Some of the montage sequences during the initial acts are just sheer inspiration and i couldn’t but stare in awe at it. The screenplay also proves to be quite fluid with its seamless flow between non chronological scenes it intercuts between and the editing deserves all the praise it can get, nolan has employed his past experience put it to good use as he plays with the diegesis of two timelines, it’s his best written work till date. at the sympathetic portrayal of the irreconcilable conflict in the man himself or its socialist, communist exalting of which proves this is nolan at his best since inception but here it’s not just nolan but everyone is as we are thrown onto our face the apparition of various familiar faces we’ve a hard time keeping stock of. Oh and the score, is a wonder to behold by itself, without which oppenheimer would only feel half as significantly ginormous in its gravitas as it probably should, the score supports the scale of the subterranean tension and urgency with rumbling grandeur and the crescnedo rises to the occasion. Oppenhemier take itself seriously but not too seriously in an ingratiating way, but manages with grace to remain integral to what’s at play with historical accuracy as it unnerves itself from trying to document it to focus itself upon the subjecetive nuances and conundrums the titular character is faced with and reckons throughout the threehour plus runtime of his gradual wilting away like the unravelling of the bomb they invent and detonate in the eerie silence of the losalamos desert to their collective shared horror and spectacular perplexion. Oppie himself goes to extreme lengths to repress his cognitive dissonance to force himself to get the job done no matter what, his own vacillating ideal and pragmatc interests fledgling vainly as he attempts to take the easier route with a position of much power, but atleast he serves as a decent leader heading the manhattan project or so it seems. What’s more apparent is that his intellectual curiousities and support for causes he thinks is good isn’t grounded enough to be a hindrance to his job, because they are already so vain that they hardly come in the way of him opting to support the project, seeing as he doesn’t have much trouble staying conflicted about his undertaking or signing up for it which he so readily abandons anything that would embarass him with the greater authority to expose his communist history. Oppie’s rationale for signing up for the war takes only a simple beat, a confrontation from his colleague szilard to push him over the edge when he is convinced of his own self importance being less important than national duty. The film is quite sympathetic to him seeing as we receive a fair share of it from his perspective, and tries its best to make him likeable but never tries hard enough to make him less so, and what’s apparent is that it doesn’t also shy away from showing his vagueness to the left, and as he tries to steer clear of the communism at play around him (it might also be that the american concept of communism is way different to how they perceive it to its historical praxis in the east), he is just caught up with the blurred lines of ethical and moral judgement, and lacking in any sagacity is also bound to the cptsd that comes to haunt him as he deals with the consequences of his blase motives if not actions which it entails him to by way of the power rested upon him, and the brunt of the same over the world’s shoulders having to forbear the reality of what’s at stake when the catastrophic potential of its creation threatening the existential present and future, the weight of whose creation is reigning down upon crushing the world under its own gravity like the blackhole. And where it comes crashing down is in the face of authority, as he becomes increasingly convinced aided by szilard who convinces him to join the war letting go of his leftliberal antics, everyone’s striving for greatness here in the face of the war and where oppie does too and perhaps ends up crumbling in the face of authority, and where it ends up backfiring down upon him, nolan achieves some of it along the way, it maybe his most mature work as of yet, and where oppie fails to adhere to his ideal, nolan finally takes a stand against all that hypocrisy. It seems more than cowardice, it is the lack thereof conviction in one’s beliefs which leads oppie to signup for the project, and thus lends itself (being inherently prone to it) for the convenient advantage of fostering evil, playing right into the power structures which exploit it against one’s brilliance technical, academic or otherwise unto yielding what ends up as disastrous results. The mccarthy era ostracising finds its victim in the helpless pitiful remorseful oppie where the paranoia of redscare is palpably ironic as is tragic to witness play out, this is where in the thirdact the opening line alluding to prometheus becomes obvious, nolan never tries for metaphorical subtlety or subtextual nuance at any point though as is slowly revealed in the painfully obvious breakdown of his character during the later procedural investigation scenes and failing misgivings of oppie’s politics, and postwar trauma from being a major respected physicist to being humiliated by his own country to his dignity being restored pathetically when they find no use for his labour or intellect, reduced to his mere identity of a jewish physicist, we also see his collegues wrstle with their own as they testify against or in support of oppie’s integrity during and after the war, the film doesn’t go into detailed exegesis of the us war machinery or the impending new imperial hegemony at play but it does try, it is nolan’s most political one at