Oppenheimer has crushed box office expectations; many eyes (and shattered eardrums) have responded to Christopher Nolan's propulsive political thriller with praise that has surpassed his most outstanding achievements. With a coveted "A" CinemaScore and heaps of posts exclaiming the existential dread the film has suffocated audiences with, Nolan has reframed the expectations of what he's capable of. He seems to do this once a decade (Memento, Inception). Although he may have mishandled the release of Tenet during a pandemic, to bounce back with his biggest hit outside of The Dark Knight/Rises, which is a landmark in his career. Another feather in his Porkpie hat, if you will…
I loved Oppenheimer and had plenty to say about it in my review that you can find here, but the more I sit and listen to Ludwig Göransson's score in my free time, my mind continues to trace back to The Trinity Test. Placed at the end of the film's second hour, it is a centerpiece that marks the historical turning point as a paralyzing force of shock and awe. Plenty of filmmakers would have tried to wow the audience with the spectacle of a computer-generated mushroom cloud. Still, Nolan's bullishness for practical effects looks into the psychological ramifications of a petrifying sight. At the same time, we can read it through the prism of Nolan's indulgent screenwriting practices that are burned into his DNA as a storyteller.
Turning to the protagonists as stand-ins is familiar to Nolan. In Inception, we know that he used Cobb (DiCaprio) as the director of a project tasked with assembling a team to plant an idea in an unexpecting member of the operation. Inception is a movie about making movies, it isn't a revelation, but it is the most obvious example of Nolan using the emotionally exhausting filmmaking process to bring him catharsis. As clinical as many exclaim Nolan to be, his puzzle box narratives have a self-conscious playfulness that can be exciting to discover if you're a film novice or a long-term aficionado. The catharsis he seeks can often have different layers of meaning depending on which prism you view it through.
With Oppenheimer, Nolan weaves three intersecting storylines around the Trinity Test. The sequence is one of the most extended stretches of the film that is uninterrupted by a time-traveling edit, and Nolan can amplify the intensity of it as the scene incinerates ground zero. The previous hours spent before this moment are primarily made up of intercutting spaces of time that tend to feel disjointed and unattended. Questions are unanswered; information is a mile a minute, and plenty of names with roles attributed to a face speak in past and present tense based on the monochromatic texture or not. This overwhelming sense of space and time that Nolan forces us to inhabit is a brain-splitting cauldron of cinematic chemicals. Yet, the intent is largely beneficial as the bomb spoils Native American land in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Although the film evades the bulldozing of land, animals, homes, and people, the evasiveness of color (race, ethnicity) that isn't blindingly white is artistically pointed. The invasion of moral apathy, as contrasted against the full-scale embellishment of national exceptionalism, is a part of the machine that has shaped the history books - pro-American history is always issued from the perspective of Americans. So, this path towards scorching American soil isn't artistic negligence but a choice that stamps the footnotes of American history with the posturing of technological evolution as an act of discrimination. How they hide behind this motivation is through the influential minds that they've elected (in a most political sense) to emulate the pastures of empirical tyranny at ground zero. With that in mind, Los Alamos can be read as the blueprint of the nuclear families that'll define the 1950s half a decade later.
It is no coincidence that the tower of the bomb protruding from the Earth like a denominated steeple is akin to the oil derricks that harvested the blood of the land in the dawn of the 1900s. The infrastructure around these tools of destruction once siphoned the blood from Mother Earth and now, four decades later, burned her carcass. The tower looms miles away, its beating heart strapped to ventricles of energy coursing through this vestibule of technology hums with a sinister breath, and the clock ticks toward its radioactive release onto the Earth. At 5:30 a.m., they drop the bomb, and this is where Nolan ignites his everlasting love of what film is capable of achieving and how it is an all-consuming fear when you see what it is capable of becoming.
