Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is very different from his past works as it’s based on a true story and real-life characters, but it’s still covering one of Nolan’s biggest obsessions. The works of Christopher Nolan have become widely popular thanks to his narrative and visual style and for the themes he usually addresses in them, such as memory, time, and identity, even mixing them with other themes sometimes to bring complex and exciting stories. Thanks to this and more, there’s always a lot of speculation around Nolan’s next projects, and he’s now surprising the audience with Oppenheimer.

What is making Oppenheimer stand out from other Nolan works is that it’s a biographical drama, and it’s the first of his movies to be based on a true story and real-life people, though that doesn’t mean that it can’t have all those typical Nolan elements. Based on the book American Prometheus, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer 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 are Emily Blunt as Katherine Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock.

Although Nolan has already included real-life people in his stories but in fictionalized versions, and has taken real-life events and told them through fictional characters, Oppenheimer is his first full-on biopic, so it’s expected to be different from his previous movies – however, everything points at Oppenheimer continuing one of Nolan’s biggest trends: the subject of time.

Why Christopher Nolan Is So Obsessed With Time & What It Means For Oppenheimer


The theme that Christopher Nolan uses more often in his movies is time, which has been at the core of some of his most popular works, such as Memento, Inception, and Tenet. In an interview with NPR in 2020, Nolan explained where his obsession with time comes from, sharing that “time is the most cinematic of subjects” because, through the camera, people can see time backward, slowed down, sped up, etc. Speaking to AP News in 2018, Nolan said time is a “misunderstood element of the medium”, and that audiences can sit at the cinema, look at the same screen for the same amount of time, and “be watching something that represents hours” or years, thus making way for a bunch of creative ways in which time can be used in movies. Nolan has definitely gotten creative with the use of time in his movies, either addressing it in very subtle ways (as in Dunkirk, which has a ticking sound), making it the center of the story (as seen in Memento, which is told backward), or mixing it with other elements as he did in Inception with the complexity of dreams.

Now, although plot details and more about Oppenheimer haven’t been revealed yet and the first teaser doesn’t reveal much either, there’s one important detail that shows it will deal with time to an extent: the countdown. The first Oppenheimer teaser includes a countdown, and with the creation of the atomic bomb being at the core of the story, it makes sense that Nolan has once more made time an important subject in one of his stories. Oppenheimer’s work during the race to create the atomic bomb and his contributions to war and the world in general are a perfect scenario for Nolan to play with time again, and it wouldn’t be surprising if he uses this element to build suspense throughout Oppenheimer.