'Oppenheimer' review: Nolan delivers slick, grand story of A-bomb's creator

Christopher Nolan's brand as our foremost maker of high-line, prestige blockbusters precedes him, and "Oppenheimer" is his plunge inside the mind and world of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed up the team that created the atomic bomb.

You come expecting a certain level of technical mastery, and Nolan delivers. "Oppenheimer" is a slick, sturdy, overwhelmingly grand film, with a storytelling approach that ebbs and flows like the swells in composer Ludwig Göransson's undulating score.

But it also tends to leave the viewer cold. Warmth has never been Nolan's forte, and for all its focus, "Oppenheimer" feels distant, a biopic that has done all the work on its subject and his conflicted, contradictory nature but is missing the ticker at its center.

Cillian Murphy turns in a searing performance as Oppenheimer, known as Oppy to his close friends and colleagues. He's a genius of the troubled variety, at one point injecting his college professor's green apple with potassium cyanide after an in-class slight. (Don't worry, he has a crisis of conscience and won't let it be eaten.)

He's soon on to much bigger things than poisoned apples, and he's hand-picked to head up the team that will race against Germany to build the world's first atomic bomb. It's World War II and someone's going to get there first, and Russia might be throwing its hat in the ring as well. With the annihilation of the world on the line, there's so much emphasis on the completion of the project that the ethics behind the bomb are back-burnered so far as to not even weigh into the scientific equation.

Well it's no secret that the big bombs are dropped, and Nolan follows Oppy before, during and after the mushroom clouds, tracking the political and personal fallout of his work as the father of the atomic bomb, as he came to be known. It also follows his pushback on the hydrogen bomb and the political hot water it landed him in, and the communist fears that ruled the political agendas of 1950s America as well as attempts to railroad Oppenheimer and his reputation.

"Oppenheimer" stars so many recognizable faces that it's dizzying keeping track of them all. There's Matt Damon as a hard-headed (but humorous) lieutenant general, Robert Downey Jr. as a political lifer seeking a cabinet appointment and Kenneth Branagh as Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr. Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt are on board as Oppenheimer's love interests. Three recent Best Actor Oscar winners, Casey Affleck, Gary Oldman and Rami Malek, show up for a combined, oh, seven minutes of screen time. Hey, is that Josh Peck? Oh man, Benny Safdie's in this? Check it out, Josh Hartnett, you guys! Yo, Dane DeHaan in the building! And that's not mentioning roughly a dozen others.

(It should also be noted that Tom Conti plays Albert Einstein in the film, so occasionally Einstein is wandering in and out of scenes, which isn't, well, not distracting.)

The screenplay by Nolan is disorienting by design, as it unfolds in at least three parallel timelines at different times in Oppenheimer's life, shifting from black and white to color all the while. (Editor Jennifer Lame practically conducts a symphony.)

We see Oppy working with a team of physicists in a large room with formulas scrawled out on chalkboards during the Manhattan Project sessions, and also answering heated questions from a group of sweaty inquisitors in an enclosed office space. There's also scenes of Downey Jr.'s character's confirmation hearings, and none of these truly come into context until well into the movie, after an A-bomb test that acts as the explosive centerpiece of the film. (The attacks themselves, alas, are left off screen.)

Some of these threads feel like they're taken from separate movies altogether, particularly Pugh's storyline, and her troubled character is reduced to a manic sex bomb in the overstuffed script. One high profile character emerges as a villain in the late stages of the story, as Nolan searches for a sense of comeuppance, and a particular name drop at a key moment feels like a cheap bit of audience bait in a story searching for grounded emotional notes.

But where "Oppenheimer" excels is in Murphy's performance and the heavy, heavy themes of military, man (and men, for that matter) and the, er, moral implications of nuclear destruction. The most effective scene has Oppenheimer speaking at a rally after the bomb is dropped on Japan, as he looks out at a crowd wildly cheering the deaths of tens of thousands in the name of nationalism and patriotism. Up until that point he's been a loyal soldier, preaching science first, with his blinders on toward the vast global implications of his work. But a bomb can change a man, and the scene unfolds as a grim commentary on politics, propaganda and human nature, and it cuts to the core of the man better than any scene in the film.

Nolan's mistrust of the government and its silencing, all-reaching power is evident. He could have arrived there with a more succinct presentation, but then big subject matter calls for a big canvas, and Nolan isn't interested in scaling down or tidying up. Heck, no one expects a bomb to go off cleanly, and there's plenty to sift through in "Oppenheimer's" shrapnel. People will likely be going through it for years.

agraham@detroitnews.com

'Oppenheimer'

GRADE: B

Rated R: for some sexuality, nudity and language

Running time: 180 minutes

In theaters