As someone who didn’t know much about Oppenheimer (the man) and made a point to avoid the Oppenheimer post-release buzz, I didn’t really know what to expect when I took the day off of work and drove to Grand Rapids to see Nolan’s latest film in all its 70mm glory. There’s a lot to unpack from the movie—much of which has already been done by a great many people online—so I will try to keep my response succinct, but I also want to pay attention to what Oppenheimer is not.

Let’s back up for a moment. Dunkirk remains one of my favourite movies. It’s a masterpiece in its cinematography and how it renders its story without words. However, I acknowledge that my reasons for loving Dunkirik are precisely the reasons that many other people dislike the film. It’s a thoroughly unAmerican film, lacking the shouting and fighting that defines so many other war movies. Dunkirk doesn’t tell you anything about itself; if you didn’t know what it was about before watching the film, you probably didn’t know what it was about after, either. It’s a perfectly encapsulated little microcosm that portrays the hopes and fears in a single, monumental moment in history, and it doesn’t try to be anything else. (I think of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as an analogous literary work.)

When I first heard about the forthcoming release of Oppenheimer, all I cared about was that it starred Cillian Murphy, one of my few favourite actors (though I didn’t look forward to the perpetual butchering of his name by American audiences; it’s pronounced with a hard C, not an S sound). At the time I didn’t think it was a big deal, but then the rumblings of Oppenheimer vs. Barbie began to take over the internet and I realised that there was a lot more interest in a long biopic about a scientist than I initially thought. Now, after seeing the movie for myself, my impression is that a great many people are dissatisfied with the film because they asked all the wrong questions which, of course, lacked answers.

Oppenheimer is meant to be the story of an individual’s life’s work, and so it is. It isn’t about politics, or World War II, or even the Manhattan Project. Something about how if a story has to tell you what it means, then it’s already failed. Oppenheimer is the story of one man, told in broad and oblique strokes, rather than an op-ed trying to make a naked argument. What little I have seen online, a number of people seem preoccupied with the fact that the film doesn’t address the human consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that’s not its job. And, even if it were, I’d argue that the film does address the moral issues with that particular chapter of history—more blatantly than most other themes we see—but it certainly doesn’t try to answer those concerns. (Could any of us answer that question, though?)

If Dunkirk is The Great Gatsby, then Oppenheimer is This Side of Paradise. It’s messy and strange and frustratingly ambiguous, but that doesn’t negate the importance or the poignance of the questions it poses. Nolan wants us to think because there aren’t any easy or simple answers about the work to which Oppenheimer dedicated most of his life, and those answers aren’t black-and-white (for one, I don’t personally believe Murphy would’ve wanted the role if the story hadn’t been a healthy shade of gray—he likes the idea of moral ambiguity as much as I do). And especially as someone who’s personally quite attuned to the moral and ethical dilemmas (or explicit abuses) of modern technology, especially in the abstract of bits and bytes, my safety glasses are even more murky.

People are capable of coaxing out any number of interpretations from the film, but that’s the beauty of a film like Oppenheimer.

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