Cillian Murphy arguably delivers the performance of his career as the title character in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Portraying the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ from his student days to the post-war years where his loyalty was called into question, he truly carries the largely subjective film on his shoulders.
And what a character Oppenheimer - Oppie to his friends - is to dig into. A man of complex contradictions, he was a scientist and an aesthete, a pragmatist who could be highly irrational, arrogant and also self-doubting. His life story is detailed in depth in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by authors Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The title of that biography - on which the film is based - references the figure from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods, and faced eternal punishment as a result.
