Director and technical wizard of smart blockbusters, Christopher Nolan grapples with the legacy of renowned scientist J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) with an epic edge-of-your-seat biographical thriller. Nolan utilises elements of ‘space race’ movies and film noir to effectively ramp up tension and an ambience of paranoia as a twisty narrative unfolds. He also skilfully evokes a Hitchcockian dramatic style placing the viewer in Oppenheimer’s psychological state for the majority of his film to mostly eschew formulaic biopic tropes. 

The movie (adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s American Prometheus) is in colour when showing the subjective and in a newly developed 15-perforation B&W film stock when objective. Nolan also switches between multiple time-lines. One follows Oppenheimer’s rise as a theoretical physicist and the years spent leading the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb that eventually killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in August 1945. The remainder portrays the controversial hearing against the scientist that took place in 1954, and a senate hearing where Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss (an excellent Robert Downey Jr) is the main focus.

A chain-smoking Murphy sporting Oppenheimer’s trademark tilted porkpie hat is magnetic; he perfectly captures the scientist’s youthful arrogance, and then, as time passes, truly inhabits the gaunt posture of a haunted man who has altered the world forever. Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer is a tad one-note but comes into her own as the film progresses. In fact, the female characters are lacking, with a charismatic Florence Pugh appearing as staunch communist and lover to Oppenheimer, Jean Tatlock, in an underwritten role.

Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves occasionally hams it up, A Few Good Men-style, but shares great chemistry with Murphy as their characters discuss the Manhattan Project’s finer details at Los Alamos. The list of big-name actors goes on with Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh all doing solid work, but most notable is Casey Affleck who appears briefly as Boris Pash, playing the military man in a controlled, menacing and skin-crawling manner.

Nolan has crafted a film concerned with the paradoxes in people and science when it comes to curiosity, creation and destruction while also exploring the historical context and contradictions of Oppenheimer’s actions with powerfully moving visuals. One scene where a victorious, flag-waving audience celebrates the bombings as a mark of World War II’s end, while a disorientated Oppenheimer gives a speech where he dips into the nightmarish horrors and screams of those who perished is particularly effective. Christopher Nolan’s nuanced approach to the tortured genius genre doesn’t let anyone off the hook in its depiction of man’s propensity for violence.  

Oppenheimer is in cinemas from Friday 21 July.