Oppenheimer Review

Oppenheimer is a three-hour film composed almost entirely of men talking in rooms, cut and scored like a heist. Christopher Nolan's dual structure, color for Oppenheimer's subjective experience, black-and-white for Lewis Strauss's objective account, turns two hearings into parallel trials of memory itself. Cillian Murphy plays the physicist as a man whose eyes are always somewhere over the horizon, and the performance carries the film's best idea: that seeing consequences in advance and proceeding anyway is the century's defining sin.

The Trinity sequence earns its legend, silence held for an unbearable beat after the light, fire rendered with practical photography rather than digital simulation, and the true climax comes after, in a gymnasium victory speech where cheering warps into screaming and Nolan puts the audience inside a guilty imagination. Robert Downey Jr.'s petty, wounded Strauss is the best work of his career.

Ludwig Göransson's score runs nearly continuous and does the connective work the fragmented editing demands. The costs are pace and clarity: the final hour re-litigates the hearing past the point of diminishing returns, and the dialogue's density occasionally becomes recitation. A monumental film that stops just short of transcendence.