[imagesource:universalpictures]

Christopher Nolan is warning everyone that his newest film – one of the big-event movies coming out this year – might leave you with a frazzled heart, turned stomach, and an aching head.

The director of Oppenheimer said that in some early screenings, viewers had a visceral reaction to the film with some even leaving the movie “absolutely devastated”.

In an interview, Nolan divulged the sheer impact of the film, which follows theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as he creates the atomic bomb to end World War II, Variety noted. He said that early viewers simply could not speak afterwards:

“I mean, there’s an element of fear that’s there in the history and there in the underpinnings. But the love of the characters, the love of the relationships, is as strong as I’ve ever done.”

Nolan later added, “It is an intense experience, because it’s an intense story. I showed it to a filmmaker recently who said it’s kind of a horror movie. I don’t disagree.”

“Oppenheimer’s story is all impossible questions,” Nolan added. “Impossible ethical dilemmas, paradox. There are no easy answers in his story. There are just difficult questions, and that’s what makes the story so compelling. I think we were able to find a lot of things to be optimistic about in the film, genuinely, but there’s this sort of overriding bigger question that hangs over it. It felt essential that there be questions at the end that you leave rattling in people’s brains, and prompting discussion.”

Historian Kai Bird, who co-wrote the 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer with Martin J. Sherwin, which Nolan adapted to the screen, said that he was “stunned” after seeing the film and needed to “emotionally recover [sic] from having seen it”:

Bird said during a recent conversation: “I think it is going to be a stunning artistic achievement, and I have hopes it will actually stimulate a national, even global conversation about the issues that Oppenheimer was desperate to speak out about — about how to live in the atomic age, how to live with the bomb and about McCarthyism — what it means to be a patriot, and what is the role for a scientist in a society drenched with technology and science, to speak out about public issues.”

Set for its premiere on July 21, Oppenheimer stars Murphy as the “father” of the atomic bomb, alongside a truly stellar cast.

There’s Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife, biologist, and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer; Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project; Robert Downey, Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission; Florence Pugh as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock; Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller; and Josh Hartnett as American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence.

We’re not ready.

[source:variety]