For a film that’s set to hit theaters a year from now, the press for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has been positively dizzying. Set to go head-to-head in a battle of foils with the highly-anticipated Barbie movie at the box office, it looks like Nolan wanted to get the jump on audiences with a brand new, enigmatic trailer for this star-studded event.
The film stars Cillian Murphy as the titular Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist said to be responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb. His efforts as the head of Los Alamos Laboratory during the Second World War contributed to the Manhattan Project, a World War II-era development that devastated members of the axis powers and, as many voices reference in the trailer, changed the face of warfare and, indeed, the world, forever.
The trailer declares that the world is set to change, a reference to Oppenheimer’s work and, cheekily, the film’s future release. Sporting a grim color scheme, a foreboding percussive soundtrack, and a countdown to July 21, 2023, the trailer perfects the gravitas to a biopic of Oppenheimer‘s scale.
Starring alongside Murphy are the likes of Emily Blunt (A Quiet Place series of films, The Devil Wears Prada), Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting, The Martian), Florence Pugh (Midsommar, Don’t Worry Darling), Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody, Amsterdam), Jack Quaid (The Boys, Scream), Robert Downey Jr., and Gary Oldman.
Directed by Christopher Nolan and distributed by Universal Pictures, Oppenheimer releases on July 21, 2023. Good luck, Barbie.