As the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, Cillian Murphy is a 20th-century Frankenstein whose catastrophic creation unravels across a tangle of timelines in Nolan’s expansive drama
It’s billed as a biopic of theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, dubbed the “father of the atomic bomb”. But “biopic” seems too small a word to contain the ambition and scope of Christopher Nolan’s formidable if occasionally unwieldy latest. Oppenheimer is a dense and intricate period piece, playing out in a tangle of timelines. It weaves together courtroom drama, romantic liaisons, laboratory epiphanies and lecture hall personality cults. But perhaps more than all of this, Oppenheimer is the ultimate monster movie. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is an atomic-age Frankenstein, a man captivated by the boundless possibilities of science, realising too late that his creation has a limitless capacity for destruction. Ultimately, however, the monster in this story is not Oppenheimer’s invention but the appetite for annihilation that it unleashes in mankind. It’s a realisation that plays out, inexorably, in Oppenheimer’s hollow, haunted face as the film unfolds. Murphy’s far-seeing ice-chip eyes have never been put to better use.
In fact, Murphy’s physicality as a whole is one of the most potent weapons at the film’s disposal. He seems impossibly slight, a theoretical idea of a man in contrast to the robust certainties of the military figures he works alongside (Matt Damon’s Lt Gen Leslie Groves, for example, is bullish and solid, a clenched fist looking for something to punch). In one shot we see Oppenheimer hauling an armful of books into a new classroom, and it looks as though he’s buckling under the weight of his accumulated knowledge. At other times he’s calm and glassily composed, somehow removed from jostling egos and the fusion of ideas that will take shape into the ultimate weapon.
