Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan at his most complex, powerful, and human
Christopher Nolan loves to make movies about the vast forces and abstract concepts that shape our understanding of the world: time, gravity, perception. Even when he turns his gaze inward on the human mind, in films like the psychologically scrambled Memento or the dream-state thriller Inception, his explorations of the metaphysical realm have strict, architectural designs that tend to trap and dwarf the characters within them — like figures on one of Inception’s Escher staircases.
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He’s often accused of coldness, I think unfairly. This is a director who takes pains to find a relatable, emotional, sometimes even sentimental way into all that awestruck bigness. But those emotional hooks often feel more like the on-ramp for his stories than the destination. In Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey journeys to the center of a black hole to find that the secret of the universe is love — but is it really, or is it the implacable gravity, capable of bending time itself, that sucks him in? In Nolanworld, we humans can attempt to find meaning in the forces of the universe, or to bend them to our will, but they ultimately rule us. The bigness wins.
Until Oppenheimer. The paradox of this film — a three-hour historical epic about the theoretical physicist who unleashed the terrible forces of the quantum realm
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