One man led the project that could ultimately doom all of mankind one day. J. Robert Oppenheimer gave humanity the nuclear bomb. Is he history’s greatest monster or the person who helped save it from an even greater evil? Christopher Nolan’s next film starring Cillian Murphy as the infamous theoretical physicist will bring his story to the screen. But the intense first full trailer for Oppenheimer shows the movie is unlikely to answer that question for us because an answer probably doesn’t exist.
Oppenheimer am become trailer, to quote Oppenheimer himself. A pretty damn good trailer, too, in what is our best look yet at writer-director Christopher Nolan’s next film. Universal Pictures says it will bring “audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.”
Nolan has put together an incredible cast to tell the scientist’s story in the movie. And we see teases of how they’ll come together in Oppenheimer. Starring opposite Murphy—in his first starring role for the director—is Emily Blunt as his wife, the biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Matt Damon joins them as General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey Jr. will play Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
Florence Pugh also stars as psychiatrist Jean Tatlock in Oppenheimer. Benny Safdie is another theoretical physicist from the project, Edward Teller. And the movie features Michael Angaran, Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Dylan Arnold, David Krumholtz, Alden Ehrenreich, and Matthew Modine.
Oppenheimer is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin.
Nolan also decided a story this explosive needed the biggest screen possible. He filmed it in a combination of IMAX 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography. And the movie includes, for “the first time ever, sections in IMAX black and white analogue photography.”
Oppenheimer bursts into theaters this summer on July 21. Just don’t expect to get any clear answers about its main subject when it does.