Christopher Nolan’s next project, Oppenheimer, is different from his previous works, but it also pays off an interesting career trend and can still surprise the audience as he always does. Christopher Nolan has earned the respect and praise of critics and viewers with his signature narrative and visual style along with the themes he often addresses in his works, such as memory, time, and identity, which he has sometimes mixed with other themes, as he did with dreams in Inception back in 2010. This has led to speculation and anticipation around Nolan’s projects, and his newest work is taking his career on a slightly different route.

After the critical success of Tenet, Nolan is leaving the sci-fi genre aside for a while and focusing on the genre of biographical drama with Oppenheimer. The movie tells the story of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project, and his contributions that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Also starring in Oppenheimer are Emily Blunt as Katherine Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock.

Related: Why Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer Is In Black & White

Oppenheimer is unlike any other Nolan project as it’s the first time he makes a biopic, as so far he hasn’t made any movie centered on a real person, though he has included fictionalized versions of real-life people (as he did with David Bowie's Nikola Tesla on The Prestige) or taken real events and told them through fictional characters (as happened with Dunkirk) – and yet, Oppenheimer will pay off this Nolan career trend, even if it’s also a first for him.

What We Know About Oppenheimer's Story

Oppenheimer Trailer World Forever Changes

Nolan’s Oppenheimer is based on the book American Prometheus, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and as mentioned above, it will follow real-life theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer during the race to create the atomic bomb and how his contributions changed not only war but the world in general. Due to Oppenheimer’s role in the Manhattan Project (the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons), he’s credited as one of the “fathers of the atomic bomb”. Once the war was over, Oppenheimer became chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and lobbied for international control of nuclear power to avoid nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and he later opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. It’s unclear exactly how much of Oppenheimer’s life the movie will cover, but it will surely look at it beyond his destructive contributions to the war.

Oppenheimer Probably Won't Be A Traditional Biopic

why is oppenheimer black and white

Although Oppenheimer is Nolan’s first biopic and thus the first movie of his to be based on a real-life person and events, it probably won’t be a traditional biopic, simply because Nolan always comes up with something to surprise the audience. Oppenheimer could explore the above-mentioned typical themes in Nolan’s movies but focused on the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer, or it could follow the steps of Dunkirk and add some fictional characters to enhance the dramatic charge of the story. Christopher Nolan’s career has been slowly but surely building up to him making a biopic with those previous additions of real-life characters and events to his movies, but Oppenheimer will surely still have those distinctive elements that make a Nolan movie stand out.

Next: Oppenheimer Can Fix Nolan’s 1 Filmmaking Weakness

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