You may not understand “Oppenheimer” – it’s pathos and chaos. I complain, but it’s still worth going to the cinema [RECENZJA]

“Oppenheimer” is a great spectacle in many dimensions, although unfortunately not without excessive pathos and chaos. However, for several elements this film, while you may not understand it, is worth seeing.

“Oppenheimer” is a film full of paradoxes

Like it or not, Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. It has changed the world we live in, for better or worse. His story has to be seen to be believed

said Christopher Nolan. Well, “believe” does not mean “understand”. Because although the creators of “Oppenheimer” did a lot to show the story of the “father of the atomic bomb” and the dilemmas related to its use, in my opinion they failed at the stage of writing the script. There are dialogue pearls in it, but also sentences spoken by the characters, whose hands fall from the weight of pathos.

The problem of the script is also chaos. Even the person who was writing a thesis on the Manhattan project in college had problems at times to figure out who was who, who they were talking about and which actor was playing this character – I know what I’m saying, she was sitting next to me in the cinema chair. Before the screening, I knew even less about Oppenheimer and his work than according to Wikipedia – I specifically decided to go to the film without exploring the knowledge gained before the promotional machine of Nolan’s production started. All the more so with the snapshots with a dozen or so heroes who turned out to be important several dozen minutes later, or time jumps, and often with as many brilliant actors as they quickly flipping through the next lines, I couldn’t follow everything as much as I would like.

Oppenheimer – Cilian Murphy and Christopher Nolan on the set Melinda Sue Gordon/AP

Nolan, as he likes it, decided to tell the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer in three or even four time frames. We watch the hero over the course of more or less forty years. More recent is the one from 1954, during which the physicist became the subject of interrogations related to withdrawing the physicist’s access to secret information. In fact, they became a trial against a scientist agitating against the arms race, critical of the hydrogen bomb and since the 1930s associated with left-wing ideas and suspected of belonging to the communist party. Mixed with it is the second, though shot in black and white to distinguish it, account of the meeting that took place in 1959 to approve the candidacy of Lewis Strauss – Oppenheimer’s post-war boss – for a government post.

The third (fourth?) is the story of Opppenheimer’s life, shown from his studies to work in the secret town of Los Alamos, where first hundreds and then thousands of people led to the test of a nuclear bomb on July 16, 1945, which was then used by the army in Hiroshima and NAgasaki. And this path can also be divided into “before” and “during and after” the Manhattan project. And on it, the creators present more people, more theories, more arguments for and against at the pace – to use a military analogy – of machine gun shots. But at the same time…

Oppenheimer almost like Batman

… at the same time, even if we do not fully understand all the details of the physicists’ discussions or verbal skirmishes during the interrogations, it is difficult to break away from this story. Huge credit to the actors with Cilian Murphy at the forefront. One of the actor’s hallmarks is light blue, almost glass eyes. They and his face express both the depressive states that the physicist succumbed to and what made him so popular in the academic environment and by women. The acting show is given by Robert Downey Jr. as Levis Strauss. Extreme emotions – as it should – arouse Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer. Matt Damon in uniform introduces a needed breath of humor as his character jokes with Oppenheimer. Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Gary Oldman (unrecognizable but great as always as President Truman!), Benny Safdie, Kenneth Branagh, Alden Ehrenreich – they’re all great. And only Florence Pugh regrets – this talented actress, who plays the communist and Oppenheimer’s lover here, got an interesting and complex character to play. Unfortunately, someone came up with the idea that it would be best if 80 percent of screen time even the most profound conversations will be naked.

We also have symbolism in Nolan. When one of his colleagues tells Oppenheimer to take off his uniform, because despite their participation in the attempt to create an atomic bomb, they are scientists, not military men, we watch him put on a jacket and a characteristic hat, and then walk through a town specially built for the people of the “Manhattan Project” like a sheriff. “I am Batman,” she would like to mutter, referring to Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.

Cilian Murphy as Oppenheimer Melinda Sue Gordon/AP

They opened Pandora’s Box

In 1945, the “Manhattan Project” was seen by many as a success without question. Among them were also ordinary people who, after the bombing of Hiroshima, learned of the existence of a new type of weapon “that will end the war.” Of course, there were speculations about the use of a new type of weapon. Some scientists pushed forward in the name of freedom of science, others for ambitious reasons (to beat the Germans, then the USSR in this race), there were patriotic reasons and dozens of others. There were also those who – even if they were happy that their theoretical considerations were confirmed experimentally – had doubts. There were also those who did not work at all.

J Robert Oppenheimer at Princeton in 1957 photo. John Rooney/AP Photo

Nolan brilliantly shows over I don’t know how many minutes (really, a man “collapses” at this point in time) the final preparations for the Trinity test, Oppenheimer’s first ground-based nuclear test in July 1945. This is the culmination of many years of work costing two billion and the final test of whether the scientists’ theory will be confirmed in reality. Leading the action, violin music creating almost unbearable tension, culminating in a CGI-created nuclear explosion – these are minutes that will go down in cinema history. And then an inexhaustible sadness when the famous words taken from the Hindu holy book Bhagavad Gita are uttered by Openheimer after seeing the mushroom cloud:

I have become death; destroyer of worlds.

He knew the world would never be the same again.

Trinity test – photo from July 16, 1945 photo. AP

Oppenheimer’s speech works similarly as he goes out to his men celebrating after successfully dropping a cargo on a Japanese city. These are emotions that stay with a person for a long time. Murphy poignantly shows a man who sees that his life’s work is taking the lives of others and there is little he can do about it.

The atomic bomb really changed the world. Although no one has used it for military purposes since 1945, it is still somewhere within reach of the decision to press the red button. Perhaps few people think about this threat on a daily basis, perhaps more have since last February… “We wondered if our nuclear chain reaction calculations could destroy the world,” says Oppenheimer at the end of the film, then adds, “And I think we destroyed it.”

Go to the cinema and see “Oppenheimer”. See him on the big screen. Just not in the front rows, because it’s a three-hour screening, and then you’ll feel the tension in your neck from the movie and also related to the uncomfortable position. I don’t know if it’s Nolan’s best film, the best film of the weekend, or the year, or the century. But it is undoubtedly a good and important film.