On the Image

At one point in Nolan’s spurring, ceaseless first crack at a biopic, “Oppenheimer,” a physicist cautions that the reactions set in motion by the detonation of an atomic bomb might — theoretically — never stop. They just might — theoretically — go on and on and on until they cause the very atmosphere itself to ignite, immolating the entire world.

This would naturally be very bad, so our titular vehicle of perspective whisks away to ask Albert Einstein (yes, the) whether or not this could possibly be true. All Albert can offer, however, is assurance that the physicist in-question will be able to crunch the numbers and land on a probabilistic conclusion, which the government can then use to inform its next steps.

Einstein also said, and I thought this strange, that Oppenheimer needn’t worry, as there will be a clever or cathartic callback to this quandary in the ensuing hours, so that the viewer who may have paid full price for admission can experience a degree of emotional recompense. Perhaps that viewer may have paid full price twice, as a fire alarm could have conceivably gone off at the 2.5-hour mark in their first viewing, leaving them with an incomplete sense of the picture and a feeling of obligation to go see it again.

Theoretically, of course — and as we now know, theory only gets you so far.

To be blunt: “Oppenheimer” is a devastatingly disappointing follow-up to “Tenet.” What the latter promised in terms of Nolan’s auteuristic progression, namely its unconscious structure-as-mode propulsion and its complete buy-in to a vibrant and unique storytelling syntax, all seems now like either a happy accident or brief creative sojourn. “Oppenheimer’s” biggest problems stem from a bewildering reversion to the director’s most-easily lampoonable tropes: the flashy showmanship of “The Prestige’s” climactic reveal is perfectly compatible with a movie about flashy showmen; wry, winking callbacks to earlier lines of dialogue are a superhero staple; throwing narrative presentation completely out of chronology can be brilliant when your protagonist has a form of chronic amnesia. I genuinely have no clue why all of this shows up at once in a movie about the father of the atomic bomb.

This is a movie that feels much larger than it is, and on first-watch this quality plays as virtue. One scene begets another with an inevitable, driving force — if Nolan knows how to do one thing better than almost anybody, it’s craft montage in the more colloquial sense. Unfortunately, I found this to be an illusory sensation, as a second viewing revealed just how much of this thrill ride came from a simple eagerness to see the next link in the chain. I pose this in stark relief to his work on “Tenet,” which built that feeling of leaning forward in perpetuity into its structure, yielding the sensation as a repeatable result of craft. The corollary to this “always on” approach to montage is that Nolan constantly refuses to sit on an image, even in his IMAX spectacle pieces, and it drives me absolutely insane. There are gorgeous compositions in both “Oppenheimer” and “Interstellar” that could last for a minute or more and would all-the-more complement the sense of awe. Oh well.

There is a remarkable moment in the back-half of “Oppenheimer” that lends a terrifying weight to particularly prominent audio and visual motifs interspersed through the film. It plays with duality in the same sense that undergirds the paradox at the core of quantum physics (as described by the movie, at least) — instead of “particle or wave,” the question is “exalting triumph or unimaginable guilt.” It’s such an endlessly interesting scene, both because of its own merits in the context of the picture and how it provides a glimpse of an alternative “Oppenheimer” in which many of its derivative qualities were replaced with a new, diegetically coherent vision.

Grade: C+