Oppenheimer: I Am Become Loud, Blower of Minds
How I learned to stop worrying and love Christopher Nolan again.
“The problem was not splitting the atom. The problem was deciding to build a fucking bomb.”
-Adam Conover
One memer on Instagram remarked in faux disbelief that no one else joined him in chanting “USA, USA, USA!” after the nuclear test scene that is the explosive nucleus of Oppenheimer. After seeing it for myself, I reflected how the only response less in touch with this film’s themes would have been playing “Let’s Get Loud” by Jennifer Lopez over the mushroom cloud footage. Yet a J-Lo needle drop wouldn’t have been inconsistent from a sound design standpoint. This behemoth of a film thunders unapologetically at you for three intense hours.
It’s well documented that director Christopher Nolan has stubborn sound mixing “preferences,” which the lay audience tends to hear as “problems.” While some nitpick Nolan’s exposition-heavy dialogue and out-of-order timelines, I’d argue that his movies are most challenging for your ear drums. I saw this film in IMAX, which I now believe is short for “I maxed out my auditory nerve’s will to live.” Writing about Nolan’s previous film, Tenet in New Yorker, Anthony Lane had this to say:
“Word has it that Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Tenet,” is hard to understand. Not so. It’s a cinch—no more difficult than, say, playing mah-jongg inside a tumble dryer, while the principles of quantum mechanics are shouted at you in fluent Esperanto. In case that feels too easy, Nolan fiddles with the sound mix of the movie, thus drowning out important conversations. If you thought that Bane, the villain in Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012), verged on the inaudible, wait for the folks in “Tenet.” Most of them make Bane sound like Julie Andrews.”
Over this pseudo inaudible backdrop, I’m happy to shout that, despite some eardrum crushing sequences, Oppenheimer ultimately surprised me as a master class in why and how to make movies in the 21st century from one of our planet’s most accomplished directors. This film a challenging, thought-provoking, well-acted triumph.
Yes, Nolan has a trademark style that’s easy to critique and parody. One shot of Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer putting on his trademark hat in slow mo was so stylized I half expected Hans Zimmer’s Dark Knight score to erupt across Los Alamos. However, I’ve long defended Nolan as one of the few directors left who clearly, viscerally understands how to to create enticing stories that make the most out of every aspect of film as a story telling medium. Put simply, his films take you somewhere worth going in a way that only movies can. Compared to the derivative chum that Marvel shovels into the water every three months, this film epitomizes Nolans ability to create a stunningly well-realized immersive cinematic journey that’s worth the ticket price.
The pacing alone is breathtaking— this is a tense three hour film that seldom feels that long. Through razor sharp editing, stunning cinematography, and Oscar-worthy performances from the ensemble cast (Murphy, Pugh, and Damon were highlights for me), Nolan creates a story whose scope and stakes feel nail-bitingly high. This movie manages to capture the fear and uncertainty of the world actually hanging in the balance better than any of Marvel’s MacGuffin-fueled, sky beam plus CGI army slugfests ever have. Even the easy-to-mock booming sound design ends up contributing enormously. What better use of the earth-shaking speakers in a theater than to convey to the audience the resounding power of both explosives and our choices?
Nolan’s precise filmmaking succeeds thematically in achieving the difficult task of visualizing guilt. What’s the proper way to depict the weight of the decisions of a legendary man whose biography is titled American Prometheus? Nolan’s answer is, of course, sound design. Oppenheimer’s actions have profound echoes that haunt him and the audience alike.
It’s telling that in this cacophonous movie, the loudest noise I heard was neither a talking to by Matt Damon nor the suspenseful nuclear test. It was the raucous foot-stomping at a gymnasium. There, while Oppenheimer is delivering a triumphant speech about his scientific genius achieving lasting peace, he dissociates and clearly visualizes the fact that he may have set in motion a chain reaction that will end humanity forever.
Biopics are a tough genre to get right, plagued with stale tropes and a tendency to become paint-by-numbers speed runs of someone’s Wikipedia page. Ones about geniuses are tougher still. Visualizing someone’s intelligence in film language can run into the icebergs of cliches quite quickly, where even earnest attempts end up looking like self parody, as seen in A Beautiful Mind and The Theory of Everything. You can only watch indecipherable formulas intensely scribbled on blackboards over hopeful music so many times. Don’t even get me started on how these films tend to play fast and loose with the facts of the bio they’re depicting.
I can’t speak authoritatively to how faithful this story is to history, but I think much of what makes this a biopic masterclass from a cinematic standpoint are the performances, starting with Cillian Murphy’s astounding portrayal of Oppenheimer. He embodies a gaunt, wide eyed intensity that was very evocative despite being eerily reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell, which was odd because Oppenheimer is perhaps the antithesis of Gladwell. One mans ideas literally changed world history forever and another mans ideas briefly changed how mansplaining sounds at cocktail parties.
What would I say is the biggest flaw in Oppenheimer? I’m not sure that calling someone a communist needs quite this much fanfare and build up. Like The Social Network, another master class in pacing, this film uses courtroom scenes as a clever framing device. We cross cut aggressively between the timeline of Oppenheimer’s career up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a later series of political hearings that culminate in Oppenheimer being accused of having Marxist sympathies and having his security clearance revoked. The political scenes in the last hour began to drag for me. Like Oppenheimer, I can blame this on Lewis Straus, played here by Robert Downey Jr., whose performance as an insufferable Macarthyist made him the second most punchable antagonist I’ve seen on screen just behind polo shirted Jake Lacy as Shane in Season 1 of The White Lotus. If Oscars were dished out based on loathsomeness alone, Downey Jr. is a surefire bet for best supporting actor.
Maybe the political machinations wore out their welcome when I realized with a gravitas that matched Cillian Murphy’s that I eventually needed to leave this grim theater and urinate. I wasn’t alone; the chaos in the men’s bathroom after my Oppenheimer screening was the polar opposite of the serenity I’d witnessed during a recent Taylor Swift concert. I suppose it’s fitting that in a movie about the massive consequences of our actions, even my own hydration felt monumentally consequential by the end.
So go see Oppenheimer. Seeing Barbie afterwards is optional but bringing earplugs and not drinking liquids beforehand is highly encouraged.
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