For years we've cried out at Hollywood's tendency to turn horror into spectacle. War films that turn to action and eventually the easy answers to politically complex times are the best examples of turning the real into a jolt of violent fantasia. Glamorous CGI explosions, gut-busting squibs, and brain-splattering paint decorate the labyrinthine forests of Vietnam or the sandy cemetery of Normandy. As visceral as scenes can be, there is a spectacular level of scale attributed to images. How Nolan approaches the explosion in Los Alamos is nothing like the spectacle of being exposed to the spoils of war. In limiting his expenses to a practical recreation of the explosion, Nolan can use the pluming smoke to force Oppenheimer to look inward before we ever think about the scale of it. At the dawn of the day, the first light is sudden and breathtaking. As the smoke forms into the sky, Oppenheimer stares into the heart of his creation - panting, shaken by the fear of success and what it immediately means moving forward. The smoke becomes engulfed in the early morning haze, and all that's left is Oppenheimer's whimper, "It worked."
At this moment, we understand the significance of Nolan expressing his love for the IMAX format, shooting on film, and his stubborn approach to ensure he owns the theatrical circuit upon release. It's no coincidence that we knew of the Oppenheimer print's size, length, and scale well before the movie was released. It runs 11 miles long, weighs 600 pounds, and needs the support of a 3-D printed base to support it because no film has ever been this big. Perhaps this is Nolan being honest that he is unsure his creation might work, and for an unfortunate few, there were 70mm IMAX screenings that failed to maintain the projection for all three hours. Some missed the last hour or had a shade of purple take over half the image because the projector overheated, the bulbs got too hot, or the images were practically melting from the power of the machine. Nowadays, projection booths are virtually unqualified to harness this much energy for a couple of hours. Nolan being unafraid to re-invite mass audiences back to his domain with his filmmaking habits compliments his melancholic temperaments. The margins for film projection are steadily decreasing, and as thumb drives have replaced stitched-together reels of images, the successes of those who adore what the mind can project on film marks this moment in modern history as a reminder of how monumental film projection can be when audiences show up to support it.
Nolan's name practically sells more tickets than the subject matter, but the marketing around the 70mm projection boosted interest and amplified the sales. To those who have yet to see it in 70mm (myself included), the film invites a revisit to see it in the format Nolan intended for it to be seen, and the conversation continues. Whether it be about the talented cast, standard format versus IMAX, what the IMAX projection accomplishes as compared to standard, and the apolitical politics that holds this groundbreaking film together continues to push the boundaries of the conversation in exciting directions. Like the motion of the reel, the conversation winds its way through the past to illuminate one of the most critical events in human history, and it starts with the repercussions that have rippled throughout history before and after the morning of July 16, 1945.
The conversation takes shape around the film's distance from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that characteristic apathy in the language of the film expands the radius of the horror it has chosen to ignore. Perhaps the ignorant perspective inked on the politics of the United States is used to exemplify the act of discrimination as a notorious example of exceptionalism through the lens of White Americans. Their collective negligence of people and appraisal of coveted power diminishes the agency a mind can bestow on a project. Considering that the only "side" Nolan takes is the mind and what it is capable of achieving (especially as the director of a collaborative project like that of a film), Nolan can abide by his fundamentals as a politically distant filmmaker to inform us of the radically charged abuse that can deface a figure and discriminate against a populous.
I believe that Nolan fears his recreation of the Trinity Test (and the totality of the film's events) may be taken incorrectly, and it may clash with the sincere levels of empathy his filmography often enunciates. So that when Oppenheimer does work - the movie, the reel, the projector, the sound, and the light - he worries that this canvas of engulfing light a few stories high and wide will inspire the wrong lessons that could be taken from it. Making a film is a challenge, and when someone like Nolan dedicates his life to the work he brings to the world, the political optics can be foggy, but that doesn't refrain from it being an intrinsically designed monolith filled with the explosive anecdotes of creation. In the steaming hot booth, he sees that in Oppenheimer at the turn of every hour, but at its most genuinely horrifying, when you give your mind back to the world that inspired it, it can be turned against you by the globe's prideful oppressors.