It’s 1986. DC Comics has begun publishing Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen in monthly installments. It is one of several contemporaneous works that change the medium, for better or worse. Its most powerful character is Jonathan Osterman, a nuclear physicist turned by a freak laboratory accident into the nigh-omniscient, nigh-omnipotent Dr. Manhattan fourteen years after the end of World War II. Although the word “quantum” is never used in-story, his origin and intimidating powers are directly tied to the Atomic Age and the emergence of quantum mechanics. The American government employs him as an ultimate weapon, wins the Vietnam War, and changes the world and its timeline, for better or worse. As extrapolated by Moore as a sort of offshoot from quantum superposition, Dr. Manhattan perceives everything that has ever happened, is happening, or will happen to him all at once, rather than in chronological order, within/outside of each and every second that ticks by for us mortals (up to a pivotal event in the concluding chapters):

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

It’s 2023. Oppenheimer is the new film from Christopher Nolan, the celebrated writer/director whose works often play with time-shifting and experiment with our perceptions in their storytelling construction, for better or worse. Tenuous connections stretch between the leapfrogging reminiscence of the fictional Dr. Manhattan and Nolan’s narrative of the real-life Mr. Manhattan Project himself, theoretical physicist Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Much as Dr. Manhattan’s life is portrayed as a series of flashbacks that are out-of-order to us mortals yet interlock conceptually by the end, Nolan likewise eschews the standard Hollywood biopic formula (this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then The End), with a slightly modified form of the other standard Hollywood biopic formula (ordinate flashbacks within an end-of-timeline story frame) to chronicle the lives of the masters of the atom from interwoven character arcs. Certain images recur from one era to the next for foreshadowing and epiphanies and so forth. Ultimately the audience needs to experience the whole tapestry before they can truly see each component for what it is.

It’s 1926. Cillian Murphy, a veteran of four Nolan films, plays the eponymous young American theoretician wannabe. He studies nascent forms of quantum-related science in Europe because his homeland offers no such courses or teachers yet. Among the rock stars in his world of quantum academia are Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), whom he nearly poisons by accident, and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer from Zack Snyder’s mid-apocalyptic Army of the Dead), whom he only meets once. It’s all enough for Oppenheimer to go full quantum fanboy.

It’s 1998. A young Christopher Nolan completes his first feature-length film, Following, which reveals events out of order that slowly de-jigsaw into a bigger picture for $48,000.00 worth of ticketholders in its limited release. It heralds future time experiments such as Memento, The Prestige, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, and the work at hand, each of which deliver larger payloads with wider impacts.

It’s 1954. Oppenheimer’s escalating objections to America’s stubborn persistence in postwar weapons research and upgrades have irritated the wrong powerful people. A tiny kangaroo-court hearing is held in a forgotten conference room with cheap tables and empty bookshelves, where the state of his security clearance is in the hands of special counsel Roger Robb, played by Jason Clarke, survivor of such apocalypses as Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Terminator Genisys. Robb freely admits this hearing brought forth by the Atomic Energy Commission is no formal trial bound by the usual rules of checks, balances, or fairness. Oppenheimer’s frequent Venn-diagram intersections with Communists throughout his life — never a singular circle, like the self-etched hydrogen symbol on Dr. Manhattan’s forehead — provide an endless source of insinuations and justifications for punishing his philosophical rebellion.

It’s 2020. My son and I watch Tenet in a theater while wearing masks. We nearly have the place to ourselves. On a Monday night in mid-September, well after opening weekend, the showing is all but unattended. Our precautions and discomfort notwithstanding, our hearts break as the film proceeds to suck. It’s our last theatrical visit of the year. We wish Nolan better luck next time.

It’s 1959. Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission and a rear admiral after the end of WWII, is poised to become U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Dwight Eisenhower. His hearings focus on his wartime activities in general and his interactions with Oppenheimer in particular. The formality of his interrogation belies the ripple effects from the other arcs, including his direct involvement in Oppenheimer’s Communist-tangential fall from grace. Robert Downey, Jr., whose last feature film Dolittle was released shortly before the pandemic distracted us from its misbegotten existence, is fascinatingly complicated in one of the film’s two greatest performances. As Strauss’ service to the Greater Good cunningly transform into a front-line offense on behalf of American exceptionalism, the sins he commits on behalf of God and country do not go unnoticed.

