The trailer of Oppenheimer fittingly credits a champion of the theatre experience, Christopher Nolan, for having written and directed the film ‘for the screen’. The film will be released worldwide (except Japan, where it faces uncertainty) in 70mm, 35mm and IMAX versions this Friday, July 21, and comes riding on unprecedented hype and hysteria. In India, 15,000 IMAX tickets are reported to have been booked in advance and there has been chatter about 3 am shows planned in some Mumbai theatres, a privilege usually reserved for the likes of Rajinikanth and Vijay. A sweet revenge seems to await Nolan, if one may presumptively call it that, after the box office disappointment of Tenet in the immediate aftermath of the first wave of COVID in 2020. Oppenheimer will be seen as Nolan truly believes films are meant to—with a sense of communal participation than scattered, individualised consumption.
For a film telling the story of how science and technology irrevocably altered human reality and future, Oppenheimer eschews CGI. In the era of iPhone filmmaking, Nolan stands by celluloid. A proponent of traditional cameras and analog over digital imagery, his Oppenheimer has been shot with the bulky IMAX film cameras by Hoyte van Hoytema, that too majorly in real locations.
Nolan’s adherence to this classic model of filmmaking and film-viewing has me most invested in what promises to be a visual and aural spectacle. However, eventually in cinema, technology must be at the service of the human element than vice versa, something Nolan would well understand. From what one has seen, heard, and read about it so far, his sprawling, three-hour-long epic promises to offer calculated measures of thrills, drama, and emotions for heart, mind, and soul.
With Nolan—thanks to his filmography filled with mind-bending narratives like Memento, The Prestige and Inception—there is always the expectation of complexity, not just in character motivations and relationships, but in form, narrative, timeline and use of the device of ‘memory’. Oppenheimer is based on the book, American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the biography of physicist and the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. I think we can trust Nolan to have not turned it into an uncritical hagiography but a deep dive into the moral and ethical dilemmas at the core of the development of nuclear weapons, 78 years after Trinity or the first detonation was conducted in America on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project.
Fueled by “Nazi anxiety” and the apprehension that the Germans might beat them in the race to harness the newly discovered nuclear fission into a bomb, the Manhattan Project marked a coming together of A-list scientists, with Oppenheimer leading from the front—all for a quick delivery of the atom bomb in the thick of World War II. But the presumed safety against the fear of “what if the Nazis have a bomb?” led to further vulnerability for the world.
On the one hand is the progress and power that science brings for humanity. But power must also be exercised with a sense of caution and responsibility which often goes lacking. As debates on nuclear energy and arms race keep raging on in the world, it’s worth every cinematic moment to go back in history when the way to end World War II and efforts to forge peace with a bomb paved the way for more battles and bigger bombs, when a cure turned into long-term affliction.
“You are the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves”, goes a dialogue in the film. Did Oppenheimer regret his actions? Did he, like the proverbial Prometheus, give the world fire to play with—and was he later troubled by guilt? He is known to have quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “I have become death, the destroyer of worlds”. The angular face and edgy, restive persona of Cillian Murphy promise to make us privy to this secluded, beleaguered side of Oppenheimer. But what of further troubles in his life beyond the invention he is synonymous with? Oppenheimer was persecuted in the McCarthy era for being an alleged communist. Will the epic take us closer to those horrors as well? Perhaps unlikely.
The McCarthy era was also a dark phase for Hollywood when a witch-hunt was launched against several artists with communist allegiance. While a few, like actor Lucille Ball stood in support, many, like actors Ronald Reagan and Edward G. Robinson, betrayed their own community. That was a time of polarised Hollywood. The irony isn’t lost today as we see a united industry.
Potentially one of the biggest weeks in Hollywood, already being dubbed Barbenheimer—Oppenheimer releases alongside Greta Gerwig’s Barbie—comes just as the actors have joined the striking writers in fighting studios and streamers. On Thursday, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (SAG-AFTRA) voted to join Writers Guild of America after failing to reach a consensus for a new contract with the studios and streaming services, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Oppenheimer’s heavy duty star cast—Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek—did walk the red carpet at the film’s London premiere but left the screening in a show of solidarity with their striking colleagues. A film on “the most important thing to ever happen in the history of the world” is also tied up now with the most significant battles in the history of Hollywood. Oppenheimer is already momentous.
(namroo@gmail.com)