Why the Third Act of "Oppenheimer" Didn't Work for Me

and how it takes its whole thing from '90s blockbusters

Note: There are spoilers in this post, but I sincerely doubt they will ruin the film for you.

Recently, I wrote about Saving Private Ryan, a film that tries—and mostly fails—to serve two masters. It chronicles the brutality of war with unsparing rigor, while working to wrench crowd-pleasing moments from its chaos. It was not alone in pursuing this best-of-both-worlds aesthetic. Saving Private Ryan was a product of late ‘90s Hollywood, where it was still possible to make blockbuster films about serious topics. Titanic was one of them. Maybe The English Patient, too. Definitely Forrest Gump. I don’t love these movies, but I’ll take any of them over the corporate garbage that passes for blockbusters in the 2020s. 

I thought about this while I was watching Oppenheimer, which is a mostly stirring work of art that is only held back by its impulse to simplify its story for mass audiences. For the first two hours, it boldly captures the moral complexity of its dual, intertwined subjects: the creation of the atomic bomb and the man who oversaw its production. It achieves this by refusing cheap paths to narrative payoffs at (almost) every turn. The story’s conflicts and contradictions—ya know, the good stuff—are almost never voiced by the characters. Its themes are not expressed explicitly. Instead, they play out in the faces of its characters and the personal disagreements that arise as its harrowing plot plays out. This is master storytelling.

It’s not how blockbusters typically work in 2023. It may not be fair to compare Oppenheimer to a Mission: Impossible movie, but having watched them in close succession, I found it impossible to ignore how they reveal the strengths of the former and the weaknesses of the latter. In Dead Reckoning, the characters are just playthings created for stunts and plot. Several scenes are just expository monologues cut into pieces, with a sliver handed to each character so the audience doesn’t get bored; we still do. In Oppenheimer, even the smallest character feels fully drawn, with a clear (and often complex) motivation connected to their actions and dialogue.

The Mission: Impossible franchise labors to out-do every previous installment with stunts that are more novel, creative, and death-defying, a nearly-impossible task that the filmmakers somehow managed to achieve for six films but has finally begun to peter out in Dead Reckoning, whose action sequences mostly feel ripped from other, superior films. 

Oppenheimer gives us but one explosion, but it’s the best one you’ve ever seen, and the film doesn’t need another. 

It’s a film that projects sound and fury not for their own sake but to support character, plot, and a diligent approach to history that rarely cuts corners to appease our modern sensibilities. There is room here for uncertainties and unknowns. The biggest mystery is Oppenheimer himself, played with purposeful opacity by Cillian Murphy. On the page, Oppenheimer is a cipher, a mess of delightful contradictions. He is brilliant at physics and often clueless at office politics. He is arrogant and altruistic at once. He hurts the people he loves without remorse. He knows precisely what the atomic bomb is being built to do but is shocked by its application. He’s a difficult character to grasp, but Murphy’s face—inscrutable and spellbinding—at least gives us a point of focus. Peering into those crystal blue waters, we can feel the conflicting currents. As we should. He represents a power we still don’t fully understand.  

That’s why the third act feels like such a derailment. There’s this running subplot in the film about Oppenheimer’s communist leanings. As a young man, he attended meetings, where he met his first love Jean (Florence Pugh). She was a true believer. He was merely a curious intellectual with a passion for justice. He never became an official member. But in the years after the dropping of the bomb, Oppenheimer is targeted by anti-Communist crusaders for his anti-war views (and possibly his Jewishness, although the film never goes there), and a secret government hearing is held ostensibly for the renewal of his security clearance. It’s really to discredit him and keep him far away from government business. It’s a witch-hunt much like what we’ve seen in other films about the Red Scare. His friends, colleagues, and relatives are badgered by a hostile board of inquisitors, who tar him with old associations that mean little to him in the present. 

Once again we are reminded of the studio films of the 1990s, when courtroom dramas were so popular that even non-courtroom dramas—like Scent of a Woman, JFK, and Quiz Show—ended with a trial scene or something like it. A few years later, there was The Aviator, whose ending Oppenheimer most closely resembles. It’s also a film about a complex figure, charismatic but often unlikeable, who the film reduces to a martyr in the final act by setting him down in a familiar underdog narrative. It’s particularly galling in Oppenheimer because it’s an anti-communist inquisition, and we’ve been conditioned through cinema (and history itself) to understand anyone being interrogated in one of those as a hero against the forces of fascism.

Maybe that’s what Oppenheimer was, but it’s not what Oppenheimer needs. The end of the film is rousing, but it feels cheap when compared to the hard, exploratory work of the previous two hours. Almost like a different movie altogether. Most films of its kind put history in a box. Oppenheimer blows up that box—literally and figuratively—with a resulting explosion so beautiful and terrifying we can ignore the part where they try to put it back together.