The new blockbuster by Christopher Nolan shines with a star-studded cast, but is dulled by its flimsy footing in history

Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer, filmed on 70mm especially for IMAX, is two movies in one, or perhaps even three, which explains the excessive length. The first part is the weakest, telling the story of J Robert Oppenheimer’s background as a physicist in the 1920s: his three years studying physics at Cambridge, his time at Göttingen – then the centre of German quantum physics – and his problems with mental health. This could have been fascinating, but Nolan omits the revolution in physics and the background of our protagonist, who was the son of a wealthy German Jewish immigrant.

What follows is much more powerful, the story of how Oppenheimer was hired to lead the team that built the atomic bomb at Los Alamos – the famous Manhattan Project. This is what made him the most famous scientist in America, after Einstein. The personal is intercut with the political to show how Oppenheimer became one of the many victims of McCarthyism, leading to his decline and fall.

The film has many strengths, perhaps especially its terrific cast led by Cillian Murphy (Peaky Blinders) as Oppenheimer. Emily Blunt plays his turbulent wife Kitty, Florence Pugh his former lover Jean, Matt Damon is the bluff General Groves and Robert Downey Jr is his right-wing nemesis Louis Strauss, plus there are cameos from Tom Conti as Einstein, and Kenneth Branagh and Rami Malek as fellow physicists Niels Bohr and David Hill. It raises important questions about the morality of science and gives due prominence to the McCarthyite witch hunt in the early 1950s.

But despite the hype, there are serious weaknesses too. As history of science, this is poor and you would be better off watching the BBC’s drama-documentary, The Trials of Oppenheimer (available to stream until December), with a brilliant performance by David Strathairn – much better than Murphy – and an excellent cast of historians. Apart from Edward Teller and Bohr, it's hard to keep track of the famous European physicists recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. You would never guess that at its peak in June 1944 it employed almost 130,000 workers and, except for the two romantic leads, there's little sense of the role of women at Los Alamos. This is almost 40 years after questions about gender and science were raised by the great BBC drama Life Story (The Race for the Double Helix in the US).

Nolan is even more tone-deaf to issues of Jewishness and antisemitism. This was crucial to the history of McCarthyism. It wasn’t just Oppenheimer. Think of Arthur Miller, Edward G Robinson, John Garfield and the Rosenbergs. Many of the key victims were Jews. Nolan is just as uninterested in the fact that so many of the great physicists were Jewish refugees. It would be worth contrasting the film with Tom Keve’s terrific book Triad: The Physicists, the Analysts, the Kabbalists.

Oppenheimer has already received huge critical acclaim and will doubtless win many awards. Some of this will be deserved, but much of this is more about the laziness and historical ignorance of our current generation of film critics.

By David Herman

Photos courtesy of Universal Pictures

Oppenheimer is out now, with standard screenings until the autumn and IMAX showings until Sunday 6 August. oppenheimermovie.co.uk