Oppenheimer, 2023.
Directed by Christopher Nolan.
Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, and Kenneth Branagh.
SYNOPSIS:
Christopher Nolan’s epic bio pic Oppenheimer arrives on disc with an excellent batch of bonus features. It’s a great movie, and fans will want to grab this edition because the extras really go all out in examining the troubled legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
While I never had to do “duck and cover” drills in school, like my father’s generation did, I still grew up during a time when nuclear war was very much on everyone’s minds. And, of course, the question of whether the United States should have dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II still reverberated through public discourse and high school history classes.
I’ve talked to my kids about that topic — our youngest is such an admirer of Japan that the name J. Robert Oppenheimer infuriates him. I can understand that point-of-view: I’ve always appreciated that country and its culture, even if I’m not as enamored with it as he is. (I wouldn’t be shocked if he ends up living there as an ex-pat some day.)
That question of whether to drop those bombs still vexes me. I can see both sides of the answer, and I can assume Christopher Nolan did too, simply based on his latest movie, Oppenheimer. It’s a magnificent film that wrestles with a flawed man and his legacy, and like any great work of art, it lets the viewer decide how they feel about its subject.
With a three-hour running time, Oppenheimer is able to chart the scientist’s life starting in 1926, when he was a doctoral student at Cambridge. He later studies in Germany and returns to the United States to teach at UC Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology, meeting a “who’s who” of great science minds along the way, including Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.
He enters into an off-and-on relationship with Jean Tatlock and later marries Katherine “Kitty” Puening, with whom he starts a family, although he maintains contact with Jean; his marriage to Kitty is often volatile and difficult. He’s eventually recruited to lead the Manhattan Project, which was the United States’ initiative to develop an atomic bomb before Germany could.
After Germany’s surrender, members of President Truman’s administration decide to use this new weapon against Japan and end the war without a costly (in terms of money and lives lost) invasion. Oppenheimer equivocates during those discussions, making it clear that he wants to adopt an attitude of “I simply carried out the task I was asked to do, and now others can decide how to use the results of that labor.”
Such an attitude also permeates the questioning of Oppenheimer during a private hearing in 1954 to decide whether to revoke his security clearance. The reverberations of that hearing echo five years later, when Lewis Strauss, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), undergoes a US Senate hearing for nomination as Secretary of Commerce during the Eisenhower administration.
Scenes from that private hearing, as well as Strauss’s Senate hearing and its private moments, are intertwined with the narrative of Oppenheimer’s early career and time as the leader of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. The movie bounces back and forth in time, and as a result, sometimes it’s a bit difficult to keep all the names straight. It can be especially hard to track when Machiavellian schemes are revealed and the viewer needs to remember not only who said what, but in what year they said it.
The overall narrative isn’t hard to follow, however, and I will likely give this one a second viewing to cement the various players’ roles in my mind. What I’ve related here is really just a small part of the story told by the film, but it’s so sprawling in its scope that I could spend many more paragraphs trying to explain it all.
The cast is uniformly excellent, except for Matt Damon, whose performance as General Leslie Groves, recruiter of Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project, telegraphs “Hey, I’m Matt Damon” every time I see him onscreen. However, people like Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. are transformative in their roles as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Lewis Strauss, respectively, and they immediately transport me to that decades-ago world.
Befitting a movie of such importance, Universal has issued it on Blu-ray with the film on one disc and a great set of bonus features on a second high-def platter. A DVD and a code for a digital copy are included too. (The film is also available on 4K Ultra HD, of course.)
The extras lead off with The Story of our Time: The Making of Oppenheimer, a 72-minute in-depth documentary that, like the film does with its titular subject, takes its time immersing us in director Christopher Nolan’s journey to bring this story to the big screen.
It’s a wonderful departure from the quickie 20-minute featurettes found on so many discs these days. It’s also available as part of the digital edition, but it’s the only extra found there, so you’ll want the movie on disc to get everything.
The bonus features continue with To End All War: Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb, an 87-minute companion to the making-of that digs into the life of the real Oppenheimer and the history of the Manhattan Project. It was created by NBC News and treats its subject without any sensationalism, like the film does. Archival clips of the real Oppenheimer demonstrate how well Cillian Murphy inhabits the role.
The final two extras are:
• Innovations in Film: 65mm Black-and-White Film in Oppenheimer (8 minutes): Nolan shot the entire movie on old-fashioned film stock, and this is a look at the approach to that process.
• Meet the Press Q&A Panel: Oppenheimer (34.75 minutes): Another NBC News production, this one features Chuck Todd discussing the movie and the real-life history around it with Nolan, writer Kai Bird (co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which was adapted for the film), and a trio of physicists: Dr. Kip Thorne, Dr. Thom Mason, and Dr. Carlo Rovelli.
As you might imagine given the interviewees, this is a meaty discussion that tackles many weighty subjects. It’s definitely not a “Hey, we’re promoting a movie!” puff piece, and for that, I’m thankful.
Five trailers round out the platter.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
Originally published November 25, 2023. Updated April 22, 2024.
