Next month, the battle between summer blockbusters gets fully underway, with “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” “Barbie,” and Christopher Nolan‘s “Oppenheimer” slugging it out for box office supremacy. And to spice things up, “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” go toe-to-toe for their theatrical debuts, opening up the same weekend. So will Nolan’s latest, and his first Rated-R film since 2002’s “Insomnia“ best Greta Gerwig‘s Mattel team-up with Margot Robbie. Only time will tell.
But Empire notes that Nolan has something up his sleeve for “Oppenheimer” that Robbie’s Barbie, Tom Cruise‘s Ethan Hunt, or even Harrison Ford‘s Indiana Jones can’t tangle with. And what’s what? A script told entirely in the first person. “I actually wrote in the first-person, which I’ve never done before,” Nolan clarified to the magazine. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before. But the point of it is, with the colour sequences, which is the bulk of the film, everything is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view — you’re literally kind of looking through his eyes.”
But why on earth would Nolan want to be inside Oppenheimer’s head so much? Said the director, “There’s the idea of how we get in somebody’s head and see how they were visualising this radical reinvention of physics. One of the things that cinema has struggled with historically is the representation of intelligence or genius. It very often fails to engage people.” And Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy in the film, has a lot going on in his head. The movie follows Murphy’s theoretical physicist as the American government commissions him to help develop the world’s first nuclear weapons, redefining physics (and the world at large) as humanity knows it.
Nolan made sure Murphy’s subjectivity remained at the forefront of the film’s visuals as he entered pre-production. “The first person I showed the script to when it was finished after [Nolan’s producer and wife] Emma [Thomas] read it was Andrew Jackson, the visual effects supervisor,” Nolan continued. “I said to him, ‘We have to find a way into this guy’s head. We’ve gotta see the world the way he sees it, we’ve gotta see the atoms moving, we’ve gotta see the way he’s imagining waves of energy, the quantum world. And then we have to see how that translates into the Trinity test. And we have to feel the danger, feel the threat of all this somehow.’ My challenge to him was, ‘Let’s do all these things, but without any computer graphics.’”
The result is a film as heady as it is thrilling. “Odd thing to do,” Nolan said about keeping the narrative “Oppenheimer” fixed in its protagaonist’s purview. “But it was a reminder to me of how to shoot the film. It was a reminder to everybody involved in the project, ‘Okay, this is the point of view of every scene.’” While “Oppenheimer” deal with the gravest of stakes, with the end of the world hanging in the balance due to nuclear warfare, Nolan knew the story’s magnitude was caputred best in the character’s mind. “I wanted to really go through this story with Oppenheimer; I didn’t want to sit by him and judge him,” continued. “That seemed a pointless exercise. That’s more the stuff of documentary, or political theory, or history of science. This is a story that you experience with him — you don’t judge him. You are faced with these irreconcilable ethical dilemmas with him.”
Add in Nolan shooting “Oppenheimer” on IMAX large-format cameras, and expect his latest to be a seriously immersive experience. “Oppenheimer” hits theaters on July 21. Check out a trailer and behind the scenes video for the movie below.
