Ripples appear in courtyard puddle outside the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge; a tornadic funnel erupts from the black atmosphere toward Earth. Between these images — the small one of intimate life and the colossal one of planetary death — a haunted young man looks on in curiosity and horror.
The man is Robert Oppenheimer, played to perfection by Cillian Murphy, a theoretical physicist “troubled by visions of a hidden universe.” This visionary, capable of conjuring apocalypse from the particles stowed inside atoms, spends the first fifteen minutes of the film looking bewildered — a gaunt, gray sliver of a man wandering through his life like a ghost. His first act is to inject an apple with potassium cyanide and leave it on the desk of his physics professor, Patrick Blackett. He retrieves it before anyone can taste the poison fruit, but he’s soon ousted from this academic Eden and sent to study physics at the University of Göttingen.
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