Early Reactions To ‘Oppenheimer’ Praise Atomic Bomb Film: A ‘Spectacular Achievement’

Early reviews for the highly anticipated historical drama “Oppenheimer” are positive so far.

Universal Pictures will release the three-hour film, which details how the titular star, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), changed the face of warfare forever as the “father of the atomic bomb.”

“Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse,” Nolan told the crowd at CinemaCon in April.

The director also described the movie as a “wild ride” which explored “literally the most dramatic moment in history” during an interview with Wired.

Writing for the Los Angeles Times, critic Kenneth Turan said “Oppenheimer” was “arguably Nolan’s most impressive work yet in the way it combines his acknowledged visual mastery with one of the deepest character dives in recent American cinema.”

Total Film reviewer Matt Maytum said he was “stunned,” writing of the biographical thriller, “[It’s] a character study on the grandest scale, with a sublime central performance by Cillian Murphy. An epic historical drama but with a distinctly Nolan sensibility: the tension, structure, sense of scale, startling sound design, remarkable visuals. Wow.”

Associated Press reviewer Lindsey Bahr said the movie was “a spectacular achievement in its truthful, concise adaptation, inventive storytelling and nuanced performances from Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon and the many, many others involved.”

“Totally absorbed in ‘Oppenheimer,’ a dense, talkie, tense film partly about the bomb, mostly about how doomed we are,” The Sunday Times writer Jonathan Dean wrote in his review. “Happy summer! Murphy is good, but the support essential: Damon, Downey Jr & Ehrenreich even bring gags. An audacious, inventive, complex film to rattle its audience.”

Nolan previously described how the audience reacted to early screenings.

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“Some people leave the movie absolutely devastated. They can’t speak. I mean, there’s an element of fear that’s there in the history and there in the underpinnings. But the love of the characters, the love of the relationships, is as strong as I’ve ever done,” Nolan said.

“I showed it to a filmmaker recently who said it’s kind of a horror movie,” he continued. “I don’t disagree…As I started to finish the film, I started to feel this color that’s not in my other films, just darkness. It’s there. The film fights against that.”

“It’s a complicated set of feelings to be entertained by awful things, you know? Which is where the horror dimension comes in,” Nolan said.