It’s 1942. The Nazi menace is a relentless machine months ahead of the Allied forces in its forward-thinking weapons research, up to and including the as-yet-nonexistent nuclear option. If Our Heroes don’t invent it first, the Nazis totally will. Oscar winner and occasional A-lister Matt Damon, who last worked with Nolan in Tnterstellar and whose apocalypse-adjacent works include Dogma and Thor: Ragnarok, plays soon-to-be-General Leslie Groves, a West Point graduate with an engineering background and consequently a deeper sympathy for scientists than the average superficial Hollywood military officer. Groves formally invites Oppenheimer to lead what will become the Manhattan Project. Jewish and agonizingly aware of what’s happening to millions of innocents in Europe, Oppenheimer is on board with their nuclear counter-development project. Sympathetic allies include fellow Jewish notable Lewis Strauss.

It’s 1992. Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears is released in paperback, a relief to fans who lacked the necessary muscle tone to lift the original 798-page hardcover. Now over 1000 pages in mass-market softcover form, over 100 of those pages — by my literal, personal count when I spent three months reading it as a diversion from college homework — are devoted to describing the roughly six zillion components in a nuclear bomb, each of which must do their jobs in exacting sequence, like a wristwatch or a grade-A Hollywood film. Those digressions pose a tedious exercise, and yet, later in the book when the villains trigger the warhead, an indefatigable reader may understand, better than those villains do, exactly what minuscule error happens inside and why their terrorist plot is only modestly successful.

It’s 1942. Oppenheimer instructs The Powers That Be to assemble teams headquartered in different areas across the nation with multiple purposes, such as the uranium enrichment station in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; a think tank in Chicago; and an entire new neighborhood built from scratch in Los Alamos. It faintly evokes the isolated desolation of a Wild West town. The flying bullets of the legendary OK Corral are superseded by the quest to produce the one true super-bullet to end all bullets. A film already stuffed with highly recognizable faces practically triples in size as recruitment continues. A single film can’t possibly have enough space to reward every actor with a full introductions or a Great Moment to call their own. Prime example: not till later did I learn Star Trek: Lower Decks‘ Jack Quaid, whom I could plainly recognize but who lacked a name tag, played physicist Richard Feynman, who’d become a scientific Big Deal of his own in the future. If Feynman could be afforded hardly any space, one wonders how lengthy was Nolan’s lengthy list of deleted Manhattan Project contributors.

It’s 1987. Watchmen‘s final issue sees print. Through an unimaginable act of devastation Ozymandias has tricked the world into cancelling the imminent alt-history U.S.-vs.-U.S.S.R. nuclear apocalypse. The big blue living ultimate weapon removes himself from the worldwide stage but, in his parting admonition to his hyperintelligent former colleague, implies he hasn’t canceled all apocalypses.

It’s 1945. Hitler is dead and Germany has surrendered. Japan hasn’t. The Powers That Be insist the atomic bombs that were intended for Germany, should they actually work, need to be deployed upon Japan to send a message and expedite the war’s end. Some participants object mightily; the nukes were intended only as a Nazi deterrent. A thus-far-offscreen President Harry Truman refuses to let any enemies (present or future) get the slightest misconception that the Manhattan Project was a colossal bluff, and wants the war ended by any means necessary. Truman’s wishes are conveyed through his Secretary of War Henry Stimson, played by James Remar, an excellent team player from Black Lightning who once had a nosebleed-section seat to a foiled nuclear apocalypse in X-Men: First Class. Stimson brings a brainstormed list of possible Japanese targets, but crosses off Kyoto, where he honeymooned. Oppenheimer flips a priority switch in his head and consents to redirecting their plans. Whether or not this plan was The Right Thing To Do will be debated, explicitly and implicitly, for the rest of the film and the rest of American life.

It’s 2021. Tenet as a Redbox Blu-ray rental is smaller and softer, but the subtitles add considerable comprehension. A viewer with a sufficiently imaginative interior scope and a TV above a certain size no longer “has to” see it in an uncaptioned theater to appreciate its explosions, which are puny distant cousins to Oppenheimer’s works.

It’s 1945. Two hours into the three-hour epic comes the scene we’ve all been waiting for. The Trinity Test, the climax of the Manhattan Project, will see American detonate its first fully successful atomic bomb. Nolan’s crew stages the explosion and its mushroom cloud entirely through practical effects, possibly using ALL the non-atomic explosives they could afford on an unlimited budget. Through colorfully hyper-lit effects an unconventional approach to the sound design (not an uncommon phrase to use in discussing a Nolan film), That pivotal moment is stunning and utterly frightening, both visually and intellectually as the inexorable march continues toward the Allies’ traumatizing Pyrrhic victory. Conversely, Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen offscreen and away from our eyes, exactly as Oppenheimer learned of their occurrence in reality. ‘Twas all the easier to hold their devastation at arm’s length.

