About halfway through Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy gazes at a hat, a pipe, and a suit jacket laid before him. As Ludwig Göransson’s haunting score swells to a crescendo, J. Robert Oppenheimer dons all three, as if he’s suiting up for war. In a sense, he is, but it’s a war with the intricacies of quantum theory that will help him build the atomic bomb. But there’s another way to read this scene: It also plays like a superhero suiting up — Batman donning his cowl, Thor lifting his hammer, or even Indiana Jones grabbing his whip.
