8 reasons to watch Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on the big screen

Oppenheimer's cast includes Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer; Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves Jr, director of the Manhattan Project; and Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss of the US Atomic Energy Commission. (Screen grab from the film's trailer)

The one film that I am looking forward to watching in a cinema hall this year is Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The trailers are out. The film releases in the US on July 21. Most big Hollywood movies nowadays release simultaneously in India, so I suppose we will be able to watch it around the same time. But why am I looking forward so much to this film on the big screen? The reasons are several.

Nolan is of course one of the finest auteurs of his generation of film directors. In every film since the low-budget Memento (2020; remade very badly at much greater expense, without giving credit to the original, as Ghajini by Aamir Khan), he has pushed the envelope constantly both for himself and his audience. Films like Inception, Interstellar and Tenet are breathtaking in their ambition. As a member of the lay audience, I didn’t understand all their riddles and tricks fully even after several viewings, till my teenage daughter explained with great patience. Clearly, the next generation is smarter and Nolan, who is 52 years old, is as smart as they are.

Why watch Oppenheimer in a cinema hall and not on a laptop? Because Nolan makes his films specifically for a cinema hall experience. He is the last purist standing, even if his logic may not make much sense to many people. He shoots on old-fashioned physical film and avoids, as far as he can, computer-generated effects. Even Martin Scorsese, possibly the greatest film director alive, has succumbed to the lure of the digital. But Nolan maintains his conservative principles.

He shot Oppenheimer with wide-angle deep-focus Imax cameras, ending up with a final film print that is 11 miles long and weighs more than 250 kilograms. He told an interviewer: “The sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled… You’re getting a feeling of 3D without the glasses. You’ve got a huge screen and you’re filling the peripheral vision of the audience. You’re immersing them in the world of the film.”

I am an engineer by training. So I love what he is trying to do.

(Screen grab from the trailer of Oppenheimer)

And of course, the subject matter of the film. A brilliant physicist, J Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project in the US during the Second World War that built the first nuclear bombs. But after the devastating bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he pondered painfully over the moral consequences of scientific pursuit. As chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission, he vehemently opposed next-level development—what we today call the hydrogen bomb.

This was 1950s America, when McCarthyist anti-Communist paranoia prevailed. Oppenheimer was denounced as a closet Communist (which he never was), sacked, and his security clearance—access to military matters—was cancelled. In 2014, 60 years after the proceedings that ended Oppenheimer’s career, the US Department of Energy released the transcripts of the hearings, which proved conclusively that the charges against him were false. In 2022, in a mea culpa that took 70 years to come, the US government formally accepted that it had erred and vacated the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance.

There is a strong India angle in Oppenheimer’s life, though we do not know whether Nolan will mention it. In his undergraduate years at Harvard University, Oppenheimer got attracted to Indic philosophy, especially the Bhagavat Gita. In addition to physics and chemistry, in which he excelled, he was also an expert in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. One can only wonder at what the man’s brain capacity would have been.

Gita was the book he lived and abided by. On July 16, 1945, his team successfully did the first nuclear bomb test in a desert of New Mexico. His project had achieved its aim. As he watched the gigantic explosion and the blooming mushroom cloud, he recited from the Gita: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This is from what Krishna told Arjuna when he revealed his universal form, a giant terrifying creature with many mouths and eyes.

Oppenheimer used the Gita to make sense of what he was doing and justify it. Sadly, it seems that he never found the peace that he craved. Two years after he had built the nuclear bomb, he said: “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatements can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” He died at the age of 62 from throat cancer, possibly caused by his lifelong chain smoking.

Nolan recently told an interviewer: “I think of any character I’ve dealt with, Oppenheimer is by far the most ambiguous and paradoxical. Which, given that I’ve made three Batman films, is saying a lot.” For those who are not into this sort of stuff, Batman is definitely the most psychologically complicated character in the comic book world. And Nolan sealed it. Spider-Man movies are being made every year. But till date, no one dares to touch the Dark Knight interpretation that Nolan did.

Nolan has the habit of making things complex, often unnecessarily in my opinion. He makes films that ask for complete attention, to the point of being stressful. If he has to go from Point A to Point B, he will take a detour to C, take a U-turn and drive around from C to D to E to make sure no one is following him and reach B a day after he had booked his hotel in B (he would have informed the hotel, but in difficult coded language). But in Oppenheimer, he has a life and a mind that are very complex by themselves. What he needs to do is to present it just as it is. We don’t know if he has been able to do that.

What we know is that he has played around with black and white and colour in the film to denote subjective and objective views of Oppenheimer’s life. More stress, in my view. But Nolan has every right to demand super-serious engagement from his audience.

There are other reasons too to watch the film. I was speaking to my daughter as I was writing this and she, who had never heard of a scientist called Oppenheimer, said: “Oh, it has Cillian Murphy! That’s enough reason to watch.” I told her that it also has Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. “I am definitely going to watch,” she said, excited. Ah well.

Oppenheimer releases in theatres on July 21, 2023.