When studying history, you come to realize that the nitty gritty of what you believe to be truth or fact is often extremely subjective when you get down to the tiny minutia. Historians look over the primary documents including letters, conversations, radio broadcasts, etc., all to determine what the truth was. As we move further and further away from the truth, the realities of what were true and what were not become askewed. This can be an even more infuriating when big budget directors get $100,000,000 for projects about the man who changed life on earth as we know it through the creation of the atomic bomb and people take a movie as reality (I implore you to do your research and not take film as fact, no matter how grand it appears).
Suffice to say, I’m sure Kai Bird’s book, which this film is based on, is at the very least a good read. 

One of my favourite professors in university presented two sides to our study during his class on the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. There are the big players in history: the Stalins, the Chamberlains and the Trumans of the the world. And then there are the little people of history. The forgotten soldiers slain on the battlefields of the Somme or the baker in Kiev who never asked to have his beautiful 1500 year old city bombed by a modern day Hitler. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer seems to want to straddle the line between big man history and the story of the little man. Comfortable to question us what is morally right when faced with the possibility that a madman like Adolf Hitler has the capability to construct the atomic bomb. And that with time running out, you better move fucking fast. And Murphy’s Oppenheimer shows this big man/little man neutrality very well. At the end of the day, this was a man who worked with Truman, General Groves and Einstein but was just human. The movie purports that he made mistakes, he wasn’t perfect but he did his best to try and serve his nation to destroy evil and end one of the worst conflicts of all time. 
Should the bombs have been dropped? All I know is that the movie is not wrong when it tells us that A LOT of American soldiers and Japanese men, women and children would have died if the bomb was not dropped. 

This film is also about politics. Whether you agree or not, Oppenheimer shows from Robert’s perspective how the machines of war propelled the great powers of the world to create a weapon so destructive that they went from a moral crusade to annihilate fascism to internally bickering amongst themselves like hungry wolves about to devour each other once they saw red! 

I usually go into a paragraph about acting in films. With Oppenheimer this is a moot point. The acting is as good as Nolan needed it to be, which is near perfection. Cillian Murphy, you got it man!

I love the technical aspects of film. If you pay attention to my reviews, you’ll know that I’m fine when a movie sacrifices narrative for visual and auditory flare. And then there are movies like this which balance the two sides of the coin very well. There are subtle moments of gorgeous cinematography like when the hearing comes to a conclusion and we just have a shot from the perspectives of the hearing table and they say “adjourned”. Cold. And then there’s the gorgeous sweeping cinematic shots of nature which are juxtaposed with the interiors. The scene where the atomic test takes place was breathtaking. Our theatre fell silent. I still have chills thinking about it. Sound design was great and so was Göransson’s score, even if it wasn’t my favourite aspect here.

The film is also important for film history (if you’re into that kind of thing like me). The first film to have IMAX footage in black and white. Neato. I’m not going to muse of the symbolic nature of the black and white sections, but I’m here to read your ideas.

Oh, and this film is also about about physics. I don’t know shit about physics…

The film is also meditation on what might be the end of humanity one day. Boom! 

Wow… that got pretty heavy.
The credits rolled and we just looked at that IMAX screen for 2 minutes. I can’t do this movie justice that’s why for most of this I just tried to add my thoughts on such a critically important subject from history. That being said, when cinema makes you generate this many questions and quandaries on such an important time for all of humanity, I think that’s grand filmmaking. This is a masterpiece! 5/5!

I’m not a big Christopher Nolan fan, but I have a massive respect for him as a filmmaker. He crafts these epics that are more experiences, than they are movies. After The Dark Knight though, I think Insomnia is my favourite (and I’m constantly surprised that people seem to disregard it here on Letterboxd). I’ll be honest that sometimes he loses me, like when I saw Inception in the cinema as an impressional high schooler. Even more than that one though, the disrepute for Dunkirk is shocking. One day… one day (someone tie me down and make me watch Memento). All that being said, this might be my new favourite of his after the Dark Knight.

Is this the best picture winner? Here’s looking at you, Scorsese!
*Clutches copy of Killers of the Flower Moon*

2023 Films Ranked and Reviewed