Everyone Is Saying The Same Thing About Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
Marking The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception director Christopher Nolan’s return to the world of filmmaking since his 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet, the results are in for Nolan’s big-budget explosive feature Oppenheimer and the critics are loving it. Set to arrive on July 21, the initial reactions from sources including The Hollywood Reporter are pointing to the historical drama to be the biggest one of Nolan’s career.
Critic reviews of Oppenheimer call the movie Christopher Nolan‘s best work ever.
Reporting on some of the first social media responses, the media source quoted Twitter users like AP film writer Lindsey Bahr who referred to the storyline as “serious” and “philosophical,” putting it on the same level as Nolan’s critically-acclaimed war film Dunkirk. Bahr and others have also shared the sentiment that the performances give Oppenheimer that extra push over the edge with specific nods to stars like Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt.
“Cillian Murphy gets the role he deserves. In love with Downey’s work…[Robert Downey Jr.’s] work in OPPENHEIMER is STELLAR and the reminder we didn’t need that he’s one of our best actors and movie stars.”
Josh Horowitz
Likewise, Happy Sad Confused podcast host Josh Horowitz shared that he was completely blown away by Oppenheimer, dubbing it as a top piece in Nolan’s repertoire, adding that as a self-proclaimed “Nolan admirer” he has already seen the three-hour film twice.
Like Bahr, Horowitz said that audiences can expect gripping performances from the film’s star-studded cast, which has been a major selling point for the film, and directly pointed to Nolan’s “Impeccable immersive filmmaking of the highest order,” adding “Cillian Murphy gets the role he deserves. In love with Downey’s work…[Robert Downey Jr.’s] work in OPPENHEIMER is STELLAR and the reminder we didn’t need that he’s one of our best actors and movie stars.”
Likewise, Telegraph’s Robbie Collins said, “Am torn between being all coy and mysterious about Oppenheimer and just coming out and saying it’s a total knockout that split my brain open like a twitchy plutonium nucleus and left me sobbing through the end credits like I can’t even remember what else.” Quite an on point review for a film about the United States’ nuclear program!
“Am torn between being all coy and mysterious about Oppenheimer and just coming out and saying it’s a total knockout that split my brain open like a twitchy plutonium nucleus and left me sobbing through the end credits like I can’t even remember what else.”
Robbie Collins
There was also Matt Maytum of Total Film who shared that Oppenheimer “stunned” him, again praising the writing and performances, referring to the well-thought-out characters as being “on the grandest scale,” singing particular praise for Cillian Murphy’s “sublime central performance.”
He added that Nolan was able to add “tension, structure, sense of scale, startling sound design, [and] remarkable visuals” to make his latest piece come to life.
“A relentlessly paced, insanely detailed, intricate historical drama that builds and builds and builds until Nolan brings the hammer down in the most astonishing, shattering way.”
Bilge Ebiri
Another shining review came from Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, who wrote that not only was Oppenheimer “incredible” but that the best descriptor of the movie was “fearsome”. Promising future audiences were in for a treat, Ebiri teased that the feature was “A relentlessly paced, insanely detailed, intricate historical drama that builds and builds and builds until Nolan brings the hammer down in the most astonishing, shattering way.”
In Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy stars as the titular physicist who is known for leading the experiment known as the Manhattan Project which would lead to the creation of the world’s first atomic bomb. Knowing that Nazi Germany was on the cusp of building their own version of the bomb, the United States government gave J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team full reign on the project, even building them a town out of the dusty desert in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Against all odds and his own moral compass, Oppenheimer would construct a weapon of mass destruction that would not only wipe out and devastate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but would change the course of how wars were fought for decades to come.
With Cillian Murphy leading the cast as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the film also includes performances from the aforementioned Emily Blunt as his wife Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Straus, and Matt Damon as Leslie Groves.
The film also features an ensemble made up of stars including Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Dylan Arnold, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Matthew Modine, David Krumholtz, Gustaf Skarsgård, David Dastmalchian, Tom Conti, and Jack Quaid.
Keeping up with the summer blockbuster season, Oppenheimer arrives following the release of other mega-titles including Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and Insidious: The Red Door.
Opening on July 21, Christopher Nolan’s latest feature will duke it out at the box office with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie which also features a dynamite cast including Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. With two highly-anticipated features arriving on the same day and both gathering an overwhelming amount of positive buzz, there’s never been a better time to mark the date in your calendar and spend a full day at the movies enjoying two very different and unique films.
