In
Oppenheimer
, director Christopher Nolan has taken the meticulously researched seven-hundred-page book
American Prometheus,
by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and rendered it into his best film yet. Bird and Sherwin’s Robert J. Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” is a Wilsonian and a humanitarian with an intellectual interest in the “mystic East.” But Nolan’s Oppenheimer is something more: He is a dreamer, a man who smokes more than he sleeps because he is neurotically driven to lift the veil and see into the black hole at the center of being. He is a mystic. But he is also a tragic figure. Driven by an epic desire for knowledge, he brings into the world a tool that is ultimately wrested from him by the greedy and the powerful. In other words, Nolan gives us a story that revives the spirit of the pure tragedy of ancient Greece.