Sanjukta De

A short review of the film Oppenheimer : A Story of Human Disenchantment. Just watched Christopher Nolan's Epic creation "Oppenheimer", a tense and riveting portrait of human disillusionment. I must admit that this three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Bomb (played by Cillian Murphy) is a film about faces and shades. This movie is based on the real story and the plot has been taken from the book named 'The American Prometheus' (as per the title of Nolan's primary source) the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman. The talented genius film director Christopher Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico's desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy the whole World in a second. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy's face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. "Oppenheimer" rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. But these don't just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer's team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer's life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The "fissile" cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. Not only Oppenheimer himself, but the presence of other characters in the film and their powerful performances deliver a fantastic historical saga. Those of other significant characters are - General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Los Alamos' military supervisor; Robert's suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer's post-Los Alamos career etc. Each portrayal of those characters is able to capture the time. Last of all I just wanted to wrap up by saying that Nolan has stitched together a masterpiece with "Oppenheimer." It's the best movie out so far this year. The heightened tensions, weighty dilemmas, and skillful storytelling are all wrapped in science and history to create a truly grounded film. The explosions are a work of art that take entire minutes to absorb and appreciate. And it's all fueled by sound design that (while deafening) fuses with the movie's craft to truly immerse the audience in every single moment of brilliance.