Film Review: Oppenheimer (directed by Christopher Nolan)

Christopher Nolan's 2023 movie Oppenheimer sets out to provide the viewer with a narrative covering 30 years in the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (from about to about ). On one level, this offers us a hectic catalogue of outer events—Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) becomes a theoretical physicist, goes on to lead the Manhattan project and to create the first atomic bomb, then finally is cancelled by McCarthyism and all but disgraced. We nonetheless quickly become aware that Nolan is most interested in Oppenheimer's inner life—in all its fluctuating complexity. As he puts it in several interviews, writing and directing the film offered Nolan the opportunity to get “into Oppenheimer's head” (Nolan 2023c, 2023d). My own sense is that the film's true subject turns out to be the tensions and contradictions that emerge between Oppenheimer's inner life and his outer life. However, as I hope to show, it is the contradictions within the film itself that ultimately prove problematic for Nolan's project.

Of course, contradictions and ambiguities are precisely what have made Robert Oppenheimer such a consistently fascinating figure in popular culture.1 One way to characterize these tensions is to highlight the two apparently contradictory facets of his personality. On the one hand, there is the rational, scientific, personality—the man who successfully administered the Manhattan project, and on the other, the man who impressed many with his mystical, poetic, romantic side. As English professor Lindsay Michael Banco puts it, Oppenheimer, on the one hand, “embodies the American dream: entrepreneurial initiative, forging a new world of “progress” and “enlightenment” in the wilderness … achieving spectacular success through the practical application of science.” On the other, however, “he was dogged by skepticism over his supposed “overreaching,” his meddling with forbidden knowledge and eerie manipulations of nature, his self-fashioning