Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, differs from his prior works but also pays off an intriguing career pattern and yet has the ability to astound the audience, as he usually does. With his distinctive narrative and visual style, as well as the themes he frequently addresses in his works such as memory, time, and identity Christopher Nolan has gained the respect and admiration of critics and viewers. He has also occasionally blended these themes with other themes, as he did with dreams in Inception back in 2010. Nolan’s undertakings have been the subject of rumors and expectations, and his most recent endeavor is leading his career in a somewhat different direction.
Following Tenet’s critical acclaim, Nolan temporarily puts the science fiction subgenre on hold in favor of Oppenheimer, a biographical drama. The film chronicles the life of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), who served as the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory director, and his contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer also stars Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, Emily Blunt as Katherine Oppenheimer, and Matt Damon as Leslie Groves.
While Nolan has previously included fictionalized versions of real people (as he did with David Bowie’s Nikola Tesla on The Prestige) or told actual events through fictional characters (as happened with Dunkirk), Oppenheimer is unlike any other Nolan project because it’s his first attempt at a biopic. Nevertheless, Oppenheimer will continue this Nolan career trend, even though it’s also a first for him.
As previously mentioned, the plot of Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which is based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, follows the real-life theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as he competes to develop the atomic bomb and learns how his contributions altered not only war but also the course of history. Oppenheimer is recognized as one of the “fathers of the atomic bomb” because of his involvement in the Manhattan Project, which was the World War II initiative that produced the first nuclear weapons.
After the war, Oppenheimer was appointed head of the General Advisory Committee of the US Atomic Energy Commission. He pushed for global nuclear power regulation to prevent nuclear proliferation and a race to the top with the Soviet Union. Later, he opposed the creation of the hydrogen bomb. Though it’s unknown precisely how much of Oppenheimer’s life will be included in the film, it will undoubtedly look at it beyond his obnoxious contributions to the war.
Despite being Nolan’s first biography and the first of his films to be based on real-life characters and events, Oppenheimer is unlikely to be a standard biopic for the simple reason that Nolan is always thinking of ways to surprise his audience. Oppenheimer might explore the issues described above that are typical of Nolan’s films while focusing on J. Robert Oppenheimer, or it could take the approach of Dunkirk and include some fictitious characters to up the dramatic impact of the narrative. With the past contributions of real-life personalities and events to his films, Christopher Nolan’s career has been steadily preparing him to produce a biopic. Oppenheimer will undoubtedly still have those special characteristics that set a Nolan film apart, though.
