By 
There’s a moment in the new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s wartime thriller Oppenheimer which felt very out of step with what everyone’s been expecting from Oppenheimer. You expect time to be melted, and Nazis to be foiled, and to get really into some discourse about the state of the sound mixing.
You do not expect Matt Damon’s Lieutenant General Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, to say things like, “Let’s go recruit some scientists,” through his moustache before getting into a waiting car.
This isn’t war movie stuff; this is classic heist movie stuff. They’re getting the gang together. Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer is the Danny Ocean of the whole thing, gathering up collaborators and putting the plan into action. Pop a dripping hamburger in the hands of Groves and he could be Brad Pitt’s Rusty.
They’ve even got your classic sage figure who needs to be tracked down to some unlikely location so that the gang pick up some esoteric knowledge that they can’t do the heist without. In The Prestige, Nolan hooked up magician Angier with David Bowie’s Nikola Tesla; in Oppenheimer, Tom Conti will sprinkle some Albert Einstein on proceedings.
Yes, there are a few more than 11 scientists working on the bomb. Yes, it’s a secret lab in the desert which looks more like a kind of patriotic house-arrest than the sort of working environment a scientist might usually put up with. “We keep everyone there until it’s done,” says Oppenheimer, his Los Alamos research facility feeling more like something Dr Julius No might have knocked together for a corporate away day.
But this trailer really does make Oppenheimer look very caper-shaped. There’s the rehearsal of the plan, probably with chalkboard diagrams to explain exactly how it’s all going to work – it seems reasonable to expect a bit of that from Oppenheimer, as well as the whizzy practical effects Nolan’s using to simulate an atomic explosion – and the ticking down of the days and hours before it’s go time. It’ll look like it’s not going to work, until it does.
Nolan’s done a heist movie before, of course: actually, Inception was more like three heist movies happening at the same time, each more precarious than the last. But Oppenheimer would be all the more interesting because Nolan is already leading a sortie into hostile territory by making a World War Two movie in the first place.
All Quiet on the Western Front won four Oscars this year, but it was proof that World War Two has been replaced by World War One as cinema’s favourite war. The sequel used to be the one that everyone made massively successful films about. Good guys, bad guys, big stakes, near limitless scope to plonk your action anywhere you like, and a happy ending – it made sense.
Look back over the last decade of Best Picture nominees, though, and there’s a dearth of top tier World War Two films. Of the few war movies which were nominated, only Hacksaw Ridge really fits the classic mould: moviemakers are either going modern or trying to find a unique storytelling hook for their war stories. Top Gun: Maverick had some planes in it but little actual war, while Sam Mendes’ pseudo-one-take thriller 1917 was about a boy trying to find out exactly where the exact bit of war he was after might be. Darkest Hour was a political chess match rather than a war movie, while Nolan’s own World War Two movie Dunkirk had more actual war in it but was about the bit of the war where Britain spent most of its time going ‘Oh, shit’ and pegging it toward Calais.
Audiences generally haven’t gone for recent classically styled World War Two movies like Tom Hanks’ U-boat drama Greyhound, but the grinding misery of the war in Ukraine chimed with the muddy, grey horror which All Quiet on the Western Front painted so harrowingly.
Now, it might very well end up that the reason this Oppenheimer trailer looks so little like a time-warping Nolan movie is because it’s a 186-second trailer cut and shunted together into a shape which looks familiar to people who see two films a year. That’s entirely plausible. But even then, the fact that the two-films-per-annum crowd might be best wooed to a summer blockbuster war movie by making it look very little like a war movie says something in itself.
It’s hard to pin down one reason or another for why we’re apparently a bit bored of straight-up Nazi-punching adventures, but perhaps more than anything they just feel slightly out of step with a confused, jaded era. And given that, whatever shape Nolan’s story takes he’ll be warping time in more ways than his movies usually do.
