(Paris) Christopher Nolan is back where we least expected him, on the terrain of the biopic reinterpreted in his own way in Oppenheimer, a film that paints a convoluted portrait of the American who developed the atomic bomb becomes.
Posted at 10:02 am
Francois BECKER Agence France-Presse
The highly anticipated film, which hits theaters on Wednesday, traces in three hours key moments in the life of Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), a physicist who shaped the history of the United States and the 20th century contributed to it helping to lead the world into a new age: the atomic age.
As usual, the author of the action blockbuster “Tenet”, the war film “Dunkirk” or the astral epic “Interstellar” uses enormous resources, shooting films in new formats (including black and white Imax) to create a blockbuster of complex construction and to create claimed visual claims.
The title role is played by Irishman Cilian Murphy, a regular on Nolan’s sets and also known for the Peaky Blinders series. Emily Blunt plays his wife, Kitty, Matt Damon plays Leslie Groves, the general overseeing the making of the bomb, and Robert Downey Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a politician who will bring about the physicist’s downfall.
The film centers on the scientific epic of the atom race at the secret base of Los Alamos, New Mexico, where in the middle of World War II, scientists and soldiers of the Manhattan Project are busy developing the bomb before the Nazis.
This handful of men are aware that they will pass a point of no return for humanity by arming them with a weapon capable of destroying the entire planet, while at the same time fearing the prospect of an end to the motivated by world conflict. And perhaps as a deterrent for any form of war in the future.
The highlight is the first bomb test called “Trinity”, recreated in the New Mexico desert with no digital effects but using old-fashioned tricks, a trademark of Christopher Nolan.
“In Our Flesh”
PHOTO JULIEN DE ROSA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Christopher Nolan, director of Oppenheimer
With computer graphics, “it’s hard to instill fear. That’s why I challenged my teams to engage with the real, analog world,” Christopher Nolan told AFP during a meeting in Paris. “We had to try to give our audience an idea of what it felt like to be there,” as the first nuclear explosion continued, the 52-year-old filmmaker continued.
On the set, at the time of the explosion, “we all felt […] what that moment in history meant. We kind of felt it in our flesh,” added Cilian Murphy. The 47-year-old actor said he spent six months preparing to portray the inventor of the atomic bomb.
A rich and very complex role, since the film, based on a very detailed biography (Robert Oppenheimer, Triumph and Tragedy of a Genius, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Le Cherche-Midi), explores the dilemmas, contradictions and multiple facets of a Man whose secrets have never been revealed.
Oppenheimer is an ambivalent character, crushed by responsibility and doubt after the atomic attacks of August 6 and 9, 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which claimed at least 210,000 lives and were portrayed by the United States as necessary to end the war, McCarthyism’s most famous victim, in the middle of the cold war.
Treasure for Nolan, who loves nothing so much as temporalities, stories and playing with paradoxes, even at the risk of confusing. To reflect the subjectivity of certain scenes narrated from Oppenheimer’s point of view, the filmmaker alternates staging black and white and color, extensively staging important hearings in the physicist’s life. In doing so, he illustrates his setbacks in the face of a government that is looking for communist sympathizers.