This will blow you away, the director said clumsily – I have to say he was right: BRIAN VINER reviews OPPENHEIMER

Oppenheimer (15, 180 mins)

Verdict: overwhelming

Judgement:

At the London premiere of Oppenheimer, writer-director Christopher Nolan, before walking out in solidarity with the Hollywood actors and writers’ strike, told the audience that he expected people to be “blown away” by his film.

It was a dignified feeling, awkwardly expressed. Nolan’s highly anticipated photo tells the compelling story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the brilliant theoretical physicist who ran New Mexico’s top-secret Los Alamos compound as the spearhead of the US Manhattan Project. That was the name given to the development of atomic weapons and especially to the devastating bombs that fell on Japan in 1945.

But three hours after I rolled my eyes at the English director’s choice of words, they were amazed at the magnitude of his achievement.

Oppenheimer is a stunningly well-made film, with one scene (you can guess which one) truly breathtaking in its intensity. Nolan received an Academy Award nomination for Dunkirk (2017), but should definitely be a favorite now to take it one step further. Let’s hope the current turmoil doesn’t disrupt next year’s awards season, because Oppenheimer is the sort of achievement for which glittering figurines exist.

It tells the compelling story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the brilliant theoretical physicist who ran the top-secret Los Alamos compound in New Mexico.

Nolan adapted his screenplay from a 2005 biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, which won a Pulitzer Prize for authors Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. I can’t speak for the book, but on screen the story really has four components: the race to make nuclear weapons for the Nazis; the effort to prevent nuclear secrets from falling into the hands of America’s wartime ally, Soviet Russia; the post-war campaign to sully Oppenheimer for his own perceived communist leanings; and finally his messy private life.

It’s a complicated story that Nolan doesn’t really try to simplify. The director takes us forward and back in time, from ‘Oppy’s’ time as a student at Cambridge University in the 1930s to the ‘security hearing’ in Washington DC in 1954, where he actually faces trial, and the director trusts that his audience will understand what is going on. .

It’s not always easy. I confess that my own understanding of quantum mechanics, nuclear fission and related topics is about the width of an atom, maybe even a split atom, but I didn’t mind being baffled every now and then. This is adult storytelling of the highest quality.

The acting is equally great, led by Murphy, who fills the title role as fully as Tommy Shelby in the BBC drama Peaky Blinders. Robert Downey Jr is as excellent as Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and perhaps, aside from the unseen Nazis and a Soviet spy, the closest thing to a villain.

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer, in theaters tomorrow

The acting is equally great, led by Murphy, who fills the title role as fully as Tommy Shelby in the BBC drama Peaky Blinders.

But everywhere you look there are great actors at the top of their game, including Matt Damon as the army officer Oppenheimer recruits to set up Los Alamos, Gary Oldman (as President Truman), Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Casey Affleck and, perfectly convincing as Albert Einstein, dear old Tom Conti.

If the movie has a flaw, it might be that the female parts are underwritten. But Emily Blunt makes the most of her screen time as Kitty, Oppenheimer’s wife; ditto Florence Pugh as his emotionally fragile mistress, Jean Tatlock. Both women are former card-carrying members of the American Communist Party, and Oppenheimer’s own leftist sympathies come under scrutiny after the war, understandably even in the feverish McCarthyite era.

However, Nolan doesn’t mind showing his own cards. He clearly sees Oppenheimer as a flawed hero, who is absolved by this film of being anything other than an American patriot who understands better than anyone the dark ethics surrounding the development of a nuclear arsenal. “I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon,” he says. “But I know the Nazis can’t.”

The scene where we see the weapon detonate during a test in the desert near the Los Alamos lab is, I would say, one of the most thunderously powerful pieces of cinema in the entire history of the medium.

But after that virtuoso moment, much of Oppenheimer unfolds like a thriller, never straying from profound questions of morality to turn Hiroshima and Nagasaki into nuclear waste. I despair at the excessive length of many movies these days, but even at three hours this one never seems unreasonably long. There is an awful lot of story to tell, and Nolan tells it magnificently.

• Oppenheimer is in cinemas tomorrow