As expected, Barbie won the box office battle between these two juggernauts. It helps that Barbie is an hour shorter and is, well, Barbie. But Oppenheimer, who I now think of as Barbie’s more serious older brother, is doing just fine, raking in over a quarter of a billion dollars in the U.S. and $649M worldwide. Critically, Oppenheimer has been a little better than Barbie, with Rotten Tomatoes showing that 94% of its reviews are positive. So Christopher Nolan and Universal have done pretty great with making a summer blockbuster out of a three-hour movie that’s mostly just men sitting in rooms talking about science.

The story of Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues fight against time, the Nazis, and nature itself to fight to create the world’s first atomic weapon armed can definitely been seen as victorious. There’s the victory of