It's dark outside the window as my late-night train carries me home. I see occasional flashes of red light, and the backseat tray table, upon which I type this review of "Oppenheimer," won't stop shaking. So now my iPad is sitting in my lap. Though that isn't entirely still, because I'm still vibrating a bit, not from the Amtrak car, but from excitement at what I've witnessed.
This isn't some attempt at self-importance, but I do like to add a bit of gravitas to the films that really excite me. Some movies are fine. Some are quite rotten (I've recently suffered through a viewing of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"). But others, my readers, they are nothing less than a delight. A cold slice of Mississippi mud pie on a hot summer's day delight.
And I struggle a bit here because this is the part of my formula where I tell y'all what happens in the movie to set the stage without any serious spoilers. I consider that part the task assigned me -- to translate the art of the director's project as best I can, and write something interesting about it. But since "Oppenheimer" is based on historical events, the line between spoiler and mere summary has been reduced to ash.
I'll try my best though. Bear with me until I get to the next part of my formula, which is the analysis of what I've witnessed. "Oppenheimer" shows the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who gave the world the atomic bomb and ended World War II on a morose note. Well, as morose a note as can come after war.
Christopher Nolan's masterpiece is based on a 2005 biography about the physicist called "American Prometheus."
The film isn't told in a strict chronological order, but rather bounces back and forth through the decades of Oppenheimer's life. We see him in college, being interrogated by a government board, leading the team that assembled the atomic bomb, teaching as a professor in California and fornicating.
Some parts of the story are shot in black and white. Others are shown in full color. But all of it looks phenomenal, including, yes, the explosions. But these aren't Michael Bay explosions used to excite the audience in between thinly-written pieces of narrative. Forgive me for sounding a little pretentious, but these are artistic explosions, used to illustrate the raw power that was beyond even the human imagination, save for a few extraordinary gifted intellectuals.
The story of "Oppenheimer" is one of scientific might, the uncontrollable urge to explore no matter the consequences because evil people (from the Allied perspective) were racing to do the same thing, both during, and after World War II.
History has already told the audience what happens. America made and detonated the bomb, twice using it on civilian population centers in Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Viewers will watch Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his team take this bomb from hypothetical to fatal reality across three hours. And then they'll see tragedy, consequences, and the ethical questions that haunted minds for decades to come.
Murphy carries such a monumental weight throughout "Oppenheimer," and his performance matches the intensity of a man who said he had "become death" and feels the guilt associated with being a potential world destroyer. He sleeps around because even as a scientist there are elements of passion that make him a bit of a rock star.
Robert Downey Jr. proves he is more than Iron Man by playing a petty and slighted man named Lewis Strauss. It'll be a little shocking to see the man who spent more than a decade as Marvel's most-recognizable hero now playing an antagonist, but he's so skilled at being the villain of the story that folks won't even blink.
"Oppenheimer" is packed to the gills with big names, and everyone from Matt Damon to Florence Pugh swings for the moon. This is a tale of disastrous consequences full of lessons on man's folly, and they all understood the assignment.
The sound design (apart from shattering my ear drums) is artfully engineered, and unlike in "Tenet," I could hear everything that was said.
But the real treat in all of this is a narrative arc that feels so carefully fused together, it's as though Nolan spent the last 30 years knitting a sweater stitch by stitch. Not one scene feels superfluous or out of place.
The only flaw I could find in this picture, and it's a small one, is that Emily Blunt, who played Kitty Oppenheimer, just didn't seem to have any real chemistry with Murphy. But man alive does she shine during her witness testimony at the end.
Yes, this is a long movie. And yes, I tweet often that I long for the days when stories being told in 90 minutes were more common. But Nolan's film is worth it. "Oppenheimer" is weighty, it's tragic, it's art. Dammit, this is everything cinema should be. Now go watch it. And then go watch "Barbie." Please use your ticket-purchasing power to show Hollywood how ravenous the American consumer is for original stories.
And speaking of hungry, I'm going to go buy a whoopie pie from the cafe car. It's been almost 12 hours since I've eaten anything, and I'm ravenous.