Oppenheimer: The Review

[Some mild spoilers]

I am not what you would call a Nolan fanboy. I might have been once. But over the years, I have grown increasingly tired of Christopher Nolan as a director. That is because he, in my opinion, has taken his audience for granted. He has eschewed the telling of a story in favor of directorial pyrotechnics. As a superstar himself, he seems compelled to somehow put himself in front of his own movie, like a person in the theater standing up right in front of you when you least want him to.

Dunkirk was a visual spectacle, made for Imax, but it did not last in my mind. I absolutely loved it when I saw it, but quickly forgot.

Tenet was an absolute trainwreck, not merely a bad movie, but inscrutable, and deliberately so, as if Nolan is saying to his audience, “I give a flying fuck if you understand this movie or not. By the way, if you do not, you are a stupid person anyways, and not worthy of my genius.” And because he is a brand, no one in the studios has the cojones to temper his arrogance. So Nolan’s greatness survives purely on the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome: “Everyone else says his movies are great, so I must say so too, else I will be labeled stupid.”

Oppenheimer, though, is a welcome break from the navel-gazing downward spiral of a once-visionary director. It does have some abrupt staccato cuts, all done in order to do the Nolanian “reveal”, which actually does not work here, in my opinion, and sometimes you get the feeling again that Nolan does not really care if the audience is with him or not. But somehow just when you feel you are about to turn off, Oppenheimer clicks you in by your belt and takes you for a hell of a ride. 

Oppenheimer is not an easy watch, definitely not for the first hour, but once it hits its straps, Nolan brings to bear every cinematic trick in his magic hat. It’s like a heist movie without a heist, so palpable is the sense of excitement, tension, and urgency, over, what once you think about it, is a research and development project that we know killed tens of thousands of people and changed the world forever, in the worst way possible. The way Nolan does his magic is arguably what makes him Nolan: sound and visual engineering of the highest pedigree. Music, sound, silence, and visuals are perfectly coordinated,  blinding white light and dark shadows, atomic orbitals and raindrops falling on puddles, allowing for an “inception” of emotion into the audience’s minds, even when they are not completely understanding what’s going on in front of them. This is cinematic legerdemain of the highest order, and worth applauding, though I am still not convinced that the emotional impact of Oppenheimer will carry to a TV screen. If the first time you watch Oppenheimer is on streaming, this last paragraph will be as inscrutable to you as Tenet.

For me, though, in order for a movie to be called “great”, it has to say something about human beings or the human condition.

And that’s where Oppenheimer shines.

It’s not just shiny mirrors and indirection.

It is not just a 3-hour rollercoaster ride on a stationary seat.

It is not Dunkirk.  

Oppenheimer is a fascinating, multi-layered study of conflict. There are many conflicts going on–between the “small minds” and the “big minds”, between husband and wife, between Communism and Capitalism, the Allied and the Axis, and laying bare each strand of the conflict is beyond this post.  

But let’s look at the most important conflict of all, a conflict that rages inside Oppenheimer’s mind.

It stems from guilt. Anyone familiar with the Oppenheimer story knows this. On seeing the test detonation of an atomic device, Oppenheimer has a change of heart. The terrifying realization of what he has done dawns on him, and he utters those lines from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am Death, destroyer of worlds”. Seized upon by remorse, he becomes a public spokesman for nuclear arms control. At the height of the cold war, his continued opposition to the nuclear program leads to whispers that he was an agent of the Communists, with whom he had association years ago, ultimately resulting in him, a once-national-hero, losing favor with the ruling dispensation. President Truman even calls him a “crybaby”, an incident that finds its way into the movie, except that the President did not say this within earshot of Oppenheimer. Though Oppenheimer’s legacy was subsequently exhumed, post-McCarthy years, he never quite recovers from the very public attacks on him and died, with a cloud over his head.

