INFINITY

Allan Bryce, Mickey Lewis, John Martin and James Whittington look at some of the very latest 4K UHD, Blu-ray, streaming and soundtrack releases...

OPPENHEIMER (2023) 4KUHD and Blu-ray Universal. Out Now. Cert: 15.

★★★★

Christopher Nolan’s three hour epic is of course a biopic of theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, a man who was dubbed the “father of the atomic bomb.” That’s not a nomde-plume to boast about in light of the huge number of deaths that followed when it led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to be fair Cillian Murphy’s interpretation of the title character is a suitably doleful one.

Nolan is known for his showstopping action set-pieces, which are often best viewed in IMAX on the biggest screens, and therefore audiences queueing up to his latest ‘event’ picture knew that the depiction of an atomic explosion was bound to be well worth waiting for. They had to wade through a lot to get to it though, because this immaculately constructed period piece plays out amid a tangle of time-lines and gives us romance and courtroom drama along the way, weaving in cult of personality stuff from a more modern era.

Murphy’s Oppenheimer is basically Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but of the modern atomic age. Caught up in his quest to push the boundaries of science he realises rather too late that he has created a monster that can cause destruction on a vast scale. Murphy was a good choice to play the lead here, his icy eyes and haunted look a stark contrast to the non-nonsense military types he finds himself working alongside . One of these is Matt Damon’s Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, a tough, non-nonsense character from the General Patton playbook who always looks to be spoiling for a fight. He is Oppenheimer’s military minder and a boorish character to say the least.

The narrative moves us back and forth in time, allowing us to see Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a loner of young scientist, fascinated by quantum science. Ironically leaning to the left in his personal politics, his hatred for anti-fascism and innate genius drove him to develop the A-bomb before the Nazis could.

Then we move forward to the 50s, where we meet an older, disillusioned Oppenheimer, hounded by the McCarthy mob for his Communist connections. He finds himself a celebrity and hates it, finding it pointless. At one point he meets Albert Einstein, played by a sorrowful Tom Conti, who doesn’t seem that happy about his lot in life either. Kenneth Branagh is a bit more upbeat as our hero’s genial scientific hero and mentor Niels Bohr, while Robert Downey Jr is suitably sly and untrustworthy as duplicitous Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss.

The female cast get rather less to sink their teeth into, with Florence Pugh left mainly on the sidelines as Oppenheimer’s mistreated lover Jean Tatlock, and Emily Blunt gets similar short shrift in the narrative as his long-suffering wife, Kitty.

In one of the movie’s best-known quotes, Murphy’s Oppenheimer says a line from the Hindu scripture, the

Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the first atomic bomb test: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It’s not know whether Oppenheimer actually said those words during or after July 1945’s famous Trinity Test, the first time an atomic bomb was detonated. But it is known that Kenneth Bainbridge, director of the Trinity Test who is played in the film by Josh Peck, said: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”