A Surprising Positive Review of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

The film critic David Walsh has reviewed for his publication Nolan's Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), Dunkirk (2017) and Nolan's last, Tenet (2021).

During that nearly two decade period, during which the rest of the critical community has been consistently breathless in its praises for anything and everything Nolan does, Walsh has been consistently, strongly, negative in his appraisal of Nolan's work. I might add that as the reviews of the Batman films and Dunkirk in particular indicate, Walsh was particularly unimpressed with the films' handling of political and historical themes--exactly what happen to be at the heart of Oppenheimer.

The result was that I expected that, if Walsh reviewed the film their appraisal would be an utter evisceration of the film--even before the reviews of the movie were in, and certainly after I read what Mark Hughes had to say of the film's deficiencies (as he read them).

Instead Walsh, in a review--co-written with J. Cooper--offers very high praise of the film in what seems to me the most surprising review of his that I have ever read.

While Walsh and his colleague acknowledge the film's "genuine weaknesses" (in this case not the usual complaints about the sex, but rather the handling of the history that most critics cannot be bothered with, like the ways in which a biographical approach clashes with a historical one), Oppenheimer is in their view "a serious and appropriately disturbing film about nuclear weapons and nuclear war" telling an "engrossing story" that "is intended to leave viewers shaken, and . . . succeeds in that" as a film with a real critical edge, and real force. Indeed, in an extreme contrast with Hughes' view of the film, and Walsh's view of Nolan's earlier works, the review remarks Nolan's "treating many of the weighty historical issues contained in Robert Oppenheimer's life with sincerity and urgency" --all as, testifying to some artistry here, the filmmaker managed to make a movie "quite pointed" about "the horrors of nuclear weapons and the threat they represent to humanity" while "eschew[ing] didacticism." Particularly astonishing in a director so often associated with the right (not least because of that third Batman film, in which, as Walsh's colleague Adam Haig put it in his review of that movie, Nolan "defends plutocracy, associates the working class with violent murderers and thugs, identifies revolution with terrorism" in a "condescending, cruel, misanthropic, ugly and unreal" piece of "artistic and social falseness and pseudo-gravitas"), this review specifically commends Nolan for "treat[ing] honestly" the "scenes of left-wing intellectual life in the 1930s and 40s."

Thus: after dispraise for the film where I had not expected it (from a Nolan fan writing for a mainstream publication), praise where I had not expected it (from a reviewer who has been anything but a Nolan fan, from a publication whose editorial line has been consistently critical of Nolan and the politics associated with him).

At the very least the movie is garnering surprising reactions from serious critics who have followed Nolan's work for a long time. And if nothing else there seems to me something to be said for that, while it may well be that, whatever Oppenheimer's limitations, to go by the reviews of both Hughes and Walsh, Nolan is doing that very, very rare thing among those to whom the box office and the critics have been so consistently and profusely good for so long--stretching himself as an artist, however one regards the result.