Dense and spectacular – and not pink: Oppenheimer reviewed

Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant quantum physicist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’ who was later haunted by what he’d created. Starring Cillian Murphy, and his cheekbones, the film is dense, ambitious, complex, so very long (three hours) and impressive, even if it does drag by the end. (When a film is so very long, that’s the price you pay.) I could go on and on but, for many, the main selling point will be this: it isn’t Barbie and it isn’t pink.

It’s a Nolan film so, of course, it’s not chronological storytelling. I pity his wife. I bet he can’t even go to the shops without recounting his journey in splintered fragments she’ll have to piece together. (‘Chris, please just start at the beginning…’) It is jumpy and agitated and hops around several timelines, with no dates or context given, which is a headache. And it also jumps between colour and black and white, sometimes changing mid-scene, which is also a headache. But while it’s a headache, and challenging and difficult, it is never as annoyingly baffling as, say, Tenet. Or Interstellar.

The film covers Oppenheimer’s early career as a dazzling student and professor, and one problem Nolan has is: how do you put theoretical physics on screen? There are long equations on blackboards, obviously, but we might suddenly cut to fireballs, or stars collapsing, which does give us some sense of how Oppenheimer sees the world. Other timelines follow him building the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico during the second world war and we also view him in the 1950s when, having realised that his creation had a limitless capacity for destruction, he campaigned for international regulations while Washington just wanted him to shut up and go away.