Category Archives: Historical

For a movie centered on the “father of the atomic bomb,” Oppenheimer depicts its most fateful sequence in understated fashion. The day that “Fat Man” actually goes off over Hiroshima, our haunted protagonist first learns of it from a staticky radio broadcast. There’s no courtesy call, no news footage, no social media feeds. Instead, J. Robert Oppenheimer sits nearly alone in the quiet recesses of the Los Alamos laboratory, a piece in a grand geopolitical drama that far exceeds him. Events are now out of control in a very frightening way: they have burst the boundaries of the lab once and for all, and nothing can be the same again.

Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan’s first film since 2020’s disastrous Tenet. And it may be his best—a sprawling, stark, eerie meditation on the tension between the cold purity of physics and the grubby realities of the human world, all seen through the eyes of a singularly troubled figure (Cillian Murphy). Like its central character, it is a profoundly ambiguous film that defies easy political or ideological characterization.

Like most recent Nolan films, Oppenheimer plays around with its cinematic timelines, cutting back and forth between scenes from Oppenheimer’s life and career, the postwar investigation into his security clearance prompted by Oppenheimer’s past Communist associations, and finally a Senate confirmation hearing for potential Commerce Secretary Lewis Strauss (a superb Robert Downey Jr.), who finds himself tainted by his own history with Oppenheimer. 

And there’s certainly a lot of ground to cover. We first glimpse a young Oppenheimer sparring with his tutors and bringing quantum theory from Europe to America, before it’s on to his troubled marriage to Kitty (an underused Emily Blunt), and his dalliances with Communist femme fatale Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). Eventually, of course, he’s called up by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to head the enigmatic Manhattan Project and build an atomic weapon. All of this culminates in the legendary “Trinity” test in the New Mexico desert, the thunderous proof-of-concept for the bomb that changed the world.

But then, of course, bureaucracy intervenes, as Oppenheimer’s trustworthiness—with the Soviet Union ramping up its own atomic capabilities—comes into question. Were Manhattan Project security clearances handed out too cavalierly? Should Oppenheimer’s aversion to hydrogen bomb development be seen as sincere concern, or as disloyalty? In the era of the “Red Scare,” who can say?

That’s not to say, though, that Oppenheimer is a partisan hit piece (indeed, it probably skews conservative—“Communism” is a faceless and shadowy presence throughout, and it’s clearly Oppenheimer’s hamartia). Rather, the questions here are much bigger, cutting to the nature of scientific endeavor itself. 

As the film builds to its denouement, there’s a sense in which its text feels familiar enough. On the face of things, Oppenheimer mounts an extended plea for scientific independence over against political meddling. Keep the messy business of value judgments out of the lab, Oppenheimer and his colleagues protest over and over again to whomever will listen. Communists, capitalists, whomever—it’s all just noise. They want to be left alone to do their work, and maybe wrestle with the moral dimensions when they feel up to it.

But this is an old storytelling trope, and Nolan is savvier than that. The subtext of the film is that this quest for scientific neutrality is an utterly impossible fantasy. There is no lab work, especially not in wartime, that stands apart from fundamental value judgments. Oppenheimer’s choice to develop the bomb is simultaneously a choice to place it into the hands of American politicians. His choice to flirt with Communism is a choice to question whether America should be trusted with that kind of power. 

This is a truth that Nolan’s Oppenheimer can never quite bring himself to acknowledge outright. “Nobody knows what you believe,” a friend challenges Oppenheimer late in the game. “Do you?” And it’s a fair question. This Oppenheimer is a moral cipher, simultaneously brooding over the horrors of the atomic age while glorying in the thrill of his accomplishment. He can’t quite make up his mind—and Nolan declines to do so for his audience. The central question remains.

Like every Nolan film, this is a technical masterpiece featuring top-notch performances—especially, of course, Murphy’s spectral Oppenheimer—and pristine production design. And it’s all backed by a haunting score by Ludwig Göransson that (pleasingly) recalls Clint Mansell’s work on The Fountain. Happily, though, in this case it’s the characters and themes, more than just the craftsmanship, that lingers in the mind.

In the end, perhaps, the best reading of Nolan’s Oppenheimer is as a tragedy. That’s because, at bottom, it is more than just the story of one visionary man. It is the tragedy of the modern technological mind more broadly—the pursuit of physical mastery without correspondingly firm convictions.

