‘Oppenheimer’ review: Impactful sound and fury in biopic from Christopher Nolan

“Oppenheimer” is the biopic only Christopher Nolan could make, a three-hour experience with the ability to hold your gaze — and your full attention — while the fury of its sound rattles the theater auditorium in which you sit.

The director of “Dunkirk,” “Inception,” “Tenet” and several other noteworthy films, Nolan is both the director and writer of the film, adapting it from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

He offers a deep dive into the psyche of the theoretical physicist who led the U.S. government’s Manhattan Project during World War II and became known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” an examination that at times is served with near-nuclear force.

It is incredible.

Cillian Murphy — who has appeared in numerous Nolan films, including “The Dark Knight” Trilogy, but has never been front and center — portrays the titular figure with a steady and subtle touch. It is not a performance characterized by big, emotional speeches but instead by myriad science-based conversations, many regarding the physical fate of the world.

There exists, Oppenheimer comes to learn, a “near-zero” chance the detonation of an atomic will ignite the atmosphere, ending all life on Earth.

Nolan is most interested in the conflict Oppenheimer feels, more strongly at times than others, about achieving a great scientific breakthrough but one with the power to take so much life even in the event all goes as designed. A Jewish man, he mainly sells himself on the idea that the U.S. must beat Nazi Germany to the development of a weapon of such mass destruction.

Even at 180 minutes, “Oppenheimer” has no time for its subject’s childhood, instead taking us on a largely but certainly not wholly linear journey — this is Nolan, after all — from the early part of Oppenheimer’s career to the scientist’s controversial years that followed the detonation by the U.S. of atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nolan introduces us to numerous figures from Oppenheimer’s work and personal lives, and you’ll likely struggle to keep track of them all.

There are the scientists — mainly men, portrayed by, among others, Josh Harnett, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, David Krumholtz, Jack Quaid, Danny Deferrari and Tom Conti, as Albert Einstein — along with the military man who hires and subsequently oversees Oppenheimer, Leslie Graves (a predictably enjoyable Matt Damon), and Boris Pash (Casey Affleck), an Army counter-intelligence operative watching for security concerns tied to Oppenheimer.

There also are a couple of key women, psychiatrist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), with whom he has recurring relations, and his wife, the frequently drinking biologist and botanist Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt). (Until fairly deep into the film, Nolan makes too little use of “A Quiet Place Part II” costars Blunt and Murphy together.) Both of them fuel concerns Oppenheimer has significant ties to Communism, as does his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).

A film also needs its villain, this one’s proving to be Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The final of the three acts of “Oppenheimer” dramatizes parallel proceedings in which Oppenheimer and Strauss essentially are put on trial. It’s compelling fare but not as compelling as what precedes it, despite fine work from Downey (“Chaplin”).

Burning at surprisingly breakneck speed for a movie this long, dense and without at least conventional action sequences, “Oppenheimer” builds to a crescendo at the end of the second act with the re-creation of the famed Trinity test, the detonation of a bomb in the New Mexico desert close to the Manhattan Project’s top-secret Los Alamos base. According to the production information, Nolan told his effects team no digital imagery could be used, and the sequence’s visuals are highly impactful as a result.

Shot largely in New Mexico, “Oppenheimer” possesses a distinct look overall, captured by director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema (“Dunkirk,” “Tenet”) on, as the aforementioned production info states, “a combination of IMAX 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX black and white analogue photography.”

Truly, though, the reason to see the film in an IMAX auditorium may not be its larger-than-typical screen but instead its accompanying extra-thunderous sound system. “Oppenheimer” is consistently visceral from an audio perspective, thanks not only to the effects — the use of sound during the Trinity scene is next-level — but to the score by Ludwig Goransson (“Tenet,” “Black Panther”). Seemingly designed to never allow the viewer to relax, the affecting music is at times at odds with the dialogue, but not as often as in some previous Nolan efforts.

There is one more behind-the-scenes contributor whose work simply must be acknowledged: editor Jennifer Lame (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Tenet”). “Oppenheimer” moves so fluidly from scene to scene to scene that the stitching alone is astounding.

While, yes, a biopic — we certainly understand Nolan’s treatise on J. Robert Oppenheimer by the conclusion — the auteur ultimately was interested in crafting a cautionary tale, one that reminds us the possibility of the rather rapid destruction of our world is an ever-present possibility. It may not succeed in achieving our biggest ask — giving us something new about which to ponder — but it is plenty powerful all the same.

‘Oppenheimer’

Where: Theaters.

When: July 21.

Rated: R for some sexuality, nudity and language.

Runtime: 3 hours.

Stars (of four): 4.