Next month, Christopher Nolan‘s “Oppenheimer” faces off against Greta Gerwig‘s “Barbie” on its opening weekend, a showdown that very well may christen the summer’s biggest movie. In “Barbie,” moviegoers know what to expect, a smart, quippy film from Gerwig with a meta twist on its subject. But Variety reports (via Wired) that Nolan has a warning for viewers of his latest: “it’s kind of a horror movie,” and an “intense experience.”
“Some people leave the movie absolutely devastated,” Nolan told Wired Magazine about early screenings he had for “Oppenheimer.” “They can’t speak. I mean, there’s an element of fear that’s there in the history and there in the underpinnings. But the love of the characters, the love of the relationships, is as strong as I’ve ever done.” And the director isn’t afraid if his new movie is too much for some viewers. “It is an intense experience, because it’s an intense story,” Nolan continued. “I showed it to a filmmaker recently who said it’s kind of a horror movie. I don’t disagree.”
“Oppenheimer” stars Cillian Murphy as the theoretical physicist who helped the US military race to develop nuclear weapons to help end World War II. And Nolan explores what’s at stake in Oppenheimer’s work for the man’s perspective, putting the audience in his head. “Oppenheimer’s story is all impossible questions,” Nolan continued. “Impossible ethical dilemmas, paradox. There are no easy answers in his story. There are just difficult questions, and that’s what makes the story so compelling. I think we were able to find a lot of things to be optimistic about in the film, genuinely, but there’s this sort of overriding bigger question that hangs over it. It felt essential that there be questions at the end that you leave rattling in people’s brains, and prompting discussion.”
So does Nolan succeed in doing that in “Oppenheimer”? Kai Bird, one of the co-authors of the 2005 biography on the physicist, “American Prometheus,” thinks so. Bird talked about Nolan’s film at a recent conversation at Princeton University’s Institute Of Advanced Study. “I am, at the moment, stunned and emotionally recovering from having seen it,” Bird said at the talk. “I think it is going to be a stunning artistic achievement, and I have hopes it will actually stimulate a national, even global conversation about the issues that Oppenheimer was desperate to speak out about — about how to live in the atomic age, how to live with the bomb and about McCarthyism — what it means to be a patriot, and what is the role for a scientist in a society drenched with technology and science, to speak out about public issues.”
Being stunned by the movie befits Nolan’s descriptions of his latest, but will audiences feel the same way when it hits theaters? After all, Bird knows Oppenheimer’s history better than anyone arguably, and Nolan needs to sell his movie as his biggest and boldest yet. And beyond its horror film intensity, “Oppenheimer” is a huge production for Nolan. The film boasts a massive ensemble cast, including Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, and many more. Nolan also shot the film entirely in IMAX 65 mm and 65 mm large-format, making it visually spectacular. And “Oppenheimer” also boasts an R-rating, a first for a Nolan film since 2002’s “Insomnia.”
So, yes, Nolan is going big in this latest, but will “Oppenheimer” wreak the emotional devastation on its audience that he promises? Audiences find out when the film arrives in theaters on July 21.