Whether they are masked avengers or CIA agents, ordinary soldiers or astronauts, characters who they enchant Nolan has to come to terms with the fact that their intellectual superiority held back by some unrecognized mystery, while at the same time grappling with the complexity of a hostile world that seems illegible, intersected by one stupid violence and difficult to manage, in the struggle with which one can even come to a sacrifice or a previously unthinkable renunciation.
For this meeting with Julius Robert Openheimerphysicist put in charge by the United States Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, in order to get ahead of the Nazis in creating an atomic bomb, one had to arrive sooner or later: precocious genius of quantum physics, intolerant of control, at least as narcissistic and fickle, confident in his intelligence and stubborn in defending his own beliefs (also political, in the 30s close to the Communist Party), was antihero perfect to say thatweaving between the laws of Nature and the choices of History, which often fascinated the director (and that in “Origin” or “Dogma” he had two textbook examples).
But the charm and power of the film “Oppenheimer”goes beyond plot choice and stems primarily from the fluidity with which the director’s script communicates different moments of life scientist (Cillian Murphy), which weaves first research and leadership of the team gathered at Los Alamos, then moral doubts about atomic weapons and a confidential 1954 investigation into his alleged patriotic infidelity, and, finally, the third block – the subsequent public investigation, in which ambitious politician Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), intended to explain why, after the war, he wanted Oppenheimer to be Atomic Energy Commission knowing his youthful political sympathies and his aversion to development H-bomb.
181 minutes of the film does not matchchronological trend facts, but jumping back and forth over the years, alternating color (for the first two narrative blocks) with black and white for the third (probably because it was television, in black and white times, that gave us this) without, but never fluency history has to suffer. Compared to other films using the same historical fact reconstruction mechanism (example above all â€~JFKdirected by Oliver Stone), Nolan seems to consider it a point of honor to avoid any possible coarseness of the story: the scenes are not linked together to arrive at an explanation for any thesis (Oppenheimer was good or bad, right or wrong), but yes they haunt help to understand what has just been shown, as if “superb storyteller” (and Nolan wants to be) always make available scenes that can help better understand what we just saw.
nolan movie logics in its purest form, as the golden rule teaches classic cinema last year (everything that is shown is necessary to understand the film) and for this reason the duration does not matter, because here everything is really functional and necessary to accompany the viewer inside difficulties and the contradictions of this extraordinary man who was “the father of the atomic bomb” (to quote the famous cover of the American weekly “TimeTO”).
So, based on analogies and sequences, the film makes us understand the challenge Manhattan Project wanted by General Groves (Matt Damon), the doubts and anxieties of a man who does not want to argue with the interested opinions of politicians (an example is a meeting with President Truman, a wonderful episodic role Gary Oldman), the pettiness of some and the envy of others, the desire not to betray friends (the so-called “Chevalier case”), conflicting reports with his wife (Emily Blunt) and mistress (Florence Pugh) and, above all, with this idea of dealing with Death, with the ability of man create and destroywhich runs through all the scenes and which is the true message movie to watch.