Christopher Nolan He finally won his first and well-deserved Oscar Award. The figurine had so far escaped the attention of the director of the films ‘Memento’, ‘Interstellar’, ‘Dunkirk’ and ‘Tenet’. ‘Oppenheimer’ is the first ‘biography’ directed by Christopher Nolan, his longest film to date and perhaps, paradoxically, his craziest; The three-hour shoot moves at a pace that most blockbusters would envy, and that has added merit considering it consists primarily of scenes of scientists and politicians sitting down and talking, almost always. The rest fits perfectly into the director’s filmography.
In fact, it makes sense that the British man claims to have been obsessed with Oppenheimer for a long time. The profile of the so-called “father of the atomic bomb” completely coincides with the profile of a prototypical character in his cinema: a bright individual, emotionally disabled and almost always arrogantA man who faces an extraordinary moral dilemma and often has to put himself in danger to save the world as a whole.
Oppenheimer, Moreover, he went down in history as the creator of one of the devices that should never be used. We find many examples of this in Nolan’s cinema: the machine that creates the clones that Nikola Tesla made in ‘The Last Number’, the sonar device that Batman creates from the phone signals of all his citizens in ‘The Dark Knight’. Used by Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) to enter his victims’ dreams and steal their secrets in ‘Inception’; Of course, this technology is almost always used.
Dangerous methods
Nolan himself systematically resorted to dangerous methods to achieve his goals. For example, he shot scenes from ‘Interstellar’ on a decaying glacier, and a Boeing 747 exploded due to the demands of the ‘Tenet’ script. And while we were filming ‘Oppenheimer,’ recreated the first nuclear weapons explosion in history with almost no use of computer-generated imagery. It is unlikely that he dropped a real bomb to see its effects on camera, but there would be little reason to be surprised if it turned out that he did.
In other words, he is a director capable of doing anything to achieve his goal.: To make films with the box office in mind that require not only the active participation of the audience but also multiple viewings to be assimilated, satisfying both those who go to the cinema in search of emotional entertainment and those who go to the movies for the first time. intellectual stimulation. To the former they offer images of cities closing in on themselves and frantic aerial battles; For others, they turn superhero movies into a walk through the territory that separates anarchy from fascism, using the lexicon of heist movies to think about free will.
In other words: when telling stories about obsessed men willing to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks -Save Gotham, find a new home for humanity, prevent World War III, develop the technology needed to create the most devastating weapon imaginable-, Nolan repeatedly confirms to us that he is one of them.