The first official trailer for Christopher Nolan’s next epic, Oppenheimer, has been revealed seven months ahead of release.
The film will follow Cillian Murphy as Robert J. Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, which in the 1940s was tasked with and succeeded at developing the first atomic bomb. It is the first film to be shot with IMAX cameras in black-and-white — as Nolan revealed recently, though, only parts of the film will be in black and white. From what we’ve seen so far, it looks like these will be scenes that take place after the detonation of the bomb. Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects about the upcoming film will be to see what Nolan, a British filmmaker, and Murphy, a British actor, have to say about one of the most controversial moments in U.S. history.
The detonation of the atomic bomb was the cause of death of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in August of 1945, but it also put a prompt end to the Pacific War that could have lasted many more months, if not years. On the other hand, it was an unprecedented scientific achievement that moved research on quantum physics decades into the future, and, among many other consequences, it was the uncalled-for reason for the creation of CERN, the largest physics research center in the world that has the ultimate goal of making scientific breakthroughs for the purpose of peace. It is also the place where the HTTP protocols were set up in 1989 by Tim Berners Lee, the foundation of what we now know as the Internet.
Oppenheimer was written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The (insane) cast includes Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt as his on-screen wife, Kitty, Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party of the United States who had an affair with Oppenheimer, Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the Hungarian physicist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb and a member of the Manhattan Project, Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Rami Malek, Matt Damon, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, David Krumholtz, Jason Clarke, and David Dastmalchian, among many others.
It will be released in theaters July 21, 2023, the same day as Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, starring Margot Robbie.