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The Guardian gave Christopher Nolan’s movie about the making of the atomic bomb four out of five stars in its review.

That’s two more than the publication gave Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the other big blockbuster movie dropping on the same day, July 21.

There is a lot more to say about Oppenheimer. Stacked with an almost absurd cast of stars, the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer – adapted from Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s non-fiction book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer – has been amazingly twisted into a three-prong exploration of genius, regret, and historic horror.

Everyone is wondering the same thing; could this be Nolan’s best film so far? He’s directed major epics, including The Dark Knight, Momento, Tenet, Inception, Interstellar, and The Prestige, so this being his most epic film to date would be quite something.

The Guardian called it “extraordinary” and a “gigantic, post-detonation study, a PTSD narrative procedure filling the giant screen with a million agonised fragments”, while also noting its gaping flaw:

The main event is that terrifying first demonstration: the Trinity nuclear test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, when Oppenheimer is said to have silently pondered (and later intoned on TV) Vishnu’s lines from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds …”

This is the big bang, and no one could have made it bigger or more overwhelming than Nolan. He does this without simply turning it into an action stunt – although this movie, for all its audacity and ambition, never quite solves the problem of its own obtuseness: filling the drama at such length with the torment of genius-functionary Oppenheimer at the expense of showing the Japanese experience and the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mashable, too, notes that Nolan tackled a “massively ambitious endeavour” with Oppenheimer, “unfurling a story that not only includes dozens of characters, decades of real events, complicated political debates, and dizzying scientific explanations”, while lamenting the troubling omission:

On one hand, showing the devastation that the atomic bomb had on Japan and its people might have risked turning real-life human horror into gaudy summer spectacle. In Oppenheimer, the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is discussed in statistics of the dead and terse descriptions of their agony. At one point, Oppenheimer goes to a lecture, where a slideshow of the fallout is shown, but Nolan keeps it offscreen, focusing instead on Murphy’s expression, which is restrained but presumably remorseful.

The BBC, awarded the atomic bomb epic with five full stars, noting that Nolan’s “magnificent story of a tragic American genius” could be his most “mature” work to date.

Rolling Stone called Oppenheimer a “Starry Biopic” that is “Big, Loud, and a Must-See”, adding that the “extensive, exhaustive portrait of the “father of the atomic bomb” is both thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and not enough”.

The reviews are mostly dumbfounded by the performance of Cillian Murphy as the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds, while also acknowledging the surprising standout performance by Matt Damon, along with the vivacious Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife, and the talented Florence Pugh as his mistress.

The cast is more star-studded than that, but you’re going to have to go see for yourself when Oppenheimer hits theatres tomorrow, July 21.

[sources:guardian&mashable&bbc&rollingstone]