The hype around Barbenheimer has been as deafening as a nuclear bomb. Two Oscar-nominated directors releasing starkly opposite films at the same time? Initial proposals for double-features, costumed watch parties, and endless memes were fun but, to this reviewer, quickly became exhausting. And because I wanted to watch Oppenheimer in its full IMAX 70mm glory, an option at just one (fully-booked) theatre in all of New York State, I was frankly tired of both films when I finally managed to secure double-feature tickets three weeks after their release. 

By the time I was seated for two showings in the AMC Lincoln Square, dressed in pastel florals (Barbie) and a dark suit (Oppenheimer), the former film had grossed $1 billion worldwide, the latter had passed the $500 million mark, and I was pretty sick of hearing about both.

So maybe it's because I was coming in skeptical, but Oppenheimer starts on rocky footing. The film's protagonist, American physicist and "father of the atomic bomb" J. Robert Oppenheimer, is introduced as a brilliant yet distracted young student at Cambridge. (Irish actor Cillian Murphy plays Oppenheimer throughout the film, from early 20s to late 50s, but good makeup makes this believable.) His professor chastises him publicly for a laboratory error, to which Oppenheimer injects an apple with cyanide in an attempt to poison the professor; an extremely unlikely turn of events finds the fruit ending up in the hands of Danish physicist Niels Bohr (oddly-cast man-of-all-accents Kenneth Branagh), who Oppenheimer saves from death at the last second.

Writer and director Christopher Nolan's kitschy humor, fast-paced retorts, and biopic-classic coincidences and blurred realism dominate arcs like this throughout the first section of the film, as Oppenheimer goes to Germany as a student, returns to Berkeley as a professor, and becomes more of a minor scientific celebrity back in the US. 

Nolan's lifelong weak spot, his female characters (poorly-written from Marion Cotillard's Miranda Tate in The Dark Knight Rises to Anne Hathaway's Brand in Interstellar), is glaring in the movie's first section too, in which unbelievably cringeworthy dialogue given to unstable communist femme fatale Jean Tatlock (an unfortunate Florence Pugh) and Oppenheimer's wife Kitty (an only slightly more fortunate Emily Blunt) is hard to sit through.

But once Oppenheimer is offered the Manhattan Project job, all of these concerns dissipate. Nolan's script immediately gets more serious, approaching the topic with the gravity it deserves; female characters fall by the wayside (better for them than the alternative); and the complex web of characters in government, the military, and the scientific community is woven beautifully. And after the film's momentum picks up, it never stops, first accelerating at a feverish pace towards the Trinity test and the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, then pausing only momentarily before spending the final act depicting the sweaty-palmed extrajudicial interrogation of Oppenheimer at the hands of political opponents and Cabinet-member-to-be Lewis Strauss (a superb Robert Downey, Jr.). 

The bulk of the film, then, grapples brilliantly with some familiar Nolan themes and some new ones: the crushing weight of genius; the terrifying beauty of mathematics, science, and nature; the role of the individual; the interpretation of history; moral justifications to oneself and to others; trust and betrayal. 

Murphy and Downey, Jr. are the vessels for most of these investigations — and both are at the top of their game — but the supporting cast elevates their work even further, including an always-eating David Krumholz, an ethically nudging Benny Safdie, a terrifyingly accusatory Jason Clarke, icy cold Casey Affleck, a bug-eyed Rami Malek, a fast-learning Alden Ehrenreich, and Gary Oldman in an insane (but good!) surprise cameo. Only Matt Damon is seriously miscast; his star power outside the film is distracting, and certain line reads reminded me viscerally of his role in Air from earlier in the summer.

In general, the acting work is upstaged only by the visual effects, score, and sound editing. Cutaways to atoms, waves, quantum particles, stars, and planets — each matched with immersive and wonderfully loud sound effects — convince us of Oppenheimer's singular vision and tortured mind up until the bomb test itself, whose practically-done explosions and sound are hair-raising. Meanwhile, the beautiful black-and-white scenes both help the audience know when we've transitioned between places and times (making sense of yet another scene of old dudes discussing science!) and are visually stunning. No wonder that KODAK created the photographic film specifically for the film, and the Nolan severed his relationship with Warner Brothers when they suggested not releasing this masterpiece in theaters. All of this film in IMAX is unmatched.

Ludwig Göransson's score is outstanding, too. I'd expect nothing less from the producer of Because the Internet and composer of Black Panther, but his work here is truly singular, and accentuates every plot point and keeps the film's three-hour runtime feeling fresh and fast.

Even considering a struggling first act, Oppenheimer is Nolan's best work of the last decade, and is a sweeping success at a massive, explosive scale.