It was inevitable that Christopher Nolan’s multiple Oscar-winning biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, would play in Japan despite some earlier reports that no local distributor would touch it because of Hiroshima/Nagasaki; though it remains to be seen if it’s as much of a box office draw as it’s been in other markets. And, in fact, it does address the utter devastation the bomb inflicted on a human population, albeit in a scene where the titular scientist (Cillian Murphy) imagines that devastation as it affects people who don’t look particularly Asian. Nolan’s reason for not including what actually took place in Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945, is that he has made a movie about a man who was not there on those dates, and, in fact, there are very few sequences in the film that do not center directly on Oppenheimer the man. Moreover, half the script is about what happens to him when he publicly renounces his creation for the terrifyingly destructive thing it is and the uses to which it is being put, so it is hardly a celebration of that creation. Nevertheless, the scene where the news of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is met by Americans with cheers and celebration will undoubtedly make many Japanese people uncomfortable. It made me, an American, very uncomfortable, and I assume that was Nolan’s aim.

Because if the movie is about any one thing it’s hubris—Oppenheimer’s, mainly, but also that of the American intellectual left, the U.S. military, and males in general (the women are treated as cavalierly by the movie as they were in real life). Nolan’s purpose is to get into Oppenheimer’s mind in such a way as to show how those who needed him to produce the bomb could manipulate it to their ends. Normally, such an approach is done with more intimate tools, but Nolan, being Nolan, can’t work intimately, and so he trains his IMAX cameras on easy metaphors—from raindrops in water puddles to explosions on the sun—that are meant to be visually overwhelming. Likewise, Oppenheimer’s ambitions, which take him to Europe to hobnob with intellects and egos as big as his (He learns Dutch in six weeks just to present a lecture!), to the greatest universities in the U.S., where he’s a despised superstar, and finally to the attention of the authorities who exploit that ego—and his Jewish identity—for the war effort, are treated with maximalist detail by populating the cast that revolves around the protagonist with Oscar-winners and other A-listers. At first, I thought this parade of well-known faces would be a distraction (Matt Damon! Emily Blunt!Josh Hartnett! Kenneth Branagh! Robert Downey Jr.! Florence Pugh! Casey Affleck! Rami Malek for two minutes only!) but in Murphy he has an actor who does more with his face than with his voice or his body, and when you see it perform on the huge screen there’s little else to think about. This prioritizing of images at the expense of everything else comes into its own in the middle portion at Los Alamos, where the terrible deed is prepared and demonstrated, and the force that Nolan subsequently unleashes reverberates for the rest of the movie, which deals granularly with Oppenheimer’s political persecution in the 1950s and 60s.

Which isn’t to say Oppenheimer is the usual linear historical epic. Nolan liberally switches time periods and color palette to get what he wants, and if the story’s development seems to defy logic—much in the same way that the theories of the universe Oppenheimer ascribes to do, at least at first—it arrives at its destination with a proper sense of who the man always was and how it destroyed him in the end. What’s revolutionary about Nolan’s movie is how it interrogates the inner life with cinematic devices normally reserved for recreating bombast. Nolan has already proven he can do both, but he’s never juxtaposed the elemental with the gargantuan in such an assured way. It does what blockbusters have always endeavored to do: Hold the audience spellbound for three hours with the biggest gestures money can buy. But rather than assault the senses, Oppenheimer wields these devices in order to force us to ponder the arrogance of human enterprise, which may be the most terrifying thing of all. 

Opens March 29 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (IMAX 050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (IMAX 050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (03-6709-6410), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002).

Oppenheimer home page in Japanese

photo (c) Universal Pictures