\u2014 but mostly the movie is concerned with faces, glances, the subtleties of human action. The film’s signature image is not a nuclear explosion, but a close-up of the gaunt, angled face of Cillian Murphy, who plays Oppenheimer as a man haunted by his own mind.<\/span><\/p>\nBut this isn’t a turn to the domestic for Nolan. Instead, the director brings to bear the tools and techniques he’s previously used to deliver bigger-than-life entertainment\u2014only this time the story at the center is something far more consequential. The score by composer Ludwig G\u00f6ransson, who previously worked with Nolan on <\/span>Tenet, <\/span><\/i>gives the movie a thudding heartbeat, so that even discussions of theoretical physics play out with a pulsing intensity. And, working with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan once again shot the movie on IMAX cameras, granting the images vast scale and detail.<\/span><\/p>\nThe editing and story structure, meanwhile, retain the time-bending qualities of Nolan’s previous work, as multiple timelines crash into each other and what initially seem like fragments of information come together to become clear. Nolan’s movies have often been obsessed with the notion of memory\u2014the falseness of it, the way jumbled recollections somehow amount to one’s identity\u2014but in Oppenheimer<\/em>, it’s not so much about crafting a puzzle box to be solved. It’s about putting the viewer inside Oppenheimer’s own mind space by capturing the world as he saw it, as he recalled it.<\/span><\/p>\nTo the extent there is a puzzle box, it’s Oppenheimer himself, but the movie doesn’t offer a solution or anything approaching singular judgment. Instead, it wrestles with his complexities: his obvious genius, his affiliations with communism, his lust and affairs, his difficult marriage and his complicated work life, his willingness to build the bomb and his reluctance to see it used. It views Oppenheimer as both great <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> terrible.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd from that dual judgment, the movie casts its gaze to the nuclear-armed present that Oppenheimer left us. Nolan’s movies\u2014particularly <\/span>Dunkirk<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Interstellar<\/span><\/i>\u2014have often rallied around a spirit of can-do humanism, and a sense of awe at what man can build and accomplish in a vast and godless universe. But here that awe is leavened with fear and foreboding about the horror of full-on nuclear conflict in the wake of the nuclear bomb. Humanity is both great <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> terrible. <\/span>Oppenheimer<\/span><\/i> isn’t just a movie\u2014it’s a warning.<\/span><\/p>\nThe post Christopher Nolan's <i>Oppenheimer<\/i> Is an Intimate Epic About the Man Who Built the Bomb<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s a portrait of a complex man, and a warning about the nuclear era he created. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[10,19,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91889"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}