Bleak, beautiful Oppenheimer tells us about our apocalyptic future

There are few figures in American history as mythologized as J. Robert Oppenheimer in no small part due to the man himself.

So building a cohesive story about him the physicist who helped define an entire scientific field so new and arcane it was called "boys' physics"; the precocious child-genius who delivered a scientific lecture at 12; the prideful, self-promoting father of the atomic bomb; the financial supporter of both communists and Jewish victims of the Nazis; the forgetful and rude philanderer whose first media attention came from leaving a woman stranded in a car on a mountain peakas he walked home and went to sleep is, if nothing else, a feat of economy.

American Prometheus, the biography upon which Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is based, took 25 years and600 pages to describe it all. If you asked Nolan, he'd probably be proud he cut it down to three hours.

The way he achieves it is a testament to that story, as well as to what the dying world of Hollywood can produce when championed by an auteur.

Because as it follows the harried physicist (played byCillian Murphy) through his early days of self discovery, asuccessful career in quantum physics, to his management ofthe Manhattan Project andeventual pillorying by the government, Oppenheimer doesn't concern itself with a classically satisfying character arc.

Instead, it uses Oppenheimeras a staticand ultimately tragicbeaconto examine how hopelessly doomed the nuclear age has left us.

That both elevatesOppenheimer into something more than just another biopic and threatensto make it difficult to access. Because while Oppenheimer will likely be remembered as one of the best popular films of the decade, the careful and incisive character study is worlds apart from the Dunkirk-style, visual war-spectacle it's been billed as.

Complicated by its incredible fidelity to historical fact, slightly hurt by an overabundance of starsand triumphant in its performances, Oppenheimer is an extraordinary movie both because of and in spite of its morose complexity.

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When it comes to deciding whether Oppenheimeris deserving ofattention, though, the first question is practical. Ever since his Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan has long had an affinity for filming in the Imax format, leaving audiences struggling to decide which of the various screenings his movies warrant.

Unfortunately, there are only six theatres in Canada capable of screening Oppenheimer in the Imax70mm format Nolan made the movie for. While the director recommends a70mm screening if you can't find an Imax 70MM one, and Imax recommends seeing it in any Imaxformat possible, it hasn't stopped debate between fans over which is best. And as that debate grows, itonlyserves to fuel the misconception thatOppenheimerisa typical WWIImovie held up by fantastic visuals.

While there are beautiful, Tree of Life-esque moments showing particles and waves, most of Oppenheimeris told in boardrooms, laboratories and parks. Depending on which format you watch it in, you may feel more immersed but those who expect to feel the full power of Saving Private Ryan's beach storming scenes, or are just excited for a big Imaxboom, will likely feel let down.

LISTEN | Historian John Hunner on the enigma of Oppenheimer:

The Current10:13Unpacking the Oppenheimer enigma

A blockbuster biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer hits cinemas today. We talk to a historian about the physicists role in the creation of the world's first atomic bomb and why his legacy continues to shape the world.

Instead, Oppenheimer works almost as a diptych an artwork split into two halves that, while separate, inform one another. Here, it feels like two movieswith two messages.The first is the more typical: the tortured geniusenlisted into a secretive government project to win the war by Matt Damon's gruff Lt.-Gen.Leslie Groves.

Damon is only the first of a host of familiar faces to pop up in the background. Everyone from Casey Affleck, to Josh Peck, to Josh Hartnett toFlorence Pughshow up in the dust-whorled backgrounds to, at times, break the immersion.

The beginningof the movieoperatesmore as a clip show than establishing sequence, as we spend nearly 45 minutes following a flatly affected Oppenheimer, dutifully detailing the early events of his life without much character development.

That said, those events are impressively faithful to history: yes, U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson really did save the Japanese city of Kyoto from bombing because he enjoyed holidaying there, and Oppenheimer really did read all three volumes of Das Kapital in German.

Oppenheimer deconstructed

But it's the second half of the moviewhere Oppenheimer reallyearns its accolades. After successfully building the bomb, Oppenheimer is plagued by guiltand made to grapple with his past communist leanings through protracted security hearings bornof the "red scare" McCarthyismera in the U.S.

Those concerns, along with guilt over his rampant infidelity, produce some of the most compelling scenes. As in Pablo Larrain's criminally underrated Spencer, Oppenheimer's world breaks around himinto metaphorical symbols and hallucinations revealing the inner psyche of the manas it crumbles in on itself. As he is forced to celebrate his achievement amongan ecstatic crowd, Oppenheimer is suddenly stepping into a cracked and burnedcorpse. As he is forced to describe his affairs in front of a government hearing and his own wife, he is suddenly naked and with her as the committee continues on.

These scenes also bring up, surprisingly, the strongest conflict in a film about a world war: eccentric genius Oppenheimer versus the vindictive, jealous naval officer and then nominee for U.S. Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr.

Their conflict of adoomed but brilliant iconoclast taken down by a self-importantrunner-up to their own peril is nothing new: think Mozart and Salieri,AlexanderHamilton and Aaron Burr or even Patch Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman's surly Mitch.

Here, though, it's less about the characters than a finding.Fromthe beginning to Nolan's visually stunning and prophetic end, Oppenheimer never seems able to exert control over where he or humanity as a whole isheaded.He is unable to control the outcome of his relationships,fight back against the sham hearings against him,controlthe use of his weapons, or stop the later development of the even deadlier hydrogen bombs.

With its fatalistic bent, Oppenheimer is another of the year's pessimistic parables like Beau is Afraid and Asteroid City, seemingly plucked right from a public unconscious staring right at an apocalyptic end.

As an obviously bleak counterto the bright, simultaneousrelease ofBarbie, it works as a rumination on America's building upand destruction of its heroeswhile wieldingOppenheimer himself as a window into America's debate over whether its actions to save the world have ultimately and inevitably doomed us all.