Zachary’s review published on Letterboxd:
Discussed on the First Watch Podcast. Listen here!
Do you hear the music, Robert?
A forlorn sonata heralds the twilight of mankind. Out in the desert, at the end of civilization, the wind is rising, then the fire, then the ash. Then the sound. Tuning their strings is an apocalyptic 4000-man orchestra, ready to unleash America's triumphant symphonic masterpiece on the world. Death from above, 1945. Standing tall at the podium are two maestros, looking through the flow of history right into each other's eyes. Nolan and Oppenheimer, Oppy and Chris. Together they shatter open time and collect up its pieces, a mosaic of memory and history forged in the heat of the atomic blast. And the device is just the beginning. Once the sum total of Western science is unleashed in a blinding pika, brilliant theory turns to cold, hard, fact.
Bodies turn to embers, if they're lucky, and succumb to systemic failure if they aren't. The rest of us, too, are survivors, not of one bombing, but of every weapon on the planet that has not gone off since. All the earth's beasts survive on the knife's edge, but we're the only ones intent on sharpening the blade. Similar to his earliest works, Oppenheimer isn't necessarily the character drama its cast implies, but more a deep psychological probe of the man who put the hilt in our hands. Our most apolitical, asexual, blockbuster merchant reveals a passionate, aching humanism that transcends nationality, ideology, and generations of lives. It is the wisdom born of experience, passed down by the ideal cinematic caretaker. As thrilling as anything Nolan has made, and as ominous, harrowing, and angering as the story demanded. It might just be his masterpiece.
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