In 2020, the Earth stood still. Despite the bowels of political logistics, administrative failures, and scientific discoveries grinding towards a conclusion, there was a stillness that feels as undeniable today as it did three years ago. Amid that unforgettable Summer, with empty barstools and less locomotive commotion, theater lights were dimming, and Christopher Nolan’s stubborn English mind was adamant his 12th feature, Tenet, be released in theaters regardless. The mere thought of shoveling it into the streaming circuit was an affront to Nolan’s entire philosophy as a filmmaker, storyteller, and creator.
It was a box office misfire to the tune of many disgruntled murmurs behind masks, and it’s since formed into a mild fan favorite. In hindsight, Tenet feels like a test of concept with plenty of plot jargon and narrative-spinning exposition. Still, it harmed the legacy of Christopher Nolan more than it helped his crusade for the theatrical experience. In response, Nolan pivoted back towards WWII with his newest feature, Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, and a staggering amount of actors currently sidelined with a picket in hand fighting for their rights, which rings with a tinge of irony just three years removed from a Summer heat that overlooked our separation and now sizzles with collaborative unionization.
In Oppenheimer, Nolan adapts the text of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's “American Prometheus” with the interwoven subjects of personal stakes and the measurements of time that elicit the forthcoming combustion of man. It is man versus technology, man versus the world, man versus nature, and man versus man in a politically damning piece of cinematic architecture that chisels the figure from within the marble of America’s conquest in globalizing their administrated exceptionalism.
In the 1981 documentary, The Day After Trinity, director Jon Else used the people nearest Oppenheimer to explore how they were integral pieces to the creation of the A-Bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Despite Oppenheimer getting the most praise and claim to power as the project’s director, it’s the minds and bodies around him that made The Manhattan Project into a sustainable machine over the years. Nolan uses Oppenheimer to look at the same subject with more introspection than in The Day After Trinity, but they ultimately come to the same conclusion. As integral as Oppenheimer was, the scientists and physicists around him were the bodies and minds that saw the situation through at ground zero rather than the observant “Messiah” played by the system that took him to task. It is here where Nolan’s script finds a way to burrow into Oppenheimer as a tormented subject left hanging from the branches of America’s judicial chambers.
Cillian Murphy has long been a reliable actor in Nolan’s filmography. Having just missed out on playing the coveted Batman in The Dark Knight Trilogy, Nolan kept him around to play the Scarecrow and even turned to scavenging through his dreams in Inception. It was a matter of time before they collaborated as director and lead actor, and they landed on the right project for the two to explore their greatest strengths as artists. Murphy’s eyes widen and narrow as he works through the wonder of theoretical science, and Jennifer Lame’s editing allows us to discover the feeling of seeing how Oppenheimer thinks. He sees through sizzling embers, waves of matter, the energy of subatomic particles, and the chemical compounds of science - the solutions to equations conceptualized as the mystique of filing through the chemical makeup of our existence. Oppenheimer’s psychology is explored further in Ludwig Göransson’s intricately designed soundscapes that rumble with the voltage of protons, supplementing the film with an elemental charge in the vessels of the world around them. The rhythmic beats of pulsing atoms sync with the howling gusts of wind, the adulation of stomping feet, pattering raindrops, and the deafening explosions of solitary confinement.
The pressure of these elemental beats comes to bear on the structure of Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious script since Memento. To tell a story out of order is one thing, but to tell three intersecting segments out of order at once is another challenge entirely. The wires of Nolan’s narrative seem to fray early and often - signaling a tough road ahead. However, as he continues recontextualizing the story, the science behind his structure transcends theory into a proof of concept. As the reel of the film develops, the script wafts through its political lenses with a level of clear-mindedness spearheaded by the freedom that subjectiveness can offer as an absolute contrast to the objectivity of science and politics. Nolan understands that there is no creation, cinematic or otherwise, without the tools of science. Through this understanding, he can direct his way through the figure of Oppenheimer by rooting his perspective on those that perceive him and how he perceives himself. In color, Oppenheimer is a colossal figure - Promethean in design. In black and white, he is a thread of political plights - Faustian by nature. Nolan straddles the fault lines of science, politics, and art by committing to the mind of a creator and what their power bestows/befalls upon a collective people crushed by the pressures of American mythmaking.
How Nolan views Oppenheimer in these lights (with or without color) stems from a well-informed understanding of the subject matter he chose to illustrate. For a filmmaker that has struggled with laying the groundwork around a political pipeline, that apolitical trait services the depths of gray matter that the material is soaked in. Nolan grants himself the freedom to not only toy with the metrics of time but the opportunity to excavate the core of his subject without impeding on a side. In what feels like a first for Nolan, he leaves it up to us to conclude what to do with the story rather than telling us how to feel. If you go a step further, this happens because his camera is more interested in the colossal significance of character over spectacle. The relative uncertainty that tethers people to the world is a reflection of the emotions that we’ve projected onto them.
It’s why the Trinity Test is the film’s centerpiece - a median of horror that swallows the context of the story within its irradiating blast of ultimate power. Unlike the instincts of survival permeating throughout Dunkirk, Nolan doesn’t turn reality into a spectacle in Oppenheimer. The overwhelming sensation is the close-up that Nolan finds on people's faces, distraught by what their creation had brought into the world. As Oppenheimer looks on from his “projection booth,” he stares into the heart of darkness as the warmth of his creation reels in a blinding flash of light. Stunned, he whimpers through the words, “It worked,” and this moment screams with metatextual indulgence that Nolan has always loved. In this case, Nolan’s mind meets science in the middle as they share a mutual interest in theorizing through the inception of creation and discovery so that when it does work as intended, it is as glorious as it is petrifying.
Oppenheimer is utterly breathtaking. Just when the love for Christopher Nolan felt like the waning years of puppy love, he reignites the Summer season with a blockbuster antithetical to the promise of what a blockbuster weekend offers. It’s big and loud, as the double-digit admission promises. Still, it is what lies within this colossal structure of filmmaking that hulks through the implications of America’s love affair with globalizing their reign of terror. The film is a geyser of mortality tormented by the reverberating ripples of time as its narrative throughlines are scorched with strikes as searing as napalm. Through the gasps of desperation on every person’s face, Nolan can explore the suffocating nature of an empire that cut through the subatomic particles of humanity toward an anti-human device in the atomic bomb. With this in mind, Christopher Nolan looks upon his subject, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as he stares into a pond of memory that reflects a world in which the gentle paths of precipitation fall onto the face of Mother Earth. America ignored her cries and thunderous claps on the eve of the Trinity Test, and for that, they’ve written humanity’s fate upon the careless destruction of Earth’s atmosphere.
Now, we’re left to endure record-breaking heat waves as the power of the Sun was unleashed onto the world when the countdown started at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945…
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