Last night the new Nolan film premiered officially in the movie theaters nation wide. Alongside with Barbie and the new installment in the Mission Impossible saga those are the summer blockbusters. I attended the late night screening of the biopic, and to my surprise, to a full house. Lines at concessions full of people, some of them dressed in pink – creating a camp feeling- tribute to the most famous doll. I felt immense joy and a feeling of long lost normality filled me. I was eager for a collective experience in the movies. If only Nolan’s film delivered.
Three and a half hours later I knew that I just watched an instant modern classic. It is not the applause in the end, or the shared feeling of awe that was floating in the air, or the fact that I concentrated on a viewing completely for three hours, without checking my phone, or talking, or pausing or going to the restroom. The latter was a challenge I admit.
What convinced me that what I am about to experience is something special was the opening of the film. Once the first scene rolled in, a one moment ago raucous audience was silenced immediately and totally. Killian Murphy’s face as Oppenheimer dominated the screen and our focus. I remember only one time in the past a film having the same effect in an audience. Funny enough was another Nolan movie. The opening heist scene in the Dark Knight made a room full of noisy teenagers shut up for good.
Christopher Nolan for me is one of the master filmmakers of our time. From his first piece (Memento, 2000) I knew that I have encountered a genius. Oppenheimer is his masterpiece. It goes without saying that such a feat of visual art needs to be experienced in the highest screen quality and with a collective mind. Go to an I-Max if you can, and bring your loved ones with you to share this cinematic masterpiece with them.
From beginning to end the film has a commanding rhythm and an inner life that is determined from the soundtrack composed by Ludwig Goransson. The film is scored almost in its entirety, and the rare moments of silence they are so powerful that stop one from breathing. The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema is brilliantly intimate and personal. The editing by Jennifer Lame brings to life nuclear dreams and quantic theories in the most comprehensive way, and at the same time the cinematic language created is magical.
But most of all is the artistic choices that Nolan is making to serve his biopic drama. The screen is full of faces and close ups of human faces. Their emotions , their fears, doubts and inner hopes are all visible on the screen and been conveyed with pictures not words. Brilliant casting of a huge array of actors in major and minor roles. A star studded cast that doesn’t have a flaw in it. Especially the intoxicating dynamic between Oppenheimer (Killian Murphy) and Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) has a Mozart vs. Salieri quality that fuels the story with drama. A biopic that at some points takes a turn into a court room drama.
Last but not least, Nolan handles the bombings with such grace, never surrendering to the easy shock value of real footage and images of the catastrophic event. Masterfully he uses sound and vision to recreate the effect of the A bomb, in the scene with the bomb testings in the desert. In the end of the film we are all speechless wandering if there would be a way to avoid this human disaster. And most of all if we have learned anything from this experience that will prevent us from repeating the same mistake.
