A new poster for the upcoming biographical movie Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan features the actor Cillian Murphy and an explosion of an atomic bomb.
In Nolan’s most recent movie, Murphy will play theoretical scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer from World War II, who worked on the United States Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear weapon. In this new billboard, Murphy is seen in profile, wearing safety goggles as he peers through a reinforced glass at a dazzling, exploding light. Little more than the actor’s hair, goggles, and chin are in focus, and a large portion of his face is practically hard to see.
Along with Murphy, other actors in the film include Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s spouse Kitty, Matt Damon as the military head of the Manhattan Project, and Florence Pugh as a psychiatric patient and vocal communist who develops feelings for the lead scientist. Robert Downey Jr. will portray businessman Lewis Strauss, a rival who is well known for organizing a security hearing during the war that resulted in Oppenheimer having his top-level security clearance withdrawn. Other actors connected to the project include Gary Oldman, who will play President Harry S. Truman, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Matthew Modine, Jack Quaid from The Boys, Kenneth Branagh, and others. (Oldman also played Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
Even though Oppenheimer is a movie about the explosion of an atomic bomb, Nolan was determined to stay as far away from CGI as he could. This involves entirely realistically reproducing the nuclear blast from the Trinity test. This was a “big task,” according to the director, who collaborated closely with Andrew Jackson, the visual effects supervisor of Nolan’s most recent films Tenet and Dunkirk. The two of them shot the scene in a desert mesa in New Mexico under conditions that were comparable to those of the actual Trinity test in an effort to depict the test’s complex physics as faithfully as possible.
Oppenheimer will be Nolan’s first non-Warner Bros. picture since Memento in 2000, despite the fact that it has a number of cast and crew members from his earlier movies. This is because there is a disagreement about Warner Bros’s decision to concurrently release movies in cinemas and on HBO Max during the COVID-19 epidemic. After Nolan’s Tenet became one of the few movies to be released exclusively in theatres during the epidemic in 2021, this policy finally went into effect. Oppenheimer will be distributed by Universal Pictures rather than Warner Bros.
The current release date for Oppenheimer is July 21, 2023.