The name of the English filmmaker Christopher Nolan has been associated with cinematic originality and a genius style of narration. Nolan did not make a film without redefining the cinematic genre to which the film belongs.
In “Memento” and “Insomnia”, Nolan redefined police films as “noir”, and in the “Batman” trilogy, he redefined comics films by introducing the element of realism into them. In “Inception” he redefined theft films, in “Interstellar” and “Tenet” he redefined science fiction, and in “Dunkirk” he redefined World War II films.
Every time Nolan makes a movie, he presents an idea in a new way. After the daring and crazy movie “Tenet”, from which no one may understand anything due to its complexity and madness, Nolan returns today with the movie “Oppenheimer” and “Oppenheimer”, about the story of the inventor of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Japan in World War II.
In “Oppenheimer”, Nolan works in the category of drama and biographies, a category that has suffered a lot of monotony and re-equation over the past years, but this time we will not say that Nolan has redefined it, for what some see as a masterpiece we see as a very ordinary movie. This time Nolan didn’t.
Nolan moved away from action and adventure, which is his specialty, and went towards the late David Lean cinema. Despite being very long and unbalanced in rhythm, “Oppenheimer” contains great moments and a wonderful performance from the film’s hero (Irish Killian Murphy), who will inevitably be nominated in the upcoming award season.
Nolan employs black and white footage to show a congressional hearing, and even black and white here we did not understand its artistic purpose, and it reflects Nolan’s sophistication for the sake of sophistication only and we do not see it as an organic part of the film. In addition to the music that does not stop, and even in the dialogue scenes it seems intrusive and makes the movie closer to a long promotional video and sometimes overwhelms the dialogue.
During the past 80 years, since Oppenheimer’s name became famous, books and documentaries have come out that tarnished or improved the man’s reputation in accordance with the interest of the American political and military agenda. Basically, he was a hero when he invented the bomb and Washington used it to stop World War II.
Then, during the Cold War, his reputation was tarnished by rumors of his ties to the Soviet Union. He lived a dismal period until he was honored with the Enrico Fermi Prize in 1963 and his reputation restored. The film presents this part of his life, jumping between the past and the present, to suit Nolan’s mood.
Oppenheimer focuses on three periods of the physicist’s life, each period consisting of flashbacks or advances. Of course, for the viewer, the method is similar to a jigsaw puzzle, but it is the only way to prevent the film from following the course of successive events, and we must not forget Nolan’s obsession with time and his manipulation of it in all his films.
On the other hand, the course of successive events is the cause of the crisis that biographical films suffer from. In the first part of the film, Nolan uses a framing device during the scene of the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearing that revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance, from here Nolan moves to the past.
The majority of the film, or the second part of it, dealt with the establishment of the Manhattan Project and the events that led to the “Trinity” or the test of the bomb in the Los Alamos desert in July 1945. As for the third part, which is black and white, it goes into the future in 1959 during a congressional hearing to appoint Louis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission as Secretary of Commerce, and Strauss is responsible for discrediting and demonizing Oppenheimer.
Nolan pays no attention to Oppenheimer’s female relationships, specifically his relationship with his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) and his relationship with his mistress Jane Tatlock (Florence Pugh), as the two relationships are immature in the text and could have served the text if they had been properly developed. The same for the scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project or the atomic bomb, they did not take an appropriate space in the film.
Nolan’s crown jewel in this film and the scene that reflects Nolan in his best moments is the 20 minutes before the experimental bombing (Trinity). Here, the Nolan we know appears in a breathtaking scene as he builds the moments of suspense that precede the climax moment, that is, the explosion itself.
Nolan is satisfied with the test explosion, then we hear that the bomb was dropped on Japan without allocating a scene for that. Then the main character enters into the torment of remorse, followed by her voice opposing the plan of the politicians and the military to develop the bomb and weapons of mass destruction, then marginalize and demonize it, a story that has become a cliché for everyone who opposes Washington internally in the decisions of its wars.
Oppenheimer’s character develops in the course of the film, so we see him at first as a theorist and then as a desire to test his theory in the field. When he is forced to confront the consequences of the bomb and a post-atomic world, he begins to have nightmares in his waking life and from here he absorbs the warnings of scientist Albert Einstein (Tom Conte) and Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh).
And it seems that Nolan chooses his stars carefully, and some of them cooperated with him previously, so we see Matt Damon in the role of a strict army officer who almost stole the scenes that brought him together with Murphy. Robert Donnie appears under a heavy layer of make-up that makes him old, and Donnie specifically is the villain of the movie, or closest to this description, and he is wonderful in the role of the villain. As for the cameo roles – meaning only one scene – they go to Oscar winners Casey Affleck as Boris Bash and Gary Oldman as US President Harry Truman.
Oppenheimer may bring the biographical epics back to the fore again if he achieves massive success at the box office. Epics such as Gandhi in 1982, Patton in 1970, and Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. They are films that tell stories of the lives of controversial historical figures without regard to the time period of the film: three hours or more. However, this period of continuous dialogues may be tedious for some, especially without action or a break in the middle.
Oppenheimer is an indication that Nolan refuses to classify him as an action or science fiction director, and he is bold and comes out of the safety zone with complete confidence, but that does not mean that “Oppenheimer” is the best of what he has made. “Oppenheimer” inevitably weakens in front of classics such as “The Dark Knight”, “Inception”, “Interstellar”, “Dunkirk” and “Tenet”. But it may well outshine the classics when it wins Oscar nominations.
competition this week
It is expected that there will be an upcoming competition this week for the top spot in the American box office between “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie”. “Oppenheimer” is Nolan’s first film with Universal Studios after his famous feud with Warner Studios over the movie “Tenet”.
And “Barbie” distributed by Warner, which deliberately put it together with “Oppenheimer” to tease Nolan. In an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph, Nolan said he did not rule out Warner’s intention to do this move.
Nolan did not make a film without redefining the cinematic genre to which the film belongs.
The non-stop music even in the dialogue scenes seems intrusive and makes the movie more like a long promotional video.
