Director Christopher Nolan has always been clear that he’s not interested in using CGI to flex a big budget or create a spectacle. If possible, he prefers to use practical camera work more often than not to avoid having his work feel wholly unrealistic, employing effects only where necessary to make things feel seamless. With Oppenheimer, however, Nolan took on a massive challenge: recreating the testing of an atomic bomb. Speaking to Collider Editor-in-Chief Steve Weintraub, Nolan said that his latest film not only has a focus on practicality, but it contains “zero” CGI shots.
Considering what Oppenheimer is aiming to do, that may seem quite the stretch to pull off. The film adapts the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin to tell the story of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer – played in the film by the excellent Cillian Murphy – who is widely known as the father of the atomic bomb. Naturally, that means there will be scenes that showcase the devastation of an atomic blast especially when recreating the tests scientists performed in the desert to see the effects of their handiwork.
Already, we knew that at least some of the work was going to be practical. Nolan previously detailed how the Oppenheimer team recreated the Trinity test, the first-ever test explosion of the nuclear bomb in the desert of New Mexico in 1945, entirely without CGI. That alone seemed like a monumental feat considering the logistical planning required to match the brilliance of the explosion described by the onlookers at the time of the real-life blast, but Nolan pulled it off. It should be no shock considering the mountains this team has moved to make the film work, including creating a whole new technology to film the black-and-white sequences in IMAX.
Oppenheimer Is Already Primed to Explode on the Big Screen
With every new detail unveiled about it, Oppenheimer only seems to get bigger and more impressive from a pure filmmaking perspective. Combined with a dream cast that also includes Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh Jack Quaid, Benny Safdie, Rami Malek, Dane DeHaan, Josh Hartnett, Matthew Modine, Kenneth Branagh, David Krumholtz, Michael Angarano, and Alden Ehrenreich, that would be enough to make it one of the blockbusters to look out for. The film has one more thing going for it, however – its rivalry with fellow starry blockbuster Barbie and the viral trend of seeing both as a double feature, “Barbenheimer.”
Since the two are releasing on the same day and could not be more tonally different, it has made for the most fortuitous of circumstances for both films as they feed off of the hype for one another. Both teams have definitely been doing their jobs to hype their respective films with Oppenheimer showcasing its eye-popping visuals and fiery explosions. Safdie has even gone as far as to call the film Nolan‘s best yet, which sets a massively high bar for what audiences are about to see on July 21.
Check out the trailer below to see some of the excellent cinematography of Oppenheimer ahead of its theatrical run.
via Collider