'Oppenheimer' review: Sympathy for the destroyer of worlds

At one point in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb dons his signature uniform - a fedora hat, a smoking pipe, a slightly oversized costume - like Batman donning his cape and cowl for the first time. It's a gaze that serves as a kind of armor against mere mortals, whom he woos with particular charisma, as well as the military and political bureaucracy he battles while leading the Manhattan Project. It's also a way for J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) to ground himself as he grapples with the major conflict surrounding his work: building an atomic bomb could help win the war, but at what cost to humanity?

Oppenheimer might seem like a curious project for Nolan: since completing his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, he's embarked on increasingly complex projects (perhaps to atone for that disappointment). Interstellar was apparently the story of a man exploring the cosmos to find a new planet for mankind, but he also struggled with personal sacrifice as his children grew old beyond him.

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Dunkirk was a purely cinematic, almost dialogue-free depiction of a famous wartime evacuation. And Tenet was a bold attempt to mix another heady sci-fi concept (what if you could turn back time?!) with explosive James Bond-esque set pieces. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is a mostly gossipy film set in a variety of meeting rooms, save for one explosive sequence.

Step back, though, and a film about a smart, very capable man struggling with massive moral issues is right in Nolan's wheelhouse. Oppenheimer's swaggering genius is a perfect match for Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne/Batman, the dedicated magicians of The Prestige or the expert dream divers/super spies of Inception.

The film, based on the biography American Prometheus by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, follows Oppenheimer from his time in Germany as a doctoral student to his professorship at UC Berkeley. He mingled with notable scientists, including Albert Einstein himself, and made a name for himself as a researcher in quantum physics. We see Oppenheimer as more than just a book geek: he sends money to anti-fascists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he urges unionization among lab workers and professors, and he supports local communists. (Something that would come back to haunt him later.)

It's not long before he's recruited by the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, and the myth-making really begins. Like a Nolan heist movie, it brings together a team of the brightest scientific minds in America and beyond, and it pushes the government to establish a city as a secret research base in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The film is strongest when it focuses on the specifics of the Manhattan Project: the rush to build a bomb in front of Nazi Germany, the pushback of scientists terrified by the damage "the gadget" could do.

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The film focuses firmly on Oppenheimer's point of view, so much so that we mostly see him as a tortured heroic genius. Only he can bring good scientists together and motivate them to work; only he can solve the puzzles of quantum physics to keep America safe. Some colleagues criticize his cavalier attitude about building an atomic bomb - they think it can lead to incalculable disaster, while he naively thinks it could be so powerful that it could end all war. But, for the most part, we feel he was a great man who was ultimately betrayed by a country that didn't care about its post-war anti-nuclear activism.

I unfortunately didn't get to see Oppenheimer on an IMAX screen, but sitting front row at a local theater still managed to be a totally immersive experience. This was especially surprising because it's really a movie about people (mostly men) talking to each other in a series of mundane parts. Except for a virtuoso setting - the buildup and aftermath of a successful atomic bomb test is Nolan at his best - what's most impressive is how the cinematograp...