I'll admit I had my doubts when I first heard that director Christopher Nolan was planning to make a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the research effort to develop the first atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project. This is one of the most well-documented periods of 20th-century American history, after all, and there have already been so many books, films, and TV series about the race for the bomb, of varying quality. (As always, let me give a shout-out to Manhattan, a stellar fictional series that was tragically canceled after just two seasons.) How would Nolan make this very well-trodden material his own?
I needn't have fretted. With Oppenheimer, Nolan has gifted us a truly unique, unflinching, nuanced portrait of the enigmatic, complicated man who spearheaded the Manhattan Project and subsequently ran afoul of the "red-baiting" politics of the McCarthy era. Technically it's a biopic, but it doesn't play like one. It's more like Nolan carefully selected various threads running through Oppenheimer's life and wove them into a richly textured tapestry that somehow transcends those raw materials. The result is pure visual poetry.
(Spoilers below, although this is very well-documented history.)
Nolan's film is largely based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (which I highly recommend). The trailers understandably focused on the drama surrounding the birth of the atomic bomb leading up to the Trinity Test, but I had hoped that the film as a whole would follow the book's arc and include Oppenheimer's subsequent fall from grace. And so it does. In fact, that later, darker part of Oppenheimer's life provides the lens through which his earlier successes play out in Nolan's film.
There are two basic storylines, and the film shifts back and forth between them; Nolan has never been one to strictly adhere to a chronological timeline. "Fission" is shot in color and follows Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) through his early years as a graduate student and college professor; his leadership of the Manhattan Project culminating with the Trinity Test; his simultaneous triumph and torment in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the eventual loss of his security clearance thanks in large part to early Communist connections and his outspoken opposition to developing a hydrogen bomb.