Oppenheimer Review

Oppenheimer is a biographical film telling the tale of theoretical physicist, J.Robert Oppenheimer, 'The Father of the Atomic Bomb'. The movie was written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight) and stars Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Junior, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh.

Oppenheimer is Jewish, with ties to communism and when nuclear fission is first discovered in 1938, he fears the Germans will use this to develop a fission bomb for the Nazi's. U.S. Army Colonel, Leslie Groves, recruits Oppenheimer as the director of the Manhatton Project to develop an atomic bomb.

When president Truman orders the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer is haunted with the guilt of all the deaths caused by what he had helped develop and when he goes to see Truman to discourage further development of nuclear weapons he is just dismissed. Cillian Murphy was sensational in the role and superbly conveyed Oppenheimer's 'haunted face'.

Oppenheimer is framed through a series of legal proceedings (regarding his security clearance) and flashbacks. Filmed in both colour and black and white, the movie is in colour for Oppenheimer's perspective and in black and white for the perspective of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Junior) a former colleague. Strauss was the orchestrater of these legal proceedings concerning Oppenheimers security clearance because he wanted to politically ruin him and limit his influence on nuclear policy because Oppenheimer had previously publically humiliated him and he also believed that Oppenheimer had criticized him in a conversation with Albert Einstein.

Nolan made this movie an explosion for the senses through sound and vision. There were many times in which the audience would jump as if watching a jump scare in a horror movie as Nolan used sound to convey moments of tension, beautifully coupled with an amazing score by Ludwig Goransson, conveying the horrors of war. There were abstract moments placed throughtout the movie of explosions which made you feel you were travelling into the heart of the atom itself which I felt were symbolic of the bombs going off in Oppenheimers life through his womanising, his thoughtless mistakes that he made in moments of pride and the apocolyptic visions that tormented him.

Normally Oppenheimer would not be 'my kind of movie' but I really enjoyed it and I certainly did not feel I had been sitting watching it for three plus hours because it held your attention throughout and the time just flew by. This is definitely a movie you have to see at least once.

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