BRIGHT SPARKS (OPPENHEIMER)

© © Universal Pictures

After the sea of pink that greeted screenings of 'Barbie' at the weekend, we now turn to the aroma of popcorn and Lynx.

That's because of the overwhelmingly male presence at the IMAX screening  this reviewer attended of Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' at the Banbridge Omniplex.

Many of those were teenage boys and that's probably a testament to a marketing campaign blitz that has seen Nolan's bulky biopic go toe to toe with Greta Gerwig's comedy in cinemas around the world.

In the end, 'Barbie' took in a staggering $377 million on its opening weekend, while 'Oppenheimer' hoovered up an impressive $174 million in global receipts.

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It was never really in doubt that Gerwig's clever, high camp comedy was always going to outperform Nolan's ambitious, serious talkfest.

Nevertheless opening box office receipts of $174 million are not to be sniffed at.

It's way and above expectations for a three hour, dialogue driven film.

'Oppenheimer' benefitted from being ridiculously pitched against 'Barbie' on July 21 as the cinematic equivalent of "Blur versus Oasis".

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But how does the film measure up against the English director's work?

'Oppenheimer' is in some senses a typical Nolan film.

It's full of bombast, it's impressive in scale, it's noisy, obsessed and jumps between different narrative time periods.

It also features some of the director's favourite actors - Kenneth Branagh, James Darcy, Gary Oldman and its lead actor Cillian Murphy.

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It also gives him an opportunity to work with others on his to do list - Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Matthew Modine, Casey Affleck and Josh Hartnett.

However 'Oppenheimer' represents a bold move away from the visual effects driven adventures of previous work into the ambitious political history biopic that Oliver Stone perfected in the 1990s.

This dazzling three hour film begins with Murphy's theoretical physicist as a young man at Oxford, trying to catch the attention of Branagh's respected Danish Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr.

We subsequently see him building an academic career in Europe, encountering David Krumholtz's Isidor Isaac Rabi on a train to Gottingen after delivering a lecture in Dutch.

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Returning to the United States, Oppenheimer lands a job teaching at the University of California in Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.

But this being a Nolan film, we also hop between this episode and one later in life where he is offered by Robert Downey Jr's Peter Strauss the chance to be the Director of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton.

It's pretty clear from the off that Nolan is consciously tying Oppenheimer's fats to the fortunes of Strauss.

Downey Jr's businessman and philanthropist emerges as the Salieri to Murphy's Mozart or, if you wish to make an Irish analogy, Eamon de Valera to Oppenheimer's Michael Collins.

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As Oppenheimer builds a reputation internationally alongside Josh Hartnett's nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence as a leading light in quantum physics, Matt Damon's US General Leslie Groves beats a path to his door to see if he will head up American Government efforts to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis do.

Oppenheimer, however, has awkward associations with left wing politics including a wife, Emily Blunt's Kitty who was once a member of the Communist Party, an on-off lover Florence Pugh's Jean Tatlock who was a party activist, an academic friend Jefferson Hall's literature professor Haakon Chevalier who tried to recruit him and a brother, Dylan Arnold's Frank who was also a member.

Lawrence is uneasy about Oppenheimer's vocal support for the left wing international brigades in the Spanish Civil War and his encouragement of the unions to organise on campus.

But in spite of these concerns, Groves takes Oppenheimer on trust, believing him to be wholeheartedly committed to the US cause and appoints him as the head of the Manhattan Project that will develop the world's first atomic bomb.

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On Oppenheimer's advice, he builds a town and testing site in Los Alamos in the New Mexican desert.

Oppenheimer assembles a team of brilliant scientists including Rabi, Benny Safdie's Hungarian born Edward Teller, Devon Bostick's Seth Neddermeyer, Alex Wolff's Luis Walter Alvarez and Rami Malek's Mississippi born David Hill.

Nolan takes his audience through the efforts to construct and test the first atomic bomb and then chronicles the fallout after it is used not once but twice in Japan.

And aa Oppenheimer becomes increasingly concerned that the bomb hasn't deterred the Soviets from developing their own weapons and has sparked an arms race, he inevitably becomes more troubled by what he has created and more vocal in his opposition to the hydrogen bomb.

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This puts him on a path where Strauss is able to engineer his downfall, with his past associations with Communism falling under the spotlight.

Once again this being a Nolan film, scenes of Oppenheimer being character assassinated behind closed doors at a US Atomic Energy Commission hearing into whether he can retain his security clearance are intercut with Strauss' very public US Senate confirmation hearing to become the Commerce Secretary in President Eisenhower's administration.

What Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, delivers is a big budget arthouse movie tackling some really massive issues - the pursuit of scientific excellence, the vanity of academia, the questionable morality of big business and politicians, the madness of the red scare.

