‘Oppenheimer’ review: A grandiloquent saga about a grand folly

Towards the end of Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist is asked about why his views on the atomic bomb that he helped create changed in a span of a few years. Oppenheimer’s reply is vague, unsatisfactory even. In the same way, the film about him dances around the question that has fascinated as well as plagued Oppenheimer’s admirers.

Nolan’s most political film plays out like a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller, in which unfounded suspicions about Communism combine with a narrow definition of nationalism to make a villain out of a hero. A sprawling cast, led by Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, lines up for a movie that is grand in vision and grandiloquent in its staging.

Oppenheimer takes off from America’s nuclear bomb programme, codenamed the Manhattan Project, in the early 1940s. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, meant to bring a brutal end to Japan’s continued opposition to the Allied forces during World War II, had tremendous moral consequences, most of all for the man who came to be known as the “father of the bomb”.

The 190-minute film has been adapted by Nolan from the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird...

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