Alan in Belfast: Oppenheimer – plenty of villains and very few heroes (in cinemas from Friday 21 July)

Despite the ‘Barbenheimer’ rhetoric that Oppenheimer is terribly dark in comparison to the pink and fluffy Barbie movie that will also be released to cinema audiences on Friday, and despite the reality of nearly a quarter of a million people in Japan being killed by the detonation of the atomic bombs Robert Oppenheimer helped create, Christopher Nolan stops short of delivering a film that sits unbearably heavy in your heart as you leave the cinema. There are plenty of villains and very few heroes.

The film is effectively split into three parts: big advances in theoretical and experimental quantum physics; the Manhattan Project’s race to create a Nazi-beating bomb and the ‘Trinity’ test denotation of a nuclear device in New Mexico; and the organised take down of the ‘father’ of the atomic bomb’s reputation after the war.

Oppenheimer screams ‘epic scale’ from the very first minutes. The location count racks up quickly. A whole town is built in the desert. The cast of characters is hard to keep track of. Nolan can juggle a lot of variables in his head at the same time. While there’s none of the time travel of Nolan’s Tenet, a second viewing might help make better connections in your head between characters in the early build-up and the later scenes at Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing.

With the screenplay based on the 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, Nolan takes a sympathetic stance towards the titular scientist, a man of complexity, but also of integrity.

You could watch the film merely as a biopic, a (mostly) factual story of the US effort with its closest allies to develop weapons of mass destruction. You could also look through an ethical lens and question whether distance can be put between the scientific endeavour to create a bomb and the military and politicians deciding where and when it can be detonated. And there’s there the dashed idealism of creating a nuclear detriment that once demonstrated would never need to be used again. Later we see Oppenheimer’s distressed visions of the human devastation resulting from his academic alliance with the military.

While Oppenheimer could have been a lament to humanity’s in humanity, Nolan ultimately tells a tale about how power corrupts. Everything is centred around Robert Oppenheimer who suffered from the actions of others that used his undeniable left-wing ideology and communist-leaning friendship group to rubbish him and further their own climb up Washington’s greasy pole. Though the oppressed can also mimic their oppressors ...

Black and white scenes portray the 1959 confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss who had become the US Secretary for Commerce but was seen as the force behind the attempt to block the renewal of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance that had long allowed him to continue working and lobbying at the top levels of the atomic research industry after he retired from his post directing the Los Alamos laboratory.

An early line in the script about learning to hear the music of algebra is mirrored in somewhat jarring (at least initially) on-screen visualisations as Oppenheimer imagines how his understanding of theoretical physics might work out in practice. A couple of hours later, these interruptions begin to make sense, and it’s perhaps their style rather than their inclusion that make them one of the weaker aspects of the film.

Cillian Murphy portrays the complex physicist at the heart of the film, showing off the scientist’s linguistic abilities alongside his passion for revolutionary physics and politics. Rarely off-camera, it’s a mesmerising performance that never drops its intensity.

Florence Pugh plays Jean Tatlock, a psychoanalyst who was even more tormented than her on/off lover whose wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) was also living with depression yet relentlessly spurring her hesitant husband on to fight the system and achieve his lofty goals.

Practically every other actor is male, with Robert Downey Jr playing the duplicitous power-hungry Strauss, Matt Damon starring as Oppenheimer’s military boss General Groves, and Tom Conti dropping in as Albert Einstein.

The three-hour run time is paid off by the scale of the storytelling. The size of the cast is justified by the characters’ long-running journeys. Ludwig Göransson’s music is frequently foregrounded and often frenzied, and is all the more noticeable for its absence in the few scenes where Nolan strips away the natural sounds of the environment (eg, the sound of the test bomb detonating or adulatory applause in a lecture theatre) to just leave the soundtrack of Oppenheimer’s anguished mind.

Oppenheimer is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre (where I previewed it on Tuesday) as well as nearly every other cinema in Northern Ireland from Friday 21 July.