The First ‘Oppenheimer’ Reviews Are Blown Away By Christopher Nolan’s Sprawling Biopic: ‘When Nolan Is On, He Is On’

The first reviews for Oppenheimer are beginning to drop, and so far, the new Christopher Nolan film seems to be racking up almost unanimous praise from critics. Despite clocking in with a massive three hour runtime, Nolan expertly uses every second of film to tell a gripping tale about how brilliant physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) created the devastating force known as the atomic bomb.

In true Nolan style, Oppenheimer grapples with the destructive power released on the world as it follows the title character’s journey from scientific discovery to untold horrors. Along the way, an all-star cast buoys this cautionary tale, and the critics are here for it.

You can see excerpts from the first batch of reviews below:

Mike Ryan, Uproxx:

For a literal three-hour movie, Oppenheimer moves pretty well. A big reason is this is a movie that doesn’t stay on one scene very long. A character will be recounting his or her story and we will see brief flashbacks. Sometimes in color, sometimes in black and white (ahem, JFK). A character testifying will set up a scene, then we will flashback for that scene. Which, in a movie that depends heavily on very complicated science, serves as a somewhat effective way to handle exposition about how splitting atoms can be used to create atomic bombs.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety:

It remains every inch a Nolan film. You feel that in the heady, dense, dizzying way it slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history written with lightning — no mere metaphor in this case, since the movie, which tells the story of the man who created the atomic bomb, feels almost like it’s about the invention of lightning.

David Ehrlich, IndieWire:

Paced like it was designed for interstellar travel, scripted with a degree of density that scientists once thought purely theoretical in nature, and shot with such large-format bombast that repetitive scenes (or at least Nolan-esque slices) of old politicians yelling at each other about expired security clearances hit with the same visceral impact as the 747 explosion in “Tenet,” “Oppenheimer” is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one.

David Fear, Rolling Stone:

So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on.

Pete Hammond, Deadline:

From a man who has taken us into places movies rarely go with films like Interstellar, Inception, Tenet, Memento, the Dark Knight Trilogy, and a very different but equally effective look at World War II in Dunkirk, I think it would be fair to say Oppenheimer could be Christopher Nolan’s most impressive achievement to date. I have heard it described by one person as a lot of scenes with men sitting around talking. Indeed in another interation Nolan could have turned this into a play, but this is a movie, and if there is a lot of “talking”, well he has invested in it such a signature cinematic and breathtaking sense of visual imagery that you just may be on the edge of your seat the entire time.

Nick Schager, The Daily Beast:

There’s an embarrassment of riches to digest, savor, and mull over in this saga, which touches upon the exhilaration of scientific discovery, the fear of inventing something over which the inventor has no control, and the alarming consequences of paving a historic path, especially when it leads directly to Pandora’s Box. At every turn, a superb supporting performance lies in wait from Damon, Blunt, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, and Tom Conti as Albert Einstein (who knows how uneasily lies the head that wears the crown).

Alison Wilmore, Vulture:

Its scope comes from Murphy’s haunted performance and the way the movie (with help from Ludwig Göransson’s panic attack of a score) submerges you in the mind-set of its protagonist as though it can create a psychic connection to the past. Robert isn’t an easy character to understand; he’s arrogant, blunt, and aloof and possesses an intelligence about the unseen world of physics that makes him seem half-alien. But Nolan doesn’t want Robert to be relatable. He just wants to explore how his flawed humanity co-exists with his genius in what is ultimately a film about moral slippage and how someone who feels so certain of his own clear-eyed ideals finds himself standing in front of a screaming crowd celebrating the deaths of thousands of people in Japan.

Oli Welsh, Polygon:

In Nolanworld, we humans can attempt to find meaning in the forces of the universe, or to bend them to our will, but they ultimately rule us. The bigness wins. Until Oppenheimer. The paradox of this film — a three-hour historical epic about the theoretical physicist who unleashed the terrible forces of the quantum realm and became “the father of the atomic bomb” — is that it’s a lot less interested in science and mechanics than most of Nolan’s previous movies, and a lot more interested in people. It’s still vast in scope and meticulous in design. But this is the film in which Nolan ponders the scary proposition that the most powerful force in the universe might be us.

Oppenheimer opens on July 21.