Oppenheimer

The Destroyer of Worlds on IMAX at a multiplex near you

Cillian Murphy is a beautiful actor, literally and in his craft. He carries Oppenheimer with intense, magnetic confidence. A less charismatic and gifted actor would have helped sink this unwieldy spectacle but Murphy is mesmerizing, and perfectly cast.

Alas, unable or unwilling to tell a story without jumping back and forth in time, writer-director Christopher Nolan sacrifices profundity and insight for spectacle. Condensing the biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer to over three hours is a herculean task. I applaud Nolan’s wish to make a film about this man. The prodigious theoretical physicist who directed the creation of the atomic bomb provides fertile ground for existential exploration. He was an important actor in an era when physicists changed our understanding of existence, and actually, the world. Oppenheimer was a peer of Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, and Heisenberg, who are all briefly paraded in the movie. His story, as the title of the book implies, is one of both triumph and tragedy, depending on whether you see the creation of atomic warfare as an achievement for mankind, or not. How he felt about the consequences of his genius is a fascinating subject. His humiliating persecution by the paranoid, rabidly anti-communist government of the US with its attendant antisemitism was also horrid and…