Recently, it’s felt like Christopher Nolan is at odds with his viewer. There’s a strange antagonism to his storytelling in his past couple of films, less of an invitation into a world than the posing of a challenge — dukes up, narratively.
In 2020’s “Tenet,” and now in “Oppenheimer,” his obfuscation of story can be trying to watch, as we trot behind the auteur, hoping that the complex cinematic bombast will pay off, that it’s not just obfuscation for obfuscation’s sake. Unmoored in time, space, and subjectivity, these films can be a struggle. Take heed the advice of the scientist played by Clémence Poésy in “Tenet” and, “don't try to understand it,” as she tells John David Washington’s Protagonist, “feel it.” The only choice Nolan allows is total submission to his dominance; to stop fighting and allow yourself to be sucked under the visual and sonic riptide that is “Oppenheimer.”
Whether or not that results in an enjoyable viewing experience will depend on the individual audience member. Nolan brings a jagged, dissonant sensibility to his adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s “American Prometheus,” the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played here by Cillian Murphy), the physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb.”
