Christopher Nolan coming in hot.

There really aren’t many out there like Christopher Nolan. The last of a dying filmmaking breed, when Nolan delivers a movie, the world listens.

As one of a select band of directors able to put bums on seats through name alone, Christopher Nolan has spent the years since his breakthrough, Memento, steadily crafting an event-level brand like no other. For a very brief moment in time, one of his films even paused a global pandemic. Kind of.

From backwards noirs to Batman via dream heists, his enviable hit rate and unprecedented clout within the industry has led to an impressively diverse filmography of truly unconventional blockbusters. With a smorgasbord of genres and subjects in his back catalogue, there’s seemingly nowhere Christopher Nolan isn’t willing to go.

But what exactly do you do when your filmmaking career has covered so much thematic ground? Well, you crack out a biopic on that atomic bomb bloke of course.

During World War II, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. (Matt Damon) appoints physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project where he and his team of scientists spend years developing and designing the atomic bomb. Their work comes to fruition on the 16th July 1945, as they witness the world's first nuclear explosion, forever changing the course of history.

In hindsight, Christopher Nolan really was the only one who could’ve made Oppenheimer. Sure, there are plenty of directors out there qualified enough to cover the story, yet no one would’ve told it quite like Nolan.

As a bona fide auteur and a somewhat obsessive filmmaking mastermind, Nolan clearly sees something in the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer that speaks to him. Of course, a film director and the father of the atomic bomb are entirely different worlds, yet there’s a sense throughout Oppenheimer that only Nolan could convey this multifaceted story about a driven, complex genius with the care and attention it requires.

While this isn’t Nolan’s first World War II rodeo, it’s certainly the first time he’s tackled the war with such intense focus and with such devastating results. So, while Dunkirk certainly concerns the same war and the same broad setting, Oppenheimer sees Nolan operating on a whole different level, with an entirely different thematic toolkit at his disposal.

Oppenheimer as a man, a human, and a complicated genius is as fascinating as it is frightening, and comes fraught with many potential pratfalls, yet Nolan tackles it all exquisitely. Christopher Nolan’s naturalistic, calculated, often stubborn filmmaking style feels made for this story of blurred morals and contradicting themes, and so it proves.

With intensity and tension through the roof, Nolan once again wields time like a weapon. Making it clear we’re on the clock from the first frame, Nolan unleashes a typically fractured narrative structure to dial up your anxiety levels and keep them there, while the film’s propulsive editing escalates the urgency with pacing that makes us all too aware of the stakes at play.

Despite its elongated three-hour running time, Oppenheimer practically skips by, as Nolan straps a rocket to the narrative and lets it fly. With scenes coming and going in the blink of an eye, Jennifer Lame’s editing is very much Oppenheimer’s secret weapon, injecting a seemingly stodgy story with a thoroughly terrifying sense of urgency.

Biopics like this can so often be starchy, slow burn affairs, however Nolan is having none of it here. Taking a hammer to the classic biopic story structure, Nolan supplements the disorientation caused by this typically fractured approach with a rapid-fire pace that grabs you and doesn’t let go.

From first frame to haunting last, Oppenheimer ruthlessly demands your attention, and as much as its horrors may urge you otherwise, it’s impossible to take your eyes off it. Propelled by Ludwig Göransson’s mesmerising score, some terrifyingly immersive sound design, and Hoyte van Hoytema’s blistering cinematography, Oppenheimer is an all-encompassing, all-consuming cinematic experience that, despite its bleak subject matter, will leave you in awe.

While watching an atomic blast may not be anyone’s idea of a good time, this really is one that you’ll want to experience in the hugest way and on the biggest screen possible. Nolan knows this and has positioned Oppenheimer to be as immense than anything in his back catalogue, and while much of the film amounts to men talking in rooms, the hypnotic visuals and enormous feel of it all is truly spellbinding.

