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Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s convoluted breathlessness
Universal Pictures Australia
by
ABR Arts 20 July 2023

Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s convoluted breathlessness
Universal Pictures Australia
by
ABR Arts 20 July 2023
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer (courtesy of Universal Pictures Australia).
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer (courtesy of Universal Pictures Australia).

Writer–director Christopher Nolan is locked in an ongoing, well-documented wrestling match with linear time. With each new film, he attempts to find some unique way of slicing, dicing, and interrogating it. Memento (2000) gave us a crime thriller told entirely out of order; Inception (2010) used an ingenious nesting-doll conceit for its thrilling dream heists; Interstellar (2014) dabbled in relativity; Dunkirk (2017) juggled three parallel timelines. Most recently, the overblown and underbaked Tenet (2020) tried to package a spy caper as a palindrome. Even Nolan’s more straightforward outings, like The Dark Knight trilogy or The Prestige (2006), rely heavily on a chronological sleight of hand; he deploys flashbacks as casually as other directors might use a close-up.

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