Oppenheimer

Type: Movie

Score: 9/10

Date modified: May 16, 2026

I recently rewatched Oppenheimer and it thought it a better time than any to rewrite the 4 words I had on it last time. I think this is a pretty fantastic film. Obviously I knew Christopher Nolan must be good at what he does, he was able to create Interstellar after all, but I didn’t really think of him as one of the bests to ever do it until I watched this.

Much of the first third of Oppenheimer is the weakest the film has. Obviously it has the iconic opening section which hits every time, but it also just feels like it has a lot of fluff (or maybe just stuff I’m too stupid to see the subtext of). I get that you can’t exactly have constant excitement a whole film and Oppenheimer really isn’t that kind of film after all. I really do. However despite much of it being the building blocks of what makes the last act so exciting, I think the blocks could be more well hidden. It’s like you can kind of tell that it’s building towards something but the end goal is so foreign it isn’t very exciting. It’s not massively uninteresting per se but if the film had continued in such a way I certainly wouldn’t have scored it as highly as I have.

The last two thirds however is where the real shit happens. Sound is used really interesting in this film. It wasn’t super noticeable earlier but it’s used in lots of cool ways here that I don’t see in much of the slop I usually watch. The beautiful violin motif throughout that plays throughout is a good example. But also the scene when the nuke finally detonates. Those few seconds of near complete silence before the shock wave makes the impact even better, not to mention the fantastic VFX job on the nuke. They really managed to make it look as powerful as you’d imagine. It’s the same in the scenes of Oppenheimer imagining a nuke dropping detonating at the hall, everything in complete silence with the blinding white and that lady’s face being peeled off as Oppenheimer slowly unravels in real time. It’s so good I’ll forgive them for the jumpscare when the sound suddenly came back at once. I know I’m kind of just listing things at this point but another cool moment before I move on, the way the stomping we’ve heard throughout is coming from the people in that hall. I can’t say for sure what it means but it certain was a pretty cool callback (and call forward because it keeps happening afterward).

You’d kind of expect a movie about Oppenheimer to have its climax as the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it really wasn’t. I felt the real climax was the conclusion to Oppenheimer’s hearing and Strauss’ bid for a cabinet position. The way we get to see the blinding white light once more during the hearing as Oppenheimer is being berated by Robb really gets across his inner turmoil about the bomb. The overwhelming feeling the scene elicited in me during both watches isn’t something I’ve found in many other films either. There’s also the conclusion to Strauss’ story. To be honest I hadn’t scene him causing Oppenheimer’s downfall coming, maybe I should’ve taken history or something, so I felt pretty personally betrayed to see him on that couch. Because of my weird personal attachment to the betrayal though, to see his downfall was really satisfying. And to follow that up at the end when we find out Oppenheimer and Einstein hadn’t even talked about him was the cherry on the top. The whole ending sequence was incredible too, probably Nolan’s best. The music, the way it finally showed the scene that had been so tantalizingly hidden throughout, the visuals, the bittersweet feeling to it. Just stunning. What a movie. There’s a lot more symbolism throughout that’s really interesting but not what I particularly want to write about here, nor would I be the best at writing something like that. Perhaps just watch the film (though odds are you already have).