The moral complexity of Oppenheimer is matched only by its extraordinary technical achievements. Both are peerless. This is one more towering achievement for Christopher Nolan in a filmography overflowing with creative impetus. Moreover, Oppenheimer is a remarkable, multi-sensory reimagining all that a biopic can be. There’s precious little of convention here. Linear history is torn asunder in the name of art, with a patchwork narrative instead eliciting both insight and thematic urgency from a story that is broadly well known in the public consciousness. To say the film is nuclear would do only to scratch the surface.

At a little over three hours in length, Oppenheimer has no right to boast so thrilling a pace as is here achieved. Theres simply no let up. Stirred up instead is an implausible unpredictability. This concerning events that occurred many decades past and are very well chronicled. This is the story of one man’s role in the still to occur destruction of humanity. It’s the birth of nuclear warfare in 65mm film and booming Dolby surround sound. Such details matter here, for this is true cinema. Nolan optimises every pixel of his screen in the name of delivering a veritable blitzkrieg of imagery: the objective, subjective, physical and metaphysical alike. Sound is integral to the appreciation. Chalkboard and siren strings wreak out a tension that scrapes through the film’s pulsating doomsday tones. Foley, too, becomes a vital soundtrack, with metronome ticks and stomping feeding bleeding into percussion and relentless drum beats. Then there’s the Trinity trial explosion itself. A deafening silence follows but more awful still is the applause.

The film opens many years pre-detonation and also several after, with timelines zoning back and forth to an accordion motion. The forebodance of guilt arises early as we watch a young Robert J. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) leave a poisoned apple for a disfavoured university professor, only to almost wipe out the Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr, who is played in stoic brief by Sir Kenneth Branagh. From here, we follow Oppenheimer’s rise to the upper echelons of contemporary theoretical physics, which he single-handedly introduces to a sluggish America. When talk of the weaponisation of nuclear power crosses the Atlantic from war torn Europe, it is to Oppenheimer US Army General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) is compelled to turn. The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer’ by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin and learns much of its politics therein.