That ambiguity may be profoundly human, of course. But as the stakes grow higher, it is an ambiguity the world can less and less afford.

One of the most uncanny aspects of the “Assassin’s Creed” series of history-themed video games, at least in recent years, is how profoundly familiar they make the past. Characters—from Viking princes to Athenian philosophers—routinely come off as modern men and women playing dress-up, displaying a smug contempt for traditional religiosity and a (historically anomalous) commitment to gender parity. And what gets lost in translation is the genuine strangeness of historical civilizations long gone, the possibility of glimpsing an altogether alien way of “Being-in-the-world” that possesses its own distinctive rationality.

Robert Eggers’s brutal, brilliant film “The Northman” does not suffer from this vice. It is the most thoroughgoing vision of pagan civilization I’ve ever seen onscreen, a glimpse back in time to the glories and horrors of an uncompromising social order.

Based on the old folktale that inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “The Northman” follows Scandinavian prince Amleth (a musclebound Alexander Skarsgård) and his quest for revenge against his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who murdered Amleth’s father and stole his queen (a delightfully venomous Nicole Kidman). Along the way Amleth falls in with the beautiful Slavic sorceress Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), who helps him lay the groundwork for his vengeance, and finds himself visited in visions by witches and gods and Valkyries. It’s a familiar story—everyone knows from the start where this tale is going to end up—but in Eggers’s capable hands, it becomes something writhing and incandescent and alive.

Eggers’s previous films—“The Witch” and “The Lighthouse”—were both characterized by their totalizing commitment to worldbuilding: “The Witch” depicted the metaphysically “enchanted” world of Puritan New England in unsettling detail, while “The Lighthouse” stressed the eeriness and danger of the sea. Altogether absent was any sense of ironic detachment or modern self-awareness. And this is precisely the element that makes “The Northman” so cinematically compelling: its utter unwillingness to “break worldview” and sand off the rough edges of its pagan sensibility.

Even if they don’t go as far as the “Assassin’s Creed” titles in modernizing their characters, most historical dramas (past and present) have a strong tendency to retroactively “Christianize” stories set in classical times. By this, I mean that they tend to feature heroes that exemplify what even today’s secular age still considers to be virtues: self-examination, compassion for the weak, and so on. And of course, the theme of escaping fate through free will is all over modern cinema of all genres.

None of this anachronism leaks into “The Northman”: Amleth is a kind of “hero” within the context of his culture, but he is not one whose morality maps onto ours. While he doesn’t participate directly, he is comfortable standing idly by while conquered villagers are burned to death in a flaming longhouse, and he is willing to kill women and children who happen to attack him. He seems to have virtually no inner life worth reflecting on, and he experiences every moment of life as structured by the unavoidable hand of fate.

Is this jarring? Of course it is. But this is also history in its unadulterated form, a history that exposes the contingency of the civic values we so often take for granted. It doesn’t sit easy because it shouldn’t sit easy. Indeed, I came away from “The Northman” struck anew by the radicalism of the Christian claim that every human life has intrinsic value: it’s one thing to read about the savagery of societies lacking such a principle, but quite another to see it depicted onscreen.

And of course, in the midst of this darkness “The Northman” is also a grimly exhilarating experience, from its blood-soaked battlefields and bouts with undead warriors in hidden tombs to its final showstopping duel. In less capable hands, some of the film’s most memorable moments—like Amleth and his fellow warriors howling like wolves to pump themselves up into a berserker rage before battle—might’ve come off as pure camp, but with Eggers behind the camera, they’re electrifying. When “The Northman” kicks into high gear, it feels like a testosterone shot straight to the chest.

There’s a lot more I could say, particularly about the amazing cinematography that suffuses this film—from stormy seas to lava-spewing craters—but words really don’t do it justice. This is a movie that demands to be experienced on the biggest screen possible, with the loudest sound system. Perhaps “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” didn’t strike your fancy (maybe they were too weird, or too slow-burning) but “The Northman” is far zippier and far more accessible. 

At the end of the day, “The Northman” is quite simply the best swords-and-sandals flick since “Gladiator.” Highly recommended.