Alki Manias

For me, Cilian Murphy's Oppenheimer is one of the stand-out performances of the last few years. He obviously lost weight in the same method acting manner as Christian Bale in The Machinist (if a little less extreme) in order to channel the physical presence of the protagonist and has similar, enigmatic, haunted eyes. The film will always suffer the inevitable pre-knowledge and perhaps strong personal opinions of the audience about the ultimate, well documented result of his life's work. However, it is perhaps this very tension that the audience walks in with, which makes the story of the lead-up to this big-screen visual spectacle's climatic scene, more intruiging. As the film reiterates again and again, few know Oppenheimer's real views, leading up to the dropping of the two bombs on Japan, and it goes to great lengths to show the contradictions in his statements in a bid to show his internal conflict. I felt that I got to know the documented facts of his life, but not really the man. The film hints at his vanity through his egotistical statements and womanising but does not really delve deeply into the psychy behind this, even with a screening length of three hours. In a stellar cast, including Gary Oldman, Tom Conti, and Rami Malek, I agree with many other reviewers that one of the stand-out perfornances is by Robert Downey Junior as Lewis Strauss. I suspect that this may be an 2024 Oscar nominated performance. Overall, I think that this movie has come the closest I have seen to trying to piece together the events leading up to one of the world's seminal moments. But do I really feel that I know the man behind the legend that was Oppenheimer? I am not so sure. But this is for sure, Christopher Nolan's epic is a brilliant cinematic creation with fantastic and convincing acting that I would recommend everyone to see.