder of the globe under the thumb of one nation's towering military arsenal, one which supplants the sovereignty of the world population and enlists the suzerainty of American imperial leadership in its place. Nolan's Oppenheimer is highly aware of this. J. Robert Oppenheimer was more than a complicit actor in the organized assembly of a weapon determined for usage against civilian populations, he was its resolute champion, yet one who, by all appearances, later found that he abhorred the annihilative device in whose creation he was a crucial figure. Oppenheimer is aware of this as well. With such complexities and international historical legacies preceding the cinematic telling of this man's story, for what productive purpose could the manufacture of a mythology surrounding him serve? How is his likening with Prometheus an intellectual exercise worthy of our analysis except as a self-congratulatory (and facile) allegory drawn to attract the veneration of any cultural product discussing his legacy?
It's laudable that at no point in Oppenheimer is the well-marketed 'destroyer of worlds' evaluated as a straightforward martyr, the chewed-up and spat-out scientist whose naiveté in comprehending the inevitable application of his work informed his later despair, but for as genuine as his pursuit is to interrogate the accountability of Oppenheimer in the establishment of a new, more fearful world kept under an even more severe condition of violent coercion by the ruling interests, Nolan is only ever aspirationally critical of the man. In effect, by moulding a scattered, morally multitudinous historical epic from him, in the sprawling, nonlinear vein of Oliver Stone without ever implementing the same compositional purpose or mindful concision behind Stone's adept and condemnatory legends, Oppenheimer takes a torpid stance of ambiguity, even as it demonstrates adversarial perspectives that opine his direction of the bomb and his positioning as a victim within the popular consciousness. It's this equivocation, this presentation of a host of diffuse perspectives as a substitute for contending with complicated, contradictory histories that informs the film's acritical view of its subject, and arranges him as the object of macroscopic tragedy; a martyrdom by way of eschewing any other moral designation.
Even overlooking the absence of a serious, historically specific acknowledgement that the bombings of Japan were not a determinant of its surrender, and purely the unconditional surrender which the US yearned for, Nolan plays into the hands of the ruling narratives surrounding nuclear development more than any responsible filmmaker ought to by way of never deconfirming the supposed maniacality of Soviet weapons programs; he rightfully offers an intimate look at the belligerence of United States foreign policy, something which a lesser biopic would not find the courage to do, but he doesn't have the parlance to even passingly explore the inverse. Comfortable in his cinder block aesthetic (which has only worsened in its incapacity to demonstrate the poetic and metaphorical in a manner that doesn't appear austere and literal), his cinematic voice is still inculcated with dialogue which rarely exceeds the most bathetic of cheeky quips, still embodies that same perennial misogyny of his where every woman is a hysteric, still sees his actors conforming to self-serious reticence or wild outbursts.
To a large extent, his shoddy craftsmanship produces moments that are most enjoyable for their hilarity (as when the glassy-eyed Cillian Murphy reads his Bhagavad Gita catchphrase aloud to Florence Pugh in the middle of sleeping together), but there is one great scene hidden in the weeds of this otherwise prosaic feature: the detonation of the Gadget at Los Alamos. Nolan has us observe this explosion in a very affecting silence not for its horrific splendour, not for the 'beauty' ironically evoked by the tools of ruination, but simply for its abominable reality. Nuclear physics had arrived at the highest stage of its advancement, and its product was an instrument of war. The material motivations of those ruling authorities who dictated the evolution of science, the knowledge extracted from it, and its application made the expected, rational dictation: that science would serve the ends of empire. In this moment, I'm unsure as to whether or not Nolan is aware of the contradictions of either his art or the social forces that bred the weapon which lies at its center. I am sure, however, that he produced an image that should give pause to anyone ambivalent or hostile to nuclear abolition. That is its own beauty, should it serve the ends of justice.
