Matin Durrani: rating 4/5 "Matin Durrani (credit: Jo Hansford Photography)"Matin Durrani (credit: Jo Hansford Photography) There have been some great science-based movies over the years. But there have also been some real stinkers. Thankfully, Oppenheimer falls into the former camp. I was relieved to find it is largely historically accurate and although a few factual distortions creep in, they aren’t huge. The moral quandries faced by Robert Oppenheimer and the other physicists on the Manhattan project are handled well – this is no glorification of the
bomb. The movie also does a great
Job at presenting the tensions surrounding the removal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance after the Second World War and the subsequent downfall of Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who sought Oppenheimer’s fall from grace. It’s also beautifully filmed, especially the scenes on location in Los Alamos in New Mexico. Stand-out performances for me are, obviously, Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr as Strauss. It was also a delight to see a huge roll-call of physicists appearing on screen, including Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Isidor Rabi, Patrick Blackett, Ernest Lawrence, Edward Teller and Hans Bethe: who’d have thought there would ever be a
Hollywood movie with them all in. My only quibble is the downplaying of Leo Szilard, who first came up with the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. I also felt the appearance of Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti, was weak and unnecessary (and I couldn’t help recall his performance as the Greek boatman Costas in the 1980s rom-com Shirley Valentine). Still, this is a movie that’s definitely worth watching. James Dacey: rating 3/5 To sum up Robert Oppenheimer’s attitude to
nuclear weapons, you might land on the word “conflicted”. That’s also how I feel about this film. Cillian Murphy is mesmerizing in the titular role. Slumped in a cinema seat eating popcorn, it’s easy to take for granted all the versions of Oppenheimer he is playing, often in the same scene through the deftest change of facial expression. The genius. The Communist sympathizer. The vanity. The doubt. The guilt. The film is also visually stunning. Director Christopher Nolan’s choice to shoot on large-format IMAX film with Panavision cameras results in a clarity and depth of field that turns even the drabbest administrative buildings into a visual treat. I enjoyed the alternation between colour and black-and-white scenes, which helped distinguish Oppenheimer’s life story from historical detail. But ultimately, I expected the film to leave more of a lasting impression. It’s slightly unfair to compare a film with a TV series, but I felt far more engaged with the characters and plot of the 2019
HBO series Chernobyl. That show – also a melting pot of 20th-century nuclear apocalypse, science and politics – perfectly captured the moment in history and created a deep sense of unease. Perhaps the enormity of destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a disconnect in my mind. But after the drama and jaw-dropping visuals of the Trinity Test in the New
Mexico desert, the final twists and turns involving the political “baddie” Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) feel a tad trivial. Perhaps the film is a victim of its determination to cram in as much historical detail as possible. One reviewer in the New Yorker referred to it as a “movie-length Wikipedia article”. That’s a bit harsh, but I sort of know what they mean. Michael Banks: rating 5/5 I think Oppenheimer is a masterpiece. When I discovered the film would run for three hours, I questioned whether a dialogue-heavy film could capture my attention for that long. But it did. That is mostly thanks to the incredible cinematography and performances not to mention the film’s mesmerizing score by Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson, which adds to the movie’s pacing and intensity. The fun aspect of the film is playing “famous physicist bingo” – even Richard Feynman has the occasional cameo playing the bongos. But this is a serious movie and by the end Oppenheimer leaves you wrestling with the moral implications that advancing science can bring. Hamish Johnston: rating 5/5 We decided to see Oppenheimer on a rainy Sunday afternoon in Bristol but much to our surprise the first two cinemas we tried were sold out. We managed to get tickets at the Odeon, where there was only a sprinkling of empty seats in the first few rows. I was gobsmacked that at least three Bristol cinemas were packed with people eager to see a film about a physicist. Indeed, we had seen Barbie the week before in a venue with more empty seats. Exactly how J Robert Oppenheimer has seeped into the zeitgeist is beyond my understanding of popular culture. And I still can’t believe that the theoretical physicist has been twinned with a plastic doll to create the Barbenheimer phenomenon (check out the illustration for Anthony Lane’s review in the New Yorker for a particularly good mashup). What I do know is that Oppenheimer is a fantastic film that I thoroughly enjoyed. How joyful it was to watch a rip-roaring tale with physics at its heart – and to see so many Nobel laureates portrayed on the silver screen. Oppenheimer was not easy to watch because it required the viewer’s full concentration. So its popularity suggests that people’s attention spans are not shortening as a result of apps like TikTok. I hope that this will encourage Hollywood to delve into the lives of other physicists. The remarkable story of Marie Curie would be a great place to start. The post
Oppenheimer the movie:
Physics World writers give their verdict appeared first on Physics World.