It’s 1983. ABC’s The Day After has sparked a neighborhood chat about the prospect of World War III, whether we fear it and if Indianapolis would even be on the USSR’s Top 20 list of first targets. The oldest kid has an inflated sense of Naptown’s importance, but he’s a taller and heftier blowhard, not much fun to debate. My family missed that landmark TV-movie in favor of watching the CBS Sunday night lineup featuring The Jeffersons and Goodnight, Beantown. The latter features Bill Bixby, previously the star of The Incredible Hulk, based on a comic about an Atomic Age physicist turned by a freak laboratory accident into an unstoppable creature seventeen years after the end of World War II.

It’s 1946. The war is over but the arms race is on. Concurrent to the Manhattan Project’s specific focus, colleague Edward Teller (Benny Safdie, last seen running for mayor in Licorice Pizza) has been multitasking a side project nicknamed The Super — a.k.a. the hydrogen bomb, whose power conceivably may dwarf the atomic bomb, as if that weren’t genocidally lethal enough. In a sidebar with Oppenheimer, they discuss their vain hopes that the atomic bomb will be the last word on inconceivable explosives. Teller muses that it will “until someone else makes a bigger one.” Teller may just be that someone before other nations raise up their own someones. By this time Oppenheimer has recited the infamous Bhagavad Gita quote twice. He’s also humiliated himself in front of Truman, played in his sole scene impeccably by Gary Oldman, who was a post-apocalyptic menace in both Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and The Book of Eli. Truman angrily dismisses the man who made victory possible, who’s now learned to stop loving the bomb and start worrying. Oppenheimer continues stockpiling regrets by the megaton.

It’s 2002. Phil Alden Robinson, the director of Field of Dreams and the co-writer of such films as Rhinestone and Ghost Dad, refuses to make his adaptation of The Sum of All Fears a 25-episode miniseries that devotes six hours to a nuclear warhead assembly tutorial. Nine sensitive months after 9/11, Tom Clancy’s terrorist coalition have been reimagined as neo-Nazis who luck into a lost nuke. The critical consensus deems this version “not great, not terrible”.

It’s 1954. Strauss is clearly pulling the strings for Oppenheimer’s clearance hearing. The fray ties together numerous threads from his life, including his foremost romantic partners: his formerly Communist wife Kitty (Emily Blunt, excellent in such time-experimental films as Edge of Tomorrow and Looper) and his stridently Communist mistress Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh, whose white-clad MCU Black Widow is no stranger to ostensible former Communists). For the film’s two most prominent women, one relationship is conveyed through two sex scenes with nudity; the other is sexless and fully clothed, but yields two children who are treated as baggage. If any other actresses in this film had more than three lines, I missed them. We are definitely not in Barbie-Land. Nevertheless, throughout the testimonies and accusations, the question looms before a besieged Oppenheimer: what did he believe, and when did he believe it?

It’s 2002. Murphy the young British stage actor is introduced to America in 28 Days Later, a horrific tale of apocalyptic survival rather than pre-apocalyptic fears. Five years later he and director Danny Boyle reunite for Sunshine, my favorite Murphy film, in which a crew of scientists must reignite our near-apocalyptic sun using a giant sci-fi bomb, surely a descendant of Oppenheimer’s work. Here in the present, Murphy has topped himself by orders of magnitude in this latest performance, a quantum superposition of his own design — seemingly holding all opinions and holding none of them, each compartmentalized like a herd of Schrödinger’s Cats. (Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, that particular physicist is Sir Not Appearing in This Film. He was alive during WWII, but teaching in Ireland and outside Nolan’s scope.)

It’s 1987. Watchmen‘s schedule falls behind for the final three issues. Twelve chapters eventually take fifteen months to reach comic shop shelves. No one except us aging OG collectors ever has to care about those shipping delays once the series is republished in collected form, in multiple printings for millions more readers over the next 35 years and beyond. Within the complete graphic novel, those weeks of lateness are as imperceptible as the empty space in an atom.

It’s 2009. A young Ludwig Göransson demonstrates versatility and cleverness in his scores for the NBC sitcom Community. Among other acclaimed scores, he’d later work with Nolan on Tenet.

It’s 2023. Göransson leads an orchestra into avant-garde panic attacks induced by the imagery they’re accompanying, whipping each other and the audience into a nerve-wracking frenzy. By the end they’re bashing the insides of Oppenheimer’s skull with their instruments in their capacity as the chief indicators of his mental states. Somehow Murphy’s nuances withstand their onslaught and dare us to keep our eyes locked on him, not on the terrors of the strings.

It’s 1986. Moore and Gibbons do the first round promotional rounds for Watchmen with comic-book journalists and fanzines. In their interview with Amazing Heroes, the most memorable pull quote comes from Moore, regarding the level of detail that necessitated a 100-page script for the first issue alone: “Everything means something, although not everything means very much.”

