Dikhyaa Mohanty 
Julius Robert Oppenheimer, an American scientist and theoretical physicist, has once again come into the spotlight thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer. This generation has to be aware of his history, as well as the reasons and methods he used to create the atomic bomb during World War II. In the movie, Cillian Murphy plays the title character. This Friday, July 21, the picture will be released in 70mm, 35mm, and IMAX formats around the world (with the exception of Japan, where it faces uncertainty). It will ride a wave of extraordinary frenzy and hype. According to reports, 15,000 IMAX tickets in India were pre-purchased, and there have been rumours of a 3 a.m. showing in select Mumbai theatres—a perk normally reserved for celebrities like Rajinikanth and Vijay.
After Tenet’s box office flop in the early wake of the first wave of COVID in 2020, Nolan appears to be getting a sweet vengeance, if one may presumptively call it that. Oppenheimer will be viewed the way Nolan genuinely feels movies should be viewed: with a feeling of collective engagement rather than dispersed, individual consumption.
Oppenheimer forgoes CGI in his film about how science and technology forever changed human existence and the future. Nolan defends cinema on film in the era of iPhone filming. Hoyte van Hoytema, a supporter of conventional cameras and analogue visuals over digital, filmed his Oppenheimer mostly using heavy IMAX film cameras, but also in actual places.
Nolan’s adherence to this classic model of filmmaking and film-viewing has me most invested in what promises to be a visual and aural spectacle. But eventually, as Nolan would discover, technology must serve the human aspect in cinema rather than vice versa. His huge, three-hour epic promises to provide measured measures of thrills, drama, and emotions for the heart, head, and soul based on what one has seen, heard, and read about it thus far.
There is always the expectation of complexity with Nolan, not just in character motives and relationships but also in form, narrative, timeline, and use of the device of memory, owing to his filmography full of mind-bending narratives like Memento, The Prestige, and Inception. The character of Oppenheimer is based on J. Robert Oppenheimer, a scientist and the inventor of the atomic bomb, as described in the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. 78 years after Trinity or the first nuclear detonation was carried out in America as part of the Manhattan Project on July 16, 1945, I believe we can trust Nolan to have not turned it into an uncritical hagiography but rather a deep exploration into the moral and ethical dilemmas at the core of the development of nuclear weapons.
The Manhattan Project brought together A-list scientists, with Oppenheimer leading from the front, in order to deliver the atomic bomb quickly in the midst of World War II. This effort was motivated by “Nazi anxiety” and the fear that the Germans might surpass them in the race to harness newly discovered nuclear fission into a bomb. However, the assumed security against the worry of “what if the Nazis have a bomb?” exposed the globe much more.
Oppenheimer premieres with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie during what is already being termed Barbenheimer, which coincides with the actresses joining the authors in their struggle against studios and streamers. Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, and Rami Malek, members of Oppenheimer’s heavyweight star ensemble, did walk the red carpet at the movie’s London premiere but left the theatre in support of their striking coworkers. Now, a movie about “the most important thing to ever happen in the history of the world” is linked to the most significant conflicts in Hollywood history.
