For Christopher Nolan, cinema is an “
audiovisual experience
.” To know what he means, one needs to watch Oppenheimer. Nolan anticipates Oppenheimer’s critics who fault what they see as an underdeveloped plot: “It’s a very popular fallacy . . . that all that matters is the scale of the story being told.” The emphasis on plot and characters, he asserts, is at odds with the history of cinema. And he’s right.