It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot. Manohla Dargis in the NYT.

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer

When I was a child, everybody loved J. Robert Oppenheimer, I won’t say he was a household name, but in our household, it was close. Growing up, people talked about him in the same way they spoke of Einstein. My mother, back before I was old enough to have a say, even had the barber cut my hair “Oppenheimer Style,” so when I went to the movie with Michele, Richard Taylor, and Tracy Grubbs, I was a little surprised that most people don’t know Oppenheimer’s Promethean story. That’s too bad because he is a fascinating, brilliant, and complex man.

Maybe it is an age thing; perhaps it is because my generation grew up crawling under our desks, at least through grammar school, every time the air raid siren, high on a tall pole right in front of the school, went off; or maybe it is just my quirky/perverted personal interest, whatever the reason, I feel like I have known the Atomic Bomb/Oppenheimer story my whole adult life. I admired J. Robert Oppenheimer until I was in my late teens; then, at the end of the 50s, I saw Hiroshima, mon Amour, leading me to read John Hershey’s Hiroshima – voted the greatest piece of American journalism of the 20th century, BTW – and I became aware of the Horror we unleashed on Japan. Unleashed on the whole world, really, and Oppenheimer was the face of that Horror.

I thought that our dropping of The Bomb on Hiroshima was a mistake at best and, by almost any measure, a war crime, and I still feel that way. My parents, my parent’s friends, and any random adult, who lived through World War II, thought I was wrong. They thought the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary to get Japan to surrender. So did Oppenheimer, sort of, and for a while.

Oppenheimer, the movie based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is a tour de force as a movie, a stand-alone piece of art. I expected the film to follow the book -which I thought was excellent but not as good as The Making of The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes – and it does follow the book but in a Nolandesque sort of way. Oppenheimer is a different art form. Different from the book and almost anything else. Maybe the best description is that Oppenheimer is what used to be called an Art Movie. Except Oppenheimer feels like a summer Blockbuster. It is three hours long, and the experience feels much shorter.

At its core, this is a movie about the rise and fall of a scientific superstar at a time when there were such things, and almost all of it is brilliant people talking. No car chases, just brilliant people talking and a soundtrack – is that the fitting descriptor? – that is like another character (or completely silent).

The movie is filmed both in color and in very contrasty black and white, and counterintuitively the earlier scenes, like Oppenheimer studying physics in England and Germany, are in a deep, rich color, almost like Rembrandt, and the later scenes, Oppenheimer’s downfall, is filmed in black and white. But the movie jumps around in time – duh, it is a Nolan movie, after all – so, as it jumps around in time, the film jumps from color to black and white and back to color. It isn’t very clear at first, but it keeps you involved, and that is part of its power, and you get used to it.

It seems to me that Oppenheimer is not so much an entertainment – although it is very entertaining – as an invitation to think about what we’ve done. The Horror and devastation brought on by the scientists at Los Alamos are never shown, although the scientists’ reaction to it is. Especially Oppenheimer’s reaction and dismay. Toward the end of the movie, there is a scene between Oppenheimer and President Harry Truman meeting in the Oval Office in which Oppenheimer says something along the lines of “I have blood on my hands.” Truman dismisses Oppenheimer’s lament, saying, “Nobody will remember that you made the bomb; they’ll remember that Harry Truman ordered it be dropped.”

As Oppenheimer leaves the Oval Office, we overhear Truman saying, ” I don’t want to see that crybaby again.” Both know what they have done, and both are, in a way, ashamed. Whether they should have been ashamed, whether we should have dropped the bomb or not are questions without answers, and Oppenheimer doesn’t try. But it does raise the question.

I walked out of Oppenheimer stunned. If art is supposed to make us think, to ask questions – and I think it does – then Christopher Noland’s Oppenheimer is art, even great art. It is powerful movie-making, the acting is terrific – especially Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. – and I want to see it again, but I didn’t walk out smiling like I did when we saw Barbie.