Following the moderate success of futuristic action fantasy Tenet (2020), director Christopher Nolan explores tumultuous events from the past for his latest 70mm epic, namely the race against time to make a nuclear bomb before the Nazis.

Essentially, it’s a biopic of “the father of the atomic bomb”, American scientist J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), and charts his journey from acclaimed theoretical physicist in the 1930s to recruitment on the Manhattan Project and his appointment as director of the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico where his international community of scientists was tasked with creating a weapon to end the Second World War.

In his sixth appearance in a Nolan film, Murphy takes the lead role for the first time and is joined by an awesome array of talent, ranging from Emily Blunt (as wife Kitty) and Florence Pugh (as leftie lover Jean Tatlock) to Robert Downey Jr as ambitious government adviser Lewis Strauss (pronounced “straws”) and Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer’s straight-talking military minder at Los Alamos. There are choice cameos, too, from the likes of Casey Affleck, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman (as President Harry S Truman) and veteran British actor Tom Conti as Albert Einstein.

Admittedly, the three-hour running time and plethora of scenes with boffins in rooms trying to turn quantum physics into reality could be a challenge for audiences expecting more all-out action. However, the director leavens the verbiage and slow-burning story with sequences of atom-splitting, Kubrick-like magnificence, and seismically effective sound, not least during the tension-filled detonation of that first prototype device.