Christopher Nolan is one of those fabled directors often regarded as “visionary”. He doesn’t just tell a strong story. He tells it through properly cinematic means. If he’s not pulling narratives apart and reconstructing them out of sequence, he’s tearing apart reality to rearrange it in exciting ways. He gave us the shape-shifting worlds of Inception and Memento, and then recently, the hugely complicated but fun-so-long-as-you-didn’t-think-about-it Tenet.
Much was expected, then, of his newest film, Oppenheimer, which tells the story of the man behind the Manhattan Project, who as the film frames it, became the “modern Prometheus”, by bringing fire into the world. The movie has been widely acclaimed and hailed as Nolan’s best work and perhaps it is but, to be honest, it all gets as confusing as special relativity; the case that as a body approaches the event horizon of a “perfect movie” then gravity does some very odd things and critics start to overlook the very obvious flaws.
