The Nolan catalog is one filled with tormented professionals, technicians and artists; ones who either pursue some kind of tangible, magnificent wonder through logic, technology or craftsmanship and are subsequently swallowed by their own contraptions or achieve some sort of compromised catharsis through them. As a filmmaker, mechanized construction and theory has always been the motivating factor for him: whether it’s Guy Pearce’s Leonard in Memento reshaping his own reality and narrative through image manipulation (that Nolan accentuates via his own visual trickery and editing), or the thornier labyrinthian theatricality of The Prestige which cages genuinely gruesome, disturbing ideas of the perverse, unromantic levels of obsession and commitment to industry progress and showmanship (a craft worth not just dying for, but sacrificing your loved ones and breaking the laws of nature and science for!), or his more forgiving and hopeful variations on similar themes in Inception and Interstellar which still have tragic consequences (especially familial ones: so much of his filmography is losing time with loved ones like Cobb’s fugitive purgatory existence he wanders like a dream or Coop’s decades of gravitational time dilation shot in simple home videos and McConaughey’s tragic reaction shots) baked into them and world-changing implications but see genuine beauty and majesty in the technological pursuit of something conceptual and beyond our personal lives.

So, it does seem like it was only a matter of time before the “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer—a living, breathing tortured contradiction who symbolizes the excitement of scientific creativity and left-wing academia being poisonously corrupted by petty political gamesmanship and horrifying military-industrial complex might—was added to the rotation of intelligent, ambitious, conflicted Nolan protagonists; I joked before watching it that he must’ve been stoked to find out the man he wants to make a biopic about already had a girlfriend who killed herself (or is that brief flash of black gloves meant to be his paranoia about an anti-communist government agent?) pre-written into the narrative for him to use as a traumatic ghost, but was genuinely astonished he went as far as to include horny detail about her inspiring his mythologized quoting of the Bhagavad Gita... The wait for a Nolan sex scene(s) was long and worth it. But before we get too bogged down in detail—and this is so densely packed with biographical material from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus and fired at us at such a propulsive pace it was easy on first viewing to get a bit lost in it—let me first just say this is a complete miracle of clockwork precision structure and grim Doomsday annihilation momentum.

There’s a great history of Cold War anxiety merged with thriller logic (Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe probably the most famous examples) but what’s uniquely Nolan here (with maybe a bit of precedent set by Paul Schrader’s Mishima) is how this confidently flashes forward and backward in two different fragmented color and black & white nonlinear timelines swirling around each other with the sense that we are briefly living inside of haunted, predestined memories, building to this defining moment in history that’s already happened, we’ve already suffered the consequences of and deserve to be punished for… Repeating images and recurring interactions in various scientific and political rooms that weave together and deepen with the warring subjective perspectives of Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss whose professional ego rivalry and opposing attempts at grasping power (governmental, Godlike) serve as an organizing object for the film. It’s functionally two very long dialectical montages of two hearings that have differing layers of personal, national and symbolic weight done with the same speed and intensity as Sorkin and Fincher deployed in their mirroring depositions and flashbacks in The Social Network and that eventually lead to mutually assured destruction between the two men. Everyone’s already said it but Downey’s vision of venomous bureaucracy as an envious, self-obsessed Judas in this is the best he’s been since Zodiac, speaking of Fincher.

The first two hours here that climax in the mesmerizing Trinity test sequence is a spectacular achievement of run-on sentence formal construction. The kind of thing that was once a blockbuster when Oliver Stone was holding box office court with his psychotic, hypnotizing fever dream state-of-the-nation addresses (a la JFK) that turned documented history into something blisteringly subjective and immediate that behaved more like a thriller. Nolan’s tendency towards engineer-like gravitational accumulation (in comparison to the hot-headed hysteria of Stone) effectively gets you swept up in the exhilaration of scientific innovation and ambition, while also cataloging the intense institutional pressures and sympathetic anxieties (the existential threat of the Nazis on Jewish scientists and communists, especially) that put this horrible, world-altering perversion on the strategically uncontrollable rails it was placed on, while also not side-stepping culpability in this Original sin. All the signs of dread and atrocity are there from the first frame, and everyone involved—especially Oppenheimer, who Nolan positions as an Amadeus, T.E. Lawrence and Daniel Plainview figure simultaneously—is shown to be making conscious, clear-eyed decisions to participate in this appalling invention, Nolan’s momentum simply helps show how such signs can get conveniently ignored or justified in order to keep things moving until it’s too late. You’ve perhaps broken everything; everyone watched you do it, and there’s no going back.

