Spectacle makes giddy audience out of many of us, whether we readily it it to each other or not. When something spectacular occurs or is anticipated, people flock to it like a newly erected maypole. The intention is rarely to assemble and render the thing trivial—rather, it is to revel with one another in amusement; to participate in conversations with strangers about something other than the day’s street traffic or the evening news. 

With the arrival of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a colossus of a motion picture captured on 600 pounds of film and outfitted with an ensemble of beloved character actors, spectacle has been on the brain. The film centers the titular physicist and father of the atomic age, J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy, never better) as he transforms from Berkeley intelligentsia’s Jewish academic darling to WWII-era US government scientist and celebrity, to an expendable scientific mind—rallying against nuclear proliferation and salvaging his reputation amidst McCarthy-era anti-communist sentiment.

“It was a challenge, but an exciting one,” Murphy tells us of his responsibility to embody Oppenheimer. “Because he is so complicated and contradictory and almost unknowable, emotionally and morally. I did as much reading as I could and there’s lots of stuff on YouTube of him talking. Not that many interviews. I did some of it from the outside-in at the beginning, getting his physicality, voice and silhouette right. It was a long process, but we went at it slowly, methodically.”

The similarities between Damon and Nolan in their off-screen upbringings come to the fore in this process as well. “Chris and I are the same age,” Damon continues. “We grew up in the Cold War and this was part of our childhood; it didn’t go anywhere. We all still live with this reality that this Sword of Damocles is over our heads at all times. It’s almost too much to think about. When Chris says that Oppenheimer’s the most important person to ever live, that’s true.”

In order to embody Groves, Damon had to imagine “a world when there weren’t nuclear weapons, and what was that like.” He explains: “I have one line, ‘This is the most important thing that’s ever happened in the history of humanity,’ because it is… How naive Oppenheimer was to think that you could control the genie once it was out of the bottle.”

Nolan’s film is preoccupied with these greater questions of scientific and political legacy after the bomb is birthed into the world. Yet for some audiences, the paranoia and exploration of ‘the world after’ have been criticized as a superfluous extension of the film’s runtime—as if showcasing the bomb’s detonation in IMAX was the purpose of the film.

Neil Bahadur writes, “The last hour does seem to be divisive with some people but it’s where the movie’s tone of ambivalence finally explodes into an air of guilt and paranoia—and as importantly tracks the process of which a massive technological development becomes a part of global hegemony.” Ana V elaborates: "This film goes beyond the war, beyond the bomb. It is a character study that ponders on the curse that is brilliance, on the burden that is hindsight, on the regret that can forever overshadow our pride.”

Meanwhile, Darren Carver-Balsiger speaks to the science of the film and the turmoil of the central scientist. “Oppenheimer presents a man caught in a world of moral horror,” he writes. “He never apologizes, but he never lives peacefully. The loud, overbearing soundscape creates an intensity that never stops. This is a film of existential dread, focused on the ways we have enabled ourselves to destroy each other. Scientists may believe they exist outside morality when thinking in the abstract, but in practice discoveries come with responsibility.”

Damon’s musings on a world before nuclear threat harken back to a moment in Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women (in which Barbie director Greta Gerwig co-stars). During a memory sequence chock-full of punk memorabilia and topographical land maps, Annette Bening’s character, a middle-aged mother in 1970s Southern California, waxes via voiceover about the differences between her generation and that of her teenage son. She says, “It’s impossible to imagine that kids will stop dreaming about nuclear war, and have nightmares about the weather.”

Nearly 50 years out from that film’s setting, we are contending with a hybridized version of those fearful dreams. Making movies, watching movies and engaging in other art forms about these aspects—ones that as Damon aptly named are sometimes “too much too think about”—is how we’ve come to process this shared reality: one built for us by men behind closed doors. Perhaps spectacle or chatterings about celebrity are our way of making light, deriving pleasure from the macabre subjects of our conversations in the time we do possess.

There’s an insidiousness quietly gnashing at the joy of the double feature, even while the box office receipts confirm the wisdom of new IP rather than a seventh installment; of big, important, fun and star-studded stories; of blockbusters made by women. Once again, that is seldom an intentional attempt to trivialize or a reason to scoff altogether at the sardonic wit of the internet, but rather a reflection of the way we’ve learned to stomach a reality constantly shrouded in the threat of nuclear war and climate destruction. A threat that, hard as it is now to believe, did not always punctuate life on Earth; a threat indelibly linked to efforts spearheaded by J. Robert Oppenheimer.

In a world where scientists are hired by this state or that to develop new weapons or vaccines as quickly as possible, then asked to step out of frame (or willingly underminded) for the victory pictures, is it any wonder that a movie about the industrialization of scientific achievements, the insatiable appetite of world powers for robust armaments, the vitriolic distrust of political systems that imagine human beings as something other than capital to be exploited or collateral to discard, would be met by us with clip-art and pressed suits and hand-rolled cigarettes? (Yes, of course the internet has documented Oppie’s martini recipe.) As Damon tells me, “That’s the world we all live in now, that we were born into. We accept it as it’s our reality.”

Much of this is echoed in Ana V’s review, “Oppenheimer is a masterful work of art that could very well be one of the most important pieces of cinema of this century, one that stares you in the face and forces you to come to with the enormity of man’s greed, the reality of their cruelty, and the disastrous implications of what can come from their futile attempts at playing God, at having the illusion of control over that which was never supposed to be controlled.”

Though double-feature weekend (and its follow-up, again record-breaking, weekend) has come and ed, Barbenheimer will likely continue to enrapture (or effectively disillusion) filmgoers in theaters across the globe for weeks and weeks to come. My hope is that new seeds germinate out of that history-making weekend’s discourse, encouraging us to engage with the more complex and difficult questions that surround the pictures, as uncomfortable to process as they may be. May we ask questions about what Oppenheimer means, if anything, to people nearer to the history of the Pacific; for whom Nagasaki and Hiroshima are not theoretical talking points or even regrettable military stratagems of the past but rather recurrent birth defects still hiccuping across living generations. 

And in the spirit of Nolan’s latest, may we ask questions about what we are doing to each other and where our attention lies. In five years, will we that the cast of Oppenheimer left their London premiere in solidarity with Screen Actors Guild (SAG) strike—or that the calling of the strike was elongated so that the premiere could occur in the first place?

With time, the implications of this weekend will slowly evaporate from our dinner-table conversations and we’ll return to the evening news, the weather, the endless scroll. But perhaps we can try to pause before scrounging for the next technicolor maypole to promenade around.