Writer-director Christopher Nolan is revered in Hollywood, which I find curious because I don’t love his movies.  But others do, from his “Dark Knight” trilogy to Dunkirk, Tenet and Interstellar, all of which I thought were overrated.  On the other hand I thought Inception was brilliantly done, and I think that Oppenheimer is his best work since then.  It may be his best work of all.  Certainly it is his deepest.

Christopher Nolan’s story is that of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist tasked with developing the atomic bomb for America to beat the Nazis and the Russians to the punch during World War II.  Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is a complex, troubled man but he has the best temperament to guide many of the country’s best minds to complete “the most important thing to happen in the history of the world,” according to General Groves (Matt Damon), who appoints the left-leaning scientist to the post and watches over him.  The work takes three years but the bomb is developed . . . and used . . . but that is not the end of the story for “the father of the Bomb.”

Nolan is a dynamic filmmaker and he fires on all cylinders for this story, using black-and-white film stock for the post-war scenes (!), a multitude of fire and particle images for the raging forces of energy and its destructiveness, as well as Oppenheimer’s vivid imagination.  The film is all about conflict: between neutrons and protons, the Allies and the Axis, the need to bring people in to complete the Project while ensuring that they cannot go anywhere else or do anything to jeopardize the Project, the military and the civilian, the sex drive and society’s rules about that, the desire for power and the responsibility for handling that power, and ultimately, monstrous egos of people against those who surround them.  The mighty accomplishment of Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project is, in this telling, gradually eroded and undermined by forces who want his power and influence for themselves.  Ultimately, this is a very human story, one that is rather depressing and unsympathetic.

There have been other feature film  versions of this story, most notably The Beginning or the End (1942, with Hume Cronyn as Oppenheimer and Brian Donlevy as Groves) and Fat Man and Little Boy (1989, with Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer and Paul Newman as Groves), but this one will be the definitive version for years to come.  It is certainly the most personal and most artistic, with its bombastic score and brilliant use of sound.  Two-thirds of this three hour film are absolutely riveting.  The other third, which details how the famous physicist was treated in the early 1950s, juxtaposed with the political rise of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), is just as dramatic but less satisfying.  Nevertheless, this is an important story, one which makes viewers question a wide range of issues of the past, the present, and the future.  ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2.  13 August 2023.