"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds". The countdown is on. The latest images from Christopher Nolan's latest epic have been released, giving us a new look at the film based around the science and the politics of the atomic bomb - Oppenheimer.
The eagerly awaited film is set for release next summer, but Total Film have released some new photographs from the film, which stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist who was behind the design of the original nuclear weapons during World War II. As the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where the weapons were first developed, Oppenheimer would go on to question his own involvement over the power and destruction his weapons caused, while the following years saw him tailed relentlessly by the U.S. Government, who were investigating his associations with the Communist Party.
The film marks Murphy's fifth film with Nolan, after the Dark Knight trilogy, Dunkirk and Inception, although this is the first time he is taking on the role of leading man for the director, and he's supported by an outstanding cast of actors. Emily Blunt plays his wife, Kitty, while also joining the cast are Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, and Gary Oldman. Robert Downey Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, chairman of the US Atomic Enemy Commission, who may end up being the primary antagonist of the film.
The movie is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Nolan has both adapted the screenplay, and produced the film himself. Murphy previously told Variety of his role in the film: “I prepped by doing an awful lot of reading. I’m interested in the man and what [inventing the atomic bomb] does to the individual. The mechanics of it, that’s not really for me — I don’t have the intellectual capability to understand them, but these contradictory characters are fascinating."
The film has been shot for IMAX, as is tradition now for Nolan, as well as partly in black-and-white, by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema who previously collaborated with the director on the features like Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet. The film marks Nolan's first collaboration with Universal, having recently ended a 20 year partnership with Warner Bros. Studios following the release on Tenet in the summer of 2020.
Oppenheimer opens in theaters on July 21, 2023. Catch the new images and trailer down below.
