24 frames per second

Listen, before you read any further, this post is gonna contain spoilers the size of a Wikipedia article on Dr. Julius Robert Oppenheimer. So beware.

There’s a moment in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer when the team on the Manhattan Project is setting up for the Trinity test (the first nuclear test explosion) and the titular character is worried about whether the planned detonation strategy would work. If it doesn’t, they’ll be picking up pieces of plutonium from all over the desert. Nobody at that point had built such a bomb before, and trying to do it with a world war breathing down your neck doesn’t help. So you see the nervousness.

Assuming you have read any history at all, you know that the test succeeded, America got a working atom bomb, and then went ahead a dropped a couple of them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This biopic, however, felt to me like plutonium scattered in the New Mexico desert. There are some very potent bits, but the structure of the film scattered them around and didn’t allow them to attain critical mass.

The story has two framing structures. The inner frame is a closed door review of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, an orchestrated kangaroo court that led to his clearance being revoked. For the man who at that point was one of America’s most famous scientists and widely regarded as the architect of their nuclear program, this was a slap in the face. The outer frame is a Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss, the man who orchestrated the security clearance review to carry out a personal vendetta and found, to his dismay, that his revenge came with a price. The majority of the narrative focuses on the process of building the bomb, and the people involved. However, the film is not called the Manhattan Project. It’s supposed to be a biopic, which means that its objective is to give us a better understanding of the man himself. The framing structures, and the commentary around them, are the devices Nolan uses to accomplish this. Some of the decisions Oppenheimer makes are driven by his guilt about what he has helped unleash; however, in the height of the Cold War, these could conceivably be seen as proof of his long-suspected Communist leanings.

Here’s the trouble with this structure. Apart from the two framing structures and the intercutting between them and the original timeline of events, the rest of the story is actually pretty linear. Why not ditch the framing devices and simply tell the story in chronological order? As it stands, every time the narrative has an opportunity to build up a head of steam, we cut to what happens after the war. The emotional momentum is lost in the machinery of the storytelling. This is not a dense story, simply one with many characters around the central one, and we mostly see only as much of their lives as Oppenheimer sees. So a linear structure would’ve had ample scope to slowly draw us into Oppenheimer’s inner world, and let us see how his big accomplishment became, in some ways, his albatross. Instead, we see the actual events in instalments, and the emotional core of the film is spoon-fed to us through this framing structure.

Now, to be fair, I understand the difficulty of telling it straight — once the bomb goes off, our interest in the story is likely to wane, and only truly great writing will save the third act from becoming a turgid mess. But that’s the challenge, isn’t it? Make that third act work, and you have a shot at greatness.

This is especially ironic because Nolan is willing to trust the audience’s intelligence when it comes to the science itself. There is the necessary amount of expository dialogue but think of the brief but critical conversation where Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence discuss the news of the Uranium atom being split, and reach the conclusion that this now means a bomb can potentially be made. This scientific portion of this conversation is as brief as it needs to be — it doesn’t fall into a trap of having two accomplished scientists explaining the obvious to each other for the benefit of the audience, and they revert to human-speak only when they have to explain the implications to a junior colleague who is with them.

This is not to say that I didn’t like the film. I liked a lot of it. The performances are uniformly good. The Trinity test explosion scene is an absolutely magnificent piece of cinema. There is a lovely moment with Harry Truman in which the president schools him on where the buck stops. Matt Damon has so much fun playing Leslie Groves, I found myself leaning forward every time I saw him. Like I said, so much to like.

I just wish I had loved it.