“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” was the line uttered by nuclear physicist and father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer as he gazed upon the first detonation of the weapon of mass destruction. Cillian Murphy illustrates how that detonation could very well have destroyed the world in a tense first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s latest project Oppenheimer. Murphy plays the titular scientist in the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin which explores the conflict and politics surrounding the creation of the nuclear bomb and the complicated man at the center of it all.
The trailer starts off by introducing Oppenheimer as a troubled man whose flaws are ignored in favor of his brilliance. Reluctantly asked to help end the Second World War, he points to one hope – a nuclear weapon developed in secret in the desert with the destructive power to dissuade anyone from continuing to fight. A haunting score plays as he looks over the large-scale development of the bomb, imagining a pillar of fire engulfing their enemies and ending the fighting in one swift move. The only pushback he gets from higher-ups is that the detonation has a non-zero chance of not just destroying the U.S.’s enemies, but also the world itself by ruining the atmosphere. A timer ticks down, and the music slowly builds as the catastrophic consequences become clear and the launch nears. Nolan denies us his grand non-CGI bomb detonation for now, though, as the countdown hits zero, the trailer teases us with the line, “We all know what happened there.”
To truly capture the scale of Oppenheimer, Nolan managed to get together what may be, on paper, one of the greatest casts ever assembled. Murphy stars opposite Emily Blunt who plays the scientist’s wife Kitty. Also on board the massive cast are Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, Robert Downey Jr., Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Alden Ehrenreich, David Krumholtz, Michael Angarano, and Matthias Schweighöfer among others.
