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Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Dunkirk, Inception) is famous for shooting all of his movies on film. And next month, Cinema 21 and Hollywood Theatre will honor Nolan’s devotion to celluloid (and his resistance to digital cinematography) with film screenings of his World War II epic Oppenheimer.
At Cinema 21 and Cinemagic, Oppenheimer will screen 35 mm film, while the Hollywood will go even bigger with 70 mm screenings. Both theaters will open the movie on Thursday, July 20 (tickets are currently on sale).
Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy (a frequent Nolan collaborator since Batman Begins, in which he played the Scarecrow) as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The sprawling cast also includes Matt Damon (as Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project) and Emily Blunt (as Oppenheimer’s wife, Katherine).
At nearly three hours, Oppenheimer is Nolan’s longest film, with IMAX prints weighing 600 pounds and running 11 miles long. The movie not only tackles Oppenheimer’s scientific career, but his clash with U.S. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) and his romance with Communist Party member Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh).
Weapons of mass destruction are a persistent Nolan theme (in The Dark Knight Rises, Gotham City is nearly obliterated by a nuclear bomb). In fact, he even referenced Oppenheimer in the time-twisting thriller Tenet, which starred John David Washington and Robert Pattinson (who tellingly gifted Nolan a collection of Oppenheimer’s speeches).
With its lengthy running time, disturbing story, and R rating (for “sexuality, nudity, and language,” all of which are usually scarce in Nolan’s films), Oppenheimer will face a difficult battle at the box office, especially since it’s opening against Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
Still, rolling the dice on an ambitious film for grownups is business as usual for the director who once dismissed concerns about Dunkirk’s complexity with two words: “Fuck it.”