Modern day auteur Christopher Nolan has hit us with his most ambitious and arguably controversial film yet. And so, with a complete moratorium on bomb puns, we’re here to tell you that Oppenheimer has arrived in New Zealand and is now playing in cinemas.
Nolan, one of the most revered filmmakers currently working, writes and directs this gripping biopic (as well as shooting the whole thing in IMAX and setting off one of the biggest explosions in cinema history, the madman!) based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
The film follows theoretical physicist Robert J, Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) work on the Manhattan Project, the US government’s nuclear weapons project, during World War II. It’s hard to imagine a more high-stakes real world scenario, and Nolan is pretty much guaranteed to milk it for all the drama and scale possible. Expect plenty of murky morality and ruminations on the ethics of mass destruction.
As is typical for the Dark Knight and Dunkirk director, Nolan has pulled together a ridiculously stacked cast, including Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s lover, Jean Tatlock; Emily Blunt as his wife, Kitty; Matt Damon as Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves; Robert Downey Jr as Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss; plus Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Modine, Jack Quaid, David Dastmalchian, Gary Oldman, Casey Affleck, Josh Hartnett and more.
Is there audience appeal, though? Nolan is unarguably one of the most commercially successful directors currently working, but this is a talky historical drama with a reported $100 million budget. Plus, it’s up against Barbie, and if we’re betting on which movie has broader appeal, we know where our money is going. Of course, you can always opt for the fabled Barbenheimer double feature and kill two pop culture birds with one stone…