It’s 1945. Several characters are concerned about the theoretical odds of a single atomic bomb explosion setting off a chain reaction that might destroy Earth, thus ending all wars as Oppenheimer had hoped if not necessarily as safely as he’d naively imagined. Through his endless hallways of compartmentalized thoughts and his gallery of emotional masks, sometimes he believes everything will be fine, without showing us he’s done any work to extrapolate such a mordantly optimistic conclusion. And sometimes Oppenheimer hates being aware that he’s led us all, the film and our reality, into a pre-apocalyptic state always one act away from a perfect doomsday machine TBD.

It’s 2023. Life on Earth persists for now. But just because Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t trigger the apocalypse doesn’t mean they’ve avoided all apocalypses. As its examination of the past mirrors its concerns for our future, Oppenheimer may be Nolan’s greatest film experiment to date — possibly even his greatest film. It is confidently the biggest, boldest, cinematic portrayal of the Atomic Age in our time, until someone else makes a bigger one.

It’s 1969. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five becomes his most acclaimed novel, concerning a WWII POW who begins leaping around in time as a result of alien contact. It isn’t his only time-experimental work, or his only reminder to us of the atrocities and aftershocks of World War II from his perspective as a former POW himself. I read it in high school as part of an English class project for which I chose to read all his novels from 1952’s Player Piano to his then-latest, 1987’s Bluebeard. The project left a mark.

It’s 2023. For better or worse, the ripples from Oppenheimer’s ideas, his sins, and his unintended consequences are everywhere around us, in pop culture and beyond. As the final words of Watchmen #4 portended for its 1980s fictional humankind and ring true for our living cast of eight billion today, “We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.”

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: If you loved the helter-skelter all-star casts of such films as The Poseidon Adventure or It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, you’ll be gleefully flabbergasted by Oppenheimer‘s lineup. I barely scratched the surface up there. Keep your scorecard handy as you spot the following men along this three-hour journey:

• James D’Arcy (Agent Carter, Broadchurch) as Oppenheimer’s irritated superior during his early days overseas at Cambridge.
• Josh Hartnett continues his 2023 comeback (see also his recent Black Mirror episode) as Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron and Oppenheimer’s UC Berkeley next-door classroom neighbor who later turns on him.
• David Krumholtz (Numb3rs, The Santa Clause) as friendly yet skeptical Nobel winner Isidor Rabi.
• Playing the Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity was forty years prior and who never fully stepped into the quantum arena, Tom Conti appeared briefly in Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises and was the mean judge in Paddington 2.
• Dane DeHaan (Chronicle, Amazing Spider-Man 2) as a major-general who’s crankier and far less helpful than General Groves.
• Academy Award Winner Rami Malek in a few scenes as an engineer whose reason for taking such a small role makes more sense toward the end of the 1959 arc.
• Harry Groener (Dear John, Buffy) as Wyoming Senator Gale McGee, prominent among those spearheading Strauss’ 1959 hearings.
• Alden Ehrenreich is Lewis Strauss’ assistant in the 1959 arc. I love his final scene with Strauss more than anything he did in Solo.
• David Dastmalchian (whose distinctive face first caught attention in Nolan’s The Dark Knight) as the congressional staffer whose accusations spark the 1954 hearing and help destroy Oppenheimer’s career
• Tony Goldwyn (Ghost, Scandal) as one of Truman’s yes-men.
• Scott Grimes from The Orville (though I remember him regrettably from The USA Network’s Dog House) as one of several dozen lawyers.
• Christopher Denham (Being the Ricardos, the WGN America series Manhattan about this exact same subject) lurks around the edges as Klaus Fuchs, hiding his significance till the end.
• David Arnold (the recent Halloween trilogy) has a small key role as Frank Oppenheimer, the unhelpfully Communist brother of J. Robert.
• James Urbaniak (Dwight Schrute’s pal Rolf) in one scene as an Austro-Hungarian mathematician who gets in the way for a few seconds.
• The #MeToo’d Casey Affleck in one scene as a Russian-born US Army officer who was never Oppenheimer’s friend.

…and more, more, more! Those are just the names and/or faces I recognized without cheating.

In case you were wondering, yes, there are women in the film besides the two rather famous leads, such as Olivia Thirlby (Dredd, Juno) and CSI‘s Louise Lombard. Blink like I did and you’ll miss Emma Dumont from Bunheads and The Gifted as adult daughter Jackie Oppenheimer in a 1963 epilogue. That’s very nearly it.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Oppenheimer end credits, but the Special Thanks section includes a nod to Kip Thorne, the physicist whose work inspired and/or built the theoretical engine for Nolan’s Interstellar. As the movie correctly depicts among its supporting cast, most scientists are prone to tackling multiple projects throughout their careers, not just the one.