Not for the first time, David Bowie knew the score. Back in The Prestige, his Nikola Tesla warned Robert Angier about the high cost of his revolutionary fixations. Elsewhere in Christopher Nolan’s filmography, the Joker saw that Batman’s eccentric approach to reducing crime rates might change things – ‘forever’.
Obsession, escalation, consequence… For his 12th feature, Nolan invests his long-standing fascinations with immense real-world weight in the service of a rare thing, a copper-bottomed auteur film from a director still able to greenlight such projects on a vast scale. Part first-person psychological drama, part historical enquiry, part courtroom drama, Oppenheimer is a colossal achievement: an old-school epic executed with blockbuster verve, sparking with ideas-rich, dialogue-driven substance.
