Oppenheimer Opening Five Minutes Released Online

With only a week to go before Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer lands in theaters, Universal Pictures has released the first five minutes of the new movie online. Between the film’s various trailers and featurettes, and now this opening five minutes, fans have still only seen a glimpse of what the three-hour film has in store for audiences. As with most Christopher Nolan films, Oppenheimer looks to be another cinematic event that will be best experienced in theaters, so even with all these looks at the film we’ve been given, seeing these sequences on the big screen will still feel entirely fresh. You can check out the opening five minutes below before Oppenheimer lands in theaters on July 21st.

The new movie is based on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which chronicled the figure and his development of the first atomic bomb. Writer of that book, Kai Bird, recently shared his reaction to witnessing the film’s accomplishments.

“I am, at the moment, stunned and emotionally recovering from having seen it,” Bird recalled of the film, per Variety. “I think it is going to be a stunning artistic achievement, and I have high hopes it will actually stimulate a national, even global conversation about the issues that Oppenheimer was desperate to speak about — about how to live in the atomic age, how to live with the bomb and about McCarthyism — what it means to be a patriot, and what is the role for a scientist in a society drenched with technology and science, to speak out about public issues.”  

Films like Tenet, Interstellar, and Inception allowed Nolan to push boundaries with his filmmaking techniques, and while Oppenheimer will be depicting earth-shattering destruction, he previously recalled why he wanted to embrace traditional filmmaking methods to convey the chaos.

“I mean, I’ve done a lot of explosions in a lot of films,” Nolan explained to Empire Magazine. “But there is something very unique and particular about being out in a desert in the middle of the night with a big cast, and really just doing some enormous explosions and capturing that. You couldn’t help but come back to this moment when they were doing this on the ultimate scale, that in the back of their minds they knew there was this possibility that they would set fire to the atmosphere. It was pretty amazing to engage in that kind of tension.”    

The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Academy Award nominee Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence. Oppenheimer also stars Oscar® winner Rami Malek and reunites Nolan with eight-time Oscar-nominated actor, writer, and filmmaker Kenneth Branagh. 

Oppenheimer lands in theaters on July 21st.

Are you looking forward to the new film? Let us know in the comments!