bongo-6

There are not many films made, these days, which will become classics, in the traditional sense, but I'll say 'Oppenheimer' is one. We all know it's about the bomb: but when the bomb goes off, there is plenty of time left, as the film is also about the aftermath - which we are still living with today.

There is not one bad camera shot in the whole picture, good framing and some terrific performances from the cast.

The terrific cinemaphotography is by Hoyte Van Hoytema, who has worked with Christopher Nolan before on 'Tenet' and 'Interstellar' to name but two.

You may get a little way through the story, when you realise who the various actors who are playing the roles - some are cameos - and there is a great performance by Robert Downey Jr, who plays Lewis Strauss, who seems obsessed with the quick-word Einstein had with J. Robert Oppenheimer. When people stop a conversation as you approach them, they must be talking about you, as every paranoic person knows, but sometimes they are talking about something more important.

The movie jumps about in time, there are very few clues as to when certain scenes happen, but the excellent make up - and maybe FX - helps, and in the end it all comes together.

We see Oppenheimer in many times of his life, his affairs, his obsession with another woman, Jean Tatlock, sympathetically played by Florence Pugh, a woman his wife, Emily Blunt, also sees, sitting naked across the naked Oppenheimer's lap copulating but only in her mind and, also Oppenheimer's mind, as he is given the third degree by a committee; a committee we learn about later, and we realise that just off the scene, somewhere, lurks the infamous senator from Wisconsin, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who sees many reds under many beds and somewhere, he is accusing Oppenheimer of being a red, a communist, and his henchmen are questioning his integrity and his love of the country.

Senator McCarthy who was the biggest public face during the 'cold war' has no face in this brilliant movie.

Jean Tatlock, his mistress, was a journalist who worked for 'The Western Worker' a communist newspaper, and she was probably the reason he was being questioned in the first place, and must have been on his mind throughout the ordeal and that might have been the reason for Oppenheimers fantasy.

Oppenheimer worked with Niels Bohr, who is played by Kenneth Branagh: Bohr helped develop the Bohr method, he proposed that energy levels of the electrodes can revolve around the atomic nucleus and can jump from one energy level to another.

Oppenheimer looks at patterns in a stream, patterns of rings of water, like a stone has been dropped, and the circles envelop each other and he sees this in the stars too.

It's a moment; a moment a bit like when Alan Turing sees the Fibonacci sequence in a pine cone.

There was always the risk that if there was an explosion from a nuclear device, it could be the end of the world, as the chain reaction might never stop.

There was a very strange fact about Doctor Oppenheimer, in that people didn't think he was 100% sane. They say there were traits such as of dementia praecox, which today is diagnosed as schizophrenia, some say autism and even, these days, Asperger's syndrome.

Some of the traits could be linked with just plain shyness, as he had problems looking people in the eye, but, on the other hand, he got on with people and didn't really think he was better than anybody else, or was part of an elite group of people with a superior attitude and intellect; Einstein suggested that he was. Maybe this all comes from the 'mad professor' theory, who was a stock character such as the father spending all his time in the lab, working on a formula.

There are images in the film which, such as whirlpools, which make him think of the effect of a nuclear explosion.

A fighter pilot, reported images of the U2 rockets, on their way from Germany to England, which he witnessed on the way back from a raid. The scene is shown of the pilot seeing the rockets and later, we also see Oppenheimer in the same scene, making him think that 'The Manhattan Project' needed to be completed quickly before Germany invented the atom bomb.

Oppenheimer was likened to Prometheus, who stole the fire from the Greek gods just as he, Oppenheimer, was stealing his formulas from the stars - the gods.

There are so many brilliant performances in this piece, too numerable to mention, but the brilliant performance of Cillian Murphy makes Oppenheimer into some kind of individual who goes from peaks to peaks to collect knowledge of how to build a nuclear reactor/fusion - who knows where this came from and, in fact, Oppenheimer was a genius, and is the film's director Christopher Nolan a genius too? I think so.

This is not a perfect series; it all adds up in the end, but each episode is devoted to a different character and plot line, and some of those slip in to following episodes. The playing of the priest by Sean Bean is as natural a performance that you will see anywhere. Bean plays a maverick of a priest with unconventional approaches and attitudes to religion and a very chatty way of delivering the sermon and the mass. This is a priest, though, with a past; a past of the ordinary red blooded male who becomes a priest after he has sewn his wild oats and he questions the faith and whether he is fit enough to even be a priest. His demons attack him every time he performs the Eucharist - if perform is the right word - and images from his past flood through his mind every time he takes the piece of bread before he turns it into Christ. The first episode tells you what the whole series is about when a character is found 'borrowing money' from the till of her employer just to feed her kids. Then we have a scene at the Social Security office, after she is fired, which we have seen in films by Ken Loach and Tony Garnet but we go a little further in this story. The performances are generally excellent and played for realism but everything seemed to be blamed on the southerners. Apart from a black family from the West Indies all the cast were 'northerners' but why did they have to have the big bad bully of a bookie who makes all the money from his slot machines played by a 'southerner' - a cockney? It's as if everything is blamed on the south east of the country - the priest says this in one of his sermons in the final episode - and sometimes the script takes a heavy hammer to the subject when a more subtle approach might have been more acceptable; I mean I've seen tally men in Manchester fleecing the poor housewife who's run out of money but the whole piece is very highly recommended, nonetheless, and very watchable with beautiful music and songs by Nina Simone and Ray Davies. The last thing I would say about this series is that it is very difficult to work out if it is pro or anti Catholic or even religion; the priest is a good man and does good work and where would we be without the work of the church but they preach to us telling us that there is a God - or a god - and it's as if they help us in the community and expect us to believe. The same dilemma is in the excellent British movie The Singer not the Song with John Mills and Dirk Bogarde.