The film is breathtakingly ambitious, both in its scale and the way Nolan's narrative unfolds.

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And just like Oliver Stone's 'JFK,' it's a visual feast, dazzlingly edited and packed full of information that is hard to take everything in in just one screening.

The film's not perfect.

Like other great directors, Nolan's women characters are not his strong suit - with Blunt and Pugh doing a pretty good job giving their thinly drawn characters life.

The appearance of Tom Conti's Albert Einstein also feels a bit too Jiminy Cricket to really convince.

Nevertheless, it's still one hell of an achievement.

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Nolan and his film editor Jennifer Lame impressively pull off a three hour extravaganza that makes sure your interest never dips.

Director of Photography Hoyte van Hoytema again conjures up handsome visuals.

He is hugely assisted by Samantha Englender's fantastic art direction, Ruth de Jong's epic production design, Ellen Mirojnick's elegant costumes, superb visual effects work from a 34 strong team and amazing sound from a team of 23.

Ludwig Goransson also contributes a stirring musical score.

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Ultimately, though, the film is dominated by two tour de force performances.

Cillian Murphy is compelling as Robert Oppenheimer - so compelling that I will eat his Fedora if he isn't in the major shortlists for Best Actor during awards season next year.

Seizing the opportunity to take the lead role in a big US movie, the Corkman delivers a typically rich, layered portrait of a paradoxical historical figure.

His piercing ocean blue eyes are deployed to mesmeric effect by Nolan.

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Murphy's Oppenheimer is not a straightforward martyr, with many flaws that contribute to his demise.

Downey Jr delivers his best performance in decades by dialling down his Robert Downey Jr-ness.

With his hair slicked back and grey, he convinces as a Machiavellian businessman and politician with a brittle ego who knows how to smile as he slowly kills Oppenheimer's career.

It's a ruthless performance that avoids pantomime villainy and recalls F Murray Abraham's superb Best Actor Oscar winning turn as Salieri in Milos Forman's 'Amadeus'.

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So don't be surprised if ends up being nominated for Best Supporting Actor at next year's Academy Awards and possibly even clutching one.

As for other members of the cast, Damon is his avuncular self as Groves.

Hartnett delivers a career best performance as Lawrence.

Krumholtz is delightful as Rabi and Safdie is perfectly cast as the arrogant Teller. 

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Dane De Haan impresses as Groves' prickly underling Kenneth Nichols, while Jason Clarke is terrific as the aggressive lawyer Roger Robb who inflicts reputational damage on Oppenheimer during the Atomic Energy Commission hearings 

Branagh, Modine, Darcy, Wolf, Oldman as President Truman, Macon Blair as Oppenheimer's lawyer, Alden Ehrenreich as a US Senate aide and Affleck as a dangerous US military intelligence officer also turn up.

And when they do, they do their bit very effectively.

Rami Malek also saves his best work in the film to last as Hill.

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With its effortless switching between colour and black and white sequences, some viewers will immediately make the connection to the political dramas of Oliver Stone - particularly 'JFK' and 'Nixon'.

But there are also visual and narrative echoes of Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane,' Michael Mann's 'The Insider' and a touch of the macabre humour of Stanley Kubrick's 'Doctor Strangelove' in one scene where a US Government official discusses the list of Japanese cities that may be targeted by the bomb, only to strike Kyoto off the list because he and his wife honeymooned there.

In the current swirl of concern around developments in the world of artificial intelligence, some will inevitably see parallels with the Manhattan Project and a warning about what happens when politicians, Generals and businessmen get access.

Other audience members will be struck by what the film has to say about the savage nature of politics and the consequences of America's unhealthy obsession about Communism.

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However in this summer of overlong blockbusters, the greatest achievement of 'Oppenheimer' is how it manages to justify what could be a bum numbing three hour running time by cloaking a compelling story with real spectacle.

If you can, see it on an IMAX screen.

That will really make you appreciate its technical achievement.

'Oppenheimer' is much more coherent film than 'Tenet'.

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It has the sense of a filmmaker willing to stretch himself and take risks.

More importantly, it makes the case along with 'Barbie' for Hollywood studios to go back to basics by ditching the superhero movies and making films that treat audiences as adults and not as pre-pubescent teens.

And it also makes the case for screenwriters, actors and directors exercising creative control as developments in AI cast a shadow over the entertainment industry.

Advances in technology are all well and good but in the end, great cinema boils down to compelling stories written by humans, brought to life by humans which have something meaningful to say about the human condition 

Let's hope the studio executives are listening.

('Oppenheimer' opened in UK and Irish cinemas on July 21, 2023)