I wonder, with Oppenheimer, what the irreducible detractors of Christopher Nolan will be able to criticize this time. Because in this new effort, there is no trace of nebulous pitch. This is one of the best Hollywood Movies in 2023.
It remains the painting of a man in the colours of his contradictions, his faults, his regrets and his fears. Because Oppenheimer, ultimately, is envisaged as a fatalistic and lyrical opera of the interiority of its eponymous character. The painting of a modern Prometheus who gives fire to men to better contemplate what they do with it.
Not the best use, of course.
It remains a biopic that almost forgot to be a biopic, so visceral is its feeling, which even succeeds in depicting the physicist's mind in deafening overdrive. A film which would have forgotten to summon any length in its three hours of demonstration and which succeeds, in the register of psychological thriller or procedural film, in summoning the spirit of Oliver Stone's formidable JFK and in maintaining its art of suspense sometimes suffocating.
See>>> Logan 2017
It remains a work that casts a bitter eye on the way America thanks its heroes and especially those who bring the end of the war to them on a platter. The way she burns her idols before hypocritically rehabilitating them. To compromise them in dark machinations deployed only to satisfy paltry political aims and outraged egos which are just as outraged. As such, Robert Downey Jr. is reborn under the eye of Christopher Nolan's camera, displaying all the Machiavellianism of which his character is capable.
Oppenheimer accompanies Oppenheimer throughout his journey, in a captivating, exciting, and impressive way, as he is irradiated with stunning images, oscillating between interiority, universality, hallucinations and impressions of post-traumatic stress, until this silent explosion, as magical as it is terrifying, but above all hypnotizing and timeless.
But Christopher Nolan finally returns to this wonderful story of time. By anchoring his new film in a fierce past that resembles an implacable fresco which nevertheless continues to assert its funereal explosions forging our present and our future.
Like these drops hitting the surface of the water and deforming it, concentric waves propagating without limits, which would have activated an invincible temporal gear, a conflagration of the atmosphere that no one would be able to contain from now on.
Not the most obvious sign of Nolanian optimism, in short.