Small men, big bombs. Not for nothing do the three main movers and shakers in writer-director Christopher Nolan’s very magnum opus refer to themselves as “a humble physicist,” “a humble soldier,” and “a humble shoemaker.” (The first is Robert Oppenheimer, director of the American effort to beat the Nazis to weaponized nuclear reactions; the second is Leslie Groves, Oppenheimer’s military overseer; and the third is Lewis Strauss, the former chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, whose confirmation hearings for Secretary of Commerce — long after the bomb’s invention and use — provide the occasion and framework for the time-hopping narrative.) Naturally, none of them mean it, but it's the truth: here, they’re just frail cogs in a mighty historical machine. Robert Oppenheimer may have quoted Shiva when he said, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” but the film treats him as more of a brilliant organizer and pitchman than as a god or even a genius — a brainy strategist in the mold of Steve Jobs. He may get the title — and the cover of Time — but he joins the rest of the characters in the scrum of a story of ordinary men and women caught up in extraordinary times. What they created really did, as the movies like to say, “change the world,” but no one here rises to the level of hero, or even tragic hero, and even the villainy on display is more vanity than anything else. Oh, the humanity, indeed. As a result, the three-hour runtime involves an awful lot of talk about impersonal science and highly personal relations, punctuated by one truly spectacular, overwhelming happening. Nolan is a past master at cutting up events and fitting them together to dramatize the former, and also at the kind of grand-scale visuals that do justice to the latter. But the inevitable affect is somber bordering on sour: a well acted, gorgeously shot downer. (2023) — Matthew Lickona