Christopher Nolan
Oppenheimer

Nolan is an exceptional storyteller and a great entertainer, a director who creates grand and excessively ambitious works, aiming to introduce the general public to the complexity of the world, matter, and quantum mechanics in an accessible way, combining demanding (and obviously recurring) themes with blockbuster spectacle. In this, he has pursued the Kubrickian model throughout his career, although the comparison is still out of place and impossible from all points of view.

Nolan is primarily interested in two things: man and physics.

In a certain sense, one can even say that Nolan is sometimes halfway between filmmaker and popularizer when it comes to theoretical physics.

Theoretical physics, technique, time, are some of the obsessions of the director of Interstellar, and Oppenheimer is a new chapter of this inquiry, which now seeks to recall the story of the father of the atomic bomb; of the one who, in fact, marked a new phase in world history. Placing science at the base of the double explosion that overturned every previous conception about the destructive potential of progress and, above all, in the subsequent political phase, imposed a new world order that is the same today (I avoid speculating on how long it will last).

Oppenheimer is an engrossing film, actually less complex than other Nolan movies, compared to works like Tenet, Inception and Dunkirk (which was the first to begin Nolan's discourse on the Second World War), it is a much more conventional work, perhaps also due to the limitations of the biopic.

It's a film about a failure: that of a man who, despite being seized by unprecedented megalomania in his environment, was perhaps sincerely convinced that the atomic bomb would end wars, by virtue of the demonstration of such destructive power. But he was wrong because he hadn't fully considered the implications, precisely, political ones.

The true core of Oppenheimer indeed is this, and not so much the process that led to the construction of the two bombs that wiped out hundreds of thousands of lives in Japan.

Physics is a subject, a discipline, a theory, and a bomb is an object, an explosion a technical matter. But clearly, the fate of humanity and the world is always in the hands of man and politics.

It's not the most original among reflections, but undoubtedly it brings to light the real problem posed by the film, which is that of power.

Oppenheimer is indeed a political film that Nolan skillfully - as always, as is his way - stages, wisely alternating timelines, in line with his typical non-linear narrative.

For me, it is not a masterpiece (Nolan's only masterpiece remains The Prestige). And even in this case, the English director doesn't give up on his didacticism: it would have been, for me, much more fascinating if the dialogue between Oppenheimer and Einstein had not been revealed, leaving the doubt to the viewer, given the banality of what was said in that dialogue.

To quote the title of a beautiful book by Benjamín Labatut that I recommend, in which the stories of various pillars of physics, including Einstein and Heisenberg, present in the film are proposed in a novelistic context: when we stopped understanding the world. And Oppenheimer himself is mentioned:

"On September 1, 1939 - the same day Nazi tanks crossed the borders of Poland - Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder published an article in issue 56 of the 'Physical Review'. In the article, the American physicists proved beyond any doubt that 'when a sufficiently heavy star has exhausted its source of thermonuclear energy, it will collapse and, unless its mass is reduced by fission, radiation, or expulsion, that concentration will continue indefinitely', forming the black hole that Schwarzschild had prophesied, capable of crumpling space like a sheet of paper and extinguishing time as if it were the light of a candle, without any physical force or natural law being able to prevent it."

It is as if the atomic bomb was for its creator a way, in addition to manifesting his desire to become a modern 'American Prometheus', as well as the God of death, to restore order in an uncontrolled situation like that of war. Instead, the pulverization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - which in the film rightly remains off-screen, as does the release of Little Boy and Fat Man - emphasized this chaos, then giving rise to a series of betrayals, envies, power plots. Wars did not end, as we know, in fact, the atomic device served as both a prelude and a pretext for the Cold War. And it's curious to remember how the end of the latter, due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, also symbolically passed through Chernobyl, another manifestation of hell on earth caused by energy, radiation, and, ultimately, technique.

The moral and ethical dilemmas behind the event that officially ended the Second World War are very relative and secondary, and rather show the great hypocrisies of the character Oppenheimer, which Cillian Murphy, in the role of a lifetime (at least his cinematic one, since in the end, he will always be Tommy Shelby), renders extraordinarily, offering a titanic interpretation. An interpretation with many facets, perfect for such a great yet controversial and problematic character. And he is rightly already a candidate for an Oscar in 2024.

At the end of it all, the eternal repetition is that of the logic of power and the human propensity for destruction and death.

Physics serves to discover worlds, even when the discovery may not be pleasant or overturn all the millennial previous conceptions. Man, on the other hand, will tend to destroy those worlds over and over again.

And the world is ever more incomprehensible, chaotic, and nearing the end.