This is a good story and a known story, but in Oppenheimer, it is not the only story. In one of the opening sequences of the movie, Oppenheimer is introduced as a quiet, introverted student who, on being bullied by his tutor, injects potassium cyanide into his apple. Once the silent rage subsidizes, he rushes back to destroy the apple before it kills his tutor. This establishes a character trait of the titular character, blinding, unthinking rage, the one that rages behind an apparently calm exterior. As a Jewish man in the US, when he first hears of what the Nazis are doing to Jews, it’s the anger that drives him to say “yes” to becoming the project director of the Manhattan Project, despite his “ultra-liberal” worldview.

It’s not that he realizes what he has done only when he sees the explosion. He knows fully well what he is doing from day one. Post-facto guilt is very much a part of his character, from trying to poison his tutor to cheating on his wife.

Rage is not the only reason for Oppenheimer leading the Manhattan Project. Nor is his later regret a consequence of his anger subsiding. As a matter of fact, rage might be only a small part of Oppenheimer’s overall psychological profile.

What he is really looking for is glory.

It is part of the unique pathology of geniuses, and there is no doubt Oppenheimer was one, this relentless pursuit of glory. Maybe that last sentence is not fully correct, all of us desire glory, but geniuses, whether it be in science or arts or sports, are already halfway there.

Oppenheimer is chasing glory, the kind of glory that is mythic, and it is not a coincidence that the movie begins with him being compared to Prometheus, a Greek demi-god who brought fire to humans and endured eternal damnation for that.

As the head of the Manhattan Project with an insane budget of 2 billion dollars in the 1940s, Oppenheimer is fully seduced by the power he has, the boss of the best minds in America, a direct audience with the most powerful men in the land, the brains to understand it all, and the knowledge that the fate of the Western world effectively rests in his hands. 

Though he has occasional pangs of conscience, be it with respect to his serial philandering or his role in creating a weapon of mass destruction, he never takes his inner voice seriously. He is too preoccupied with power. It is only once the project is coming to an end that the rush subsides, and Oppenheimer contemplates the impact of his actions. There is a scene where the military takes the bomb from him and tells him essentially that we will take it from here. When Oppenheimer sees the successful detonation of his device, he is at the acme of his power, and it is in this context one should interpret the line, ” I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is not some great expression of guilt, but something exactly the opposite, the full articulation of his God complex. Once the experiment is successful, he realizes that his power is over; someone else will indeed take it from here, and he will have no say in how many bombs will be dropped, and where, now or ever.

That’s when he starts having thoughts of pacificism.

During the project, Edward Teller, one of the scientists working under Oppenheimer, proposes the hydrogen bomb. From a purely scientific perspective, it is a superior technology, in that it is much more destructive than Oppenheimer’s atom bomb. Here though, Oppenheimer becomes strangely reluctant to pursue that line of research, citing his moral compass. A hydrogen bomb is too destructive, of no utility in terms of war, simply a weapon of civilizational destruction. The hypocrisy is evident, the hydrogen bomb is nothing but the inevitable improvement of his own pet project, and this is not lost on Edward Teller, who, despite being a pupil and otherwise devotee of Oppenheimer, later turns on him. What he says to the committee deliberating on Oppenheimer’s fate is that while he does not doubt Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the country, he would not endorse him keeping his security clearance. The security clearance is the metaphor for Oppenheimer’s power; without it, he is a mere mortal, and that is what Edward Teller is saying, Oppenheimer cannot be trusted with power.

One cannot but find parallels with Geoffrey Hinton, the father of AI, quitting Google and then criticizing his past employer for research he did for them. Did he suddenly realize the impact of his work? Did he suddenly develop a conscience? Or did he, at the end of his career, on seeing some of the large language models in use today from other corporations, that have definitely drawn on his work, have a hydrogen bomb moment?

Maybe a future Nolan can tell us.

Which brings us back to Oppenheimer, the movie. The Nolan-ian twist is that you were not watching a biopic; you were watching a superhero-supervillain fable.

For Oppenheimer is both, depending on where you stand, a destroyer of worlds or the winner of the war, assembling other Avengers of super-scientists to create a united front against evil, or Thanos himself with his dark army, drunk with the hubris of having the power to exterminate humanity in a blinding flash of light with a flick of his mind.

An amazing work of art.