Oppenheimer (2023) review

The most unlikely summer blockbuster from 2023 is a three hour biopic about controversial physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy): it covers his early years studying at Cambridge (and almost killing his professor), meeting other prominent members in his field like Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz) and Kurt Gödel (James Urbaniak), having a romantic relationship with troubled psychiatrist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), marrying Kitty (Emily Blunt), getting recruited by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) to head the Manhattan Project (with the goal of constructing a bomb to use on the Nazis) ... and then, in True American Fashion, has his reputation tarnished when he's put on trial over alleged Communist sympathies.  As I've written before for Nolan's previous movies, his preferences are for narrative trickery (to try to dupe his viewers into thinking it's smarter than it is) and elaborate action sequences - he's a technician, not a philosopher - so he tries to doll up the "traditional" biographical material by slicing up the story, which frantically leaps around different time frames and occasionally throws in an explosion or two (as well as shots of Murphy sweating profusely in close-up).  It should come as no surprise that the Trinity sequence in New Mexico - which was the first actual test of a nuclear weapon - is the movie's centerpiece, as it's meticulously directed and its implications are frightening ... and then it goes right back to its less-than-inspired courtroom proceedings in which Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission plots against our anxious and remorseful protagonist (I suspect Nolan being half English and raised Catholic kept him from really exploring the not-so-latent anti-Semitism).  Still, it's a positive sign that audiences shelled out cash to watch a film involving a chain-smoking ectomorph playing dice with the human race ... or maybe it's just great marketing.