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While I certainly enjoy Christopher Nolan films and consider many to be truly great, I would not count myself as a Nolan Fanboy. Some of his films are simply too flawed for my tastes, with Interstellar far too cynical to the point that it confuses cynicism for wisdom and Following has a plot that in my opinion is less credible than Tenant.

That said the three-hour opus Oppenheimer dramatizing the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer from University through his later years is a magnificent piece of cinema and an outstanding
achievement. The runtime passed for me quickly as the film propulsive plot, and not entirely about the development of an implosion plutonium device, is always compelling and never without character driven human drama. I have watched movie less than half-as long that felt twice the runtime.

Robert Oppenheimer [Oppie] played by Cillian Murphy, a complex man driven equally by ego and curiosity, is most remember as the project head for the Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the first functional, practical atomic weapon. The film touches on the major elements and challenges of Oppie’s life, his association with Communists before the war and during the first ‘Red Scare,’ his elevation to a media figure for his work in the Atomic bomb project, his philandering and affairs including with the tragic Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and his hounding from government programs for being a suspected communist.

In a film that is packed with star power, the story is principally carried by two performances, Murphy’s as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr Lewis Strauss as the story’s antagonist. Much of the film is told with the Strauss’s confirmation as Secretary of Commerce hearings acting as both as a framing device and tool to jump to specific points in the Strauss/Oppenheimer feud.

Photographed beautifully by Nolan’s long-time cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema Oppenheimer presents a lush, lavish, and sweeping frame well encompassing Hoytema’s talents and Nolan’s passion for large format cameras.

Oppenheimer, Nolan’s first feature for his new home at Universal Studios, is an achievement in scope, scale, and humanity that the filmmaker has been building towards for decades, and a movie well-deserving of as theatrical viewing.