Sure, it’s an uncomfortable beauty but a beauty nonetheless, and one that only adds to the intense complexities and muddied morals of the story and its characters. Making the subject feel both Earth-shatteringly colossal and remarkably intimate, Nolan juggles the film’s many contradictions, enticing you to emotionally invest in the race-against-time plot, yet leave you repulsed by the astounding lack of empathy or humanity inherent in it.

Christopher Nolan offers no clear answers to the story’s many moral questions, and neither should he have to. Nolan, somewhat akin to Oppenheimer himself, is myopically focused and clearly driven to telling history from one man’s point-of-view alone.

A harrowing and frequently horrific portrait of morality and obsession from one man’s perspective, there is little sense of the war playing out beyond J. Robert Oppenheimer’s view, one for which he’s about to play a monumental part in. There are no gun fights, no battles, no soldiers, no Nazis, no Japanese perspective whatsoever, and if that all sounds historically one-sided, that’s entirely the point.

There are certainly moments when you desperately want Nolan to show the other side of the coin and for Oppenheimer to fully comprehend what he has done before it’s too late. That, however, is unfortunately not how things unfolded on the Manhattan Project side of history, a side where Oppenheimer found himself so consumed by the science and driven by his own calculating mind that there was no room to consider the victims of his bomb.

Behind those sunken, driven eyes, Cillian Murphy is on phenomenal form. With the huge IMAX camera stuck unflinchingly close to his face, there’s nowhere to hide for Oppenheimer’s star, as he runs a gamut of emotions, putting it all out there and drawing us in to perhaps one of the most complex minds of the twentieth century.

Biopics are always a tough task for any actor to tackle, however, there’s something so unrelentingly authentic in what Murphy is doing that you don’t question what he, or anyone else around him, are doing for a second. Despite the title and just how personal a story Nolan has made this; Oppenheimer is very much an ensemble piece. And what an ensemble it is.

With historical cameos and familiar faces aplenty, Cillian Murphy is backed up every step of the way by one of the most stacked casts you’ll come across all year. Of this ensemble, Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh as Kitty Oppenheimer (wife) and Jean Tatlock (lover) respectively deal fantastically with the relative paucity of material they’re given, however it’s Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr who give Murphy the biggest run for his money.

Alongside the gaunt, haunted profile of Murphy’s Oppenheimer, Damon’s gruff, no nonsense military man act as Lieutenant General Leslie Jones is perfect and works as a fantastic catalyst to keep the plot ticking along throughout its second act. As the bomb is dropped, however, and as we enter the final act, this is very much Robert Downey Jr.’s time to shine.

With the final hour concerning itself with the fallout between Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Committee, the finale becomes the Robert Downey Jr. show. Although much of this final act is basically men talking around tables, Downey Jr. takes this post-bomb opportunity to flex the kind of acting chops we’ve not seen in quite some time.

It truly is a powerhouse showing from an actor whose ability to pull this kind of performance out of the bag has been somewhat overshadowed of late by his MCU commitments. With impeccable line delivery, Downey Jr. drops bomb after bomb to push Cillian Murphy all the way to the end, and to prove that he was always far more than just Tony Stark.

It’s a thoroughly fascinating performance that helps drive along a final act that takes a definitive about turn from the film’s bomb building middle stretch. With the Trinity Test gone, the fateful events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki done, the tonal shift is a dramatic one that, fantastic performances aside, does get a little lost in the political weeds.

With heavy JFK influences, Oppenheimer sees things out as a courtroom drama of sorts and a densely-packed dissection/assassination of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s character. It’s a fascinating and frequently discombobulating watch with Christopher Nolan clearly keen to comb through the rest of his protagonist’s complicated story as forensically as possible, and while it’s certainly tricky to keep up with at times, it’s all thoroughly enthralling.

Undoubtedly one of Christopher Nolan’s best, Oppenheimer is an explosive, complex, harrowing portrait of morality and obsession. Minor third act wobbles aside, Oppenheimer is a tense, propulsive gut punch that absolutely blasts through its three-hour runtime. With hauntingly gorgeous visuals, a powerful score, and incredible performances from Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. Oppenheimer is a bombastic cinematic masterclass that will leave you shook.

Oppenheimer is in cinemas now.