It's almost the go-to critic cliche that a movie had them "on the edge of [their] seat," or the millennial evolution of it, "that movie had me levitating." Oppenheimer damn near had my ass hovering for 3 hours. It was so intense and I was so invested in it that I just couldn't sit anymore, like the movie was a culling song pulling me toward it. During the last act, though, the opposite happened: it became a courtroom drama and I felt like the gravity had been pumped up because I had sunk into my seat. It was so engrossing, especially when Emily Blunt's momentous speech happened, that I would have continued to watch it if the theater was on fire. I'll burn, I don't give a fuck, I need to see this play out.
BarbenHeimer made this seem more 'accessible' than it is; Nolan does some of his most ambitious filmmaking here, getting weird with arthouse sensibilities the likes of which I haven't seen from him since Memento and some I haven't seen from him ever. Not to mention he let his editor go nuts too. As a Russian nesting-doll of montages within a montage moving at a breakneck pace with non-linear cross-cutting it's wild how it's structured and paced. And outside of that are Nolan's narrative stylings where one is purely objective (shot in black and white) while the other is purely subjective (shot in color). It's a queasy, exhilarating, disturbing, paranoid, borderline psychosexual nightmare that belies the typical historical biopic.
Oppenheimer is shockingly straightforward in its indictment of the U.S. government and its history of violent posturing on the world stage. Nolan doesn't just demythologize American exceptionalism here, he shows the horrors of American imperialism. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, thankfully, not depicted as Nolan wisely avoids the pornography of suffering (much to James Cameron's chagrin). What he does show us, in scenes with Boris Pash, Henry Stimson, and especially in Oppenheimer's meeting with Harry Truman, is creepy enough and act as drops of paint-remover for any glorifying Rockwellian brushstrokes that otherwise might bleed through.
He also heavily alludes to the government [allegedly] having Jean Tatlock [allegedly] murdered.
Oppenheimer doesn't just look at the damage done in the past but it looks forward, past us, at what damage will eventually be done. The older I get the more sturdy I am with Horror movies but the depiction of environmental catastrophes completely rattle my foundation. It's no wonder why Paul Schrader loves this as much as he does considering the ending is a more explicit depiction of First Reformed's dire warnings. Nolan leaving us on that note couldn't be more perfect because the only way this could end is in flames.
This is a rapturous movie that just keeps hurtling you around for 3 hours until it reaches a sublime and devastating crescendo: this is an American tragedy.
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