The countdown is on until Christopher Nolan’s next film detonates. The first trailer just arrived for Oppenheimer, the Dark Knight and Tenet director’s biopic of the man who developed the first atomic bomb.
In a hypnotically looping YouTube livestream, Cillian Murphy is glimpsed in the trailer as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the real-life scientist who led the Manhattan Project to build a bomb for the US during World War II. Over images of roiling fire and flame (and a hat), various people offer their opinions of Oppenheimer: “The most important man who ever lived” and “The man who moved the earth” — but another voice asks, “how could a man who saw so much be so blind?”
The all-star cast includes Florence Pugh, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, Rami Malek, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Jason Clarke, David Dastmalchian, Alden Ehrenreich, Casey Affleck, James Remar and Tom Conti as Albert Einstein.
Like many of the cast, Murphy previously worked with Nolan in Batman Begins and the Dark Knight movies, as well as Inception and Dunkirk. Murphy recently starred in A Quiet Place Part 2 and the latest season of TV hit Peaky Blinders, which will also be followed by a movie in 2023.
Nolan’s film is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It’s being released by Universal Pictures after Nolan’s long-standing relationship with Warner Bros seems to have been torpedoed when Warner released his time-twisting blockbuster Tenet on streaming service HBO Max.
