Literary Analysis

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.