that. This is the first time in his films that his characters do try and enunciate like normal people, and though there are very signature montage scenes such as the first act’s build upto oppie’s journey through gradschool (sheer work of art that one, i can’t not be in awe of it), he keeps pushing the envelope and goes out of his comfort zones to bring something vastly unlike any of his previous outings, whilst still retaining his directorial hold over the picture, the sense of debilitating doom building up into the final shot is primary thread, and is a neat reminder of memento. The scale of it is hoisted as large as the canvas it weaves across the neowestern landscape of losalamos, and brings in enough breadth to the shots peopled with its significant presence of physicists, government staff and committee members at the hearings. rdj is at his best since tropic thunder which deserves extra credit for, gravely missed during the ensuing years but he delivers a surprise portrayal of a sleazy envious policymaker and knocks it out of the park. It piques the existential threat of a question in me, will the bomb have been arrived at if not for Oppie’s involvement? i surmise that it eventually would have indeed been made, if not by the manhattan project, then it must have by the germans (nazis if you will), but it’s indeed more daunting to think how things might’ve transpired if they had gotten it as is commonly hypothesised, but the project management skills of Oppie and the people he recruits, and how things gets expedited by way of throwing all the industrial, scientific and political effort at one project proves to be quite rewarding in that a great deal of scientific progress is achieved, one of which is the bomb itself to unsurprisingly grim in its inherent potential for harm, but yet the time between the test at losalamos with the explosion, as Oppie warily goes about, and the decision to use it for purposes of exhibiting might in war as a tactical military employ is nothing but ghoulish and detestably american when its commanders collude to forcibly necessitate taking it away from the grasp of scientists to leverage their power against the axis powers in a desperate attempt to seek a final solution to the vaning war, it was a race between evils no greater than each other.

Fastforward no less than 80 years later we grapple with the same if not a hundred times factored in might of the us and western allies waging warcrimes against an occupation in palestine, as they swerve from one (no)narrative to another manipulating and manufacturing consent to wage a chasm in the gaza strip so they and their friends can suck the oily land dry and ship their vessels across the suezcanal if not forge a new one, the incredible might of the new imperial guard is next to none and bolstered only by its irrevocable reputation, and thus any ground it breaks is favourable to the continued success of its capitalistic greed and megalomanical leaders and burgeoning of power manifested in its thingism, in good faith suffice to say the futility of dissent over willfully unjust forces seeking to undo and destroy any semblance of peace in the world, for which its rhetoric machinations come to the rescue, never settling nor resting, all in justifable order to keep the profits churning for what is a better trade than war? thus preying on the worst instincts and vulnerabilities of mankind, just as it divides and conquers the lands it wages wars on, it scavenges away at its intellectuals and scientists, and when scientists as Oppie get thrown into positions of much power, they are invariably easy targets to the industrial complex, customary to their dehumanization process, to use and throw. The buildup to the first nuclear test is incrediby exciting as it is foreboding, and the slow revelation of its disquiet unleashed in mute horror is brilliantly done. Oppie’s scrupulous endeavour though he remains selfaware throughout never gets hindered in the way by any moral scruples nor is anyone else’s for that matter, the job has to be done either way, until it’s too late, but only then the surfeit of guilt arrives. But for the machinery, there’s the nebulous margins between being profligate and parsimony, because to what ends do the means justify the expenditure? to no end, and to what end do the ends justify the means? again to no end whatsoever if it means the prevail of its domineering over others, to what lengths does it necessitate calumny for one’s personal opinions? or their history, again it’s not just the commodification of lives that makes it so monstrous, inasmuch as it is the inexorable hubris of its oppression. I continue to maintain it that the tyranny of evil is maintained only by the convenience it festers, aided only partly by those who are convinced of its need, it’s an ignoble conceit after all. Nolan takes care enough to not paint a historiography out of Oppie, and keeps the screenplay rather cerebral leaving emotional beats out of the fore, leaning into his skills which also luckily here plays to his advantage by turning it into a stoic character study of sorts, but there is a neat subversion here because what starts off as seemingly an inspiring journey turns into an experimentation with horror by the denouement. And by the time of the third act, the film has transformed into an experimental horror and procedural setup. I can see where it might feel lacklustre to some, but upon my second rewatch it’s anything but, and is impeccably performed, for instance I hadn’t noticed how good emily blunt or that einstein or rami malek (even though he’s just being himself) and that damn lawyer of lewis strauss were before, at this point it’s safe to say everyone’s brought their A game to this.