The Trinity sequence itself is a thing of genuine wonder, obviously, Nolan having found himself increasingly and productively comfortable with experimentation and abstraction since beginning his collaboration with genius DP Hoyte van Hoytema on Interstellar. (There’s a great apparent story going around about how Hoytema introduced him to the elemental symbolism of Tarkovsky, which might just be the most valuable contribution any of his new collaborators has made to his work including Jennifer Lame’s sharp, impressionistic editing patterns and Göransson’s expressively textured compositions that make incredible use of low rumble sound design elements, wailing synths and the shrieking horror violins here.) The practical FX imagery of particles and hellfire and black holes and subatomic chain reactions fall somewhere between David Lynch’s eerie mushroom cloud in Twin Peaks: The Return and the surreal beauty and majesty of Terrance Malick’s creation sequence in The Tree of Life (a movie that also comes up in some of the early editing choices with schoolboy Oppenheimer), with incredible use of flashing lights, sharply disruptive cutting and sound design that emphasizes silence and breathing before the visceral impact of the blast is felt. All the images we’ve seen in his mind made tangible. The blast itself marks as clean of an act divide (that fade to black followed by the cut right back in!) and as ambitious of a structural gambit as Nolan’s ever attempted, deliberately giving us the celebratory catharsis of achieving a process-oriented goal (like the kind that concludes Inception) only to confrontationally deflate it for the remaining hour(!) of the film.

Forcing us to sit in the immediate loss of control Oppenheimer experiences watching the bombs get loaded onto rickety trucks to go commit an atrocity that feels a lot different in reality than it did in strategic or theoretical terms (and pointless, since the war had essentially already been won) followed by the delayed aftermath and regret. It’s the first moment the film is given a chance to breathe and consider the actual context and magnitude of his “great” achievement. This includes a sequence that is the immediate reverse of the Trinity sequence, copying some of its uses of light and sound disruption but in a way that turns the jingoistic speech expected of Oppenheimer following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (if only they were ready in time to be used on the Germans!) into one of the most psychologically harrowing things Nolan has put on screen: the excited bleacher stomping of the crowd used portentously as score, the background vibrating as Oppenheimer disconnects from reality, the blinding flash of lights of the bomb taking over the room, a woman in front of him whose skin starts to peel off (Chris Nolan’s daughter apparently, to send home the sense of loss, his mind), the cheering becomes screaming, he steps through an incinerated corpse… His “accomplishment” infected by the gruesome recorded evidence of what his display of “divine power” actually did to real human life and flesh; it’s the closet Nolan’s imagery gets to Threads territory. 

An internal conflict of guilt-ridden terror about culpability in mass murder that Nolan eventually exorcises in a display of self-loathing martyrdom that was Strauss’ real-life McCarthy-era Red Scare witch-hunt for Oppenheimer over his left-wing past and associations when he came to have public opinions in favor of arms control and against the warmongering security state apparatus trying to escalate a global arms race and develop an even more devastating Hydrogen bomb. A result of both the cursed irony that an object built with the supposed intent of ending a war was clearly starting an eternal one and the reality that all of his power and credibility is directly tied to the patriotic war machine whose existence is only justified through one. The way this section turns records and words into ammunition is riveting, as is its use of Cillian Murphy’s visual alienation as he’s pushed into the corners of rooms in humiliation or framed against the vast Los Alamos vistas which feel like Nolan’s attempt at inserting this as foundational, moral American myth in the same way the great westerns are; physics and New Mexico! Cillian’s performance in general is the movie, and it’s so good at playing genuinely operatic feelings on such a subtle tapestry it will make you wonder why he’s been kept in Nolan’s back pocket for so long… His stiff composure and the sense of earned hubris to the way he carries himself (David Bowie’s skinny-dapper physicality serving as apparent inspiration) contrasted with increasingly gaunt, hollowed-out, skintight features of his face as he becomes dead behind the eyes and is framed in close-ups that feel like that IMAX equivalent of Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc; all these institutional and existential forces converging onto the landscape of a single distraught, ghostly face.

It’s definitely the most intimate, claustrophobic use of such an epically scaled format we’ve ever seen, serving as both a tormented subjective abstraction of history and an earth-rattling realization/culmination of it through a whirlwind of colliding and collapsing (subatomic) details. Historical documentation merging with frightening psychological intimacy, the thrill of scientific invention haunted by its devastating military application, a man who once saw visions of a beautiful world that buzzed, hummed, glowed and rippled like water now sees one that screams and burns into nothingness… Energy and paradox, gravity and light, space and force, science and politics, man and machine all turned into the most depressed, sensorial, dread-inducing summer spectacle that’s maybe ever been conceived of. Nolan’s obsession with achronological cross-cutting impressionism and fatal, bombastic mechanized paradoxes all arriving at a vivid, purgatorial black hole of an ending. One that reads as both all-consuming paranoia flooding after so much compartmentalization and simply the natural, apocalyptic endpoint of tracing these events we’ve just witnessed to their logical conclusion. Regardless, some of the most dazed, quiet shuffling out of a packed theater I’ve seen in some time. Going to sit with this one for a bit longer but it might be his best movie.

“But now we got weapons
Of chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to,
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And they shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side”

[70mm IMAX]

Full discussion on my podcast SLEAZOIDS.