Filmmaker Christopher Nolan has presented us with so many dark splendors and unsettling displays of destruction in his career — in science fiction, in Gotham City or in “Dunkirk,” his first real-world historical thriller.
Now we have “Oppenheimer,” his second in that real-world category. People will be talking about it for a long time; they already are, largely because of what it’s not: not a sequel, not an overbudgeted franchise product, not junk.
It’s Nolan’s most haunted film to date, and with this subject — J. Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist, “father of the atom bomb,” anguished, conscience-stricken victim of America’s errantly shifting political winds — a filmmaker cannot treat the sight, and the fallout, of the dawn of our catastrophic nuclear age as mere spectacle. Well, they can. But it’d be a mistake.
