The pivotal scene in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is a victory speech gone wrong. Cillian Murphy is masterfully cast as the queasy genius, a spindly boy with troubled dreams who has grown into an unlikely and uncomfortable war hero.
Addressing an exuberant Los Alamos crowd after his bomb has cinched the victory in Japan, Julius Robert Oppenheimer hovers between triumph and torment like a particle in quantum superposition, overlaid in two conflicting states at once. He barks out a rousing tribute to his country, but Nolan shows us imagined scenes of horror clouding the scientist’s vision: skin peeling from the fresh faces in the audience, ashen corpses crunching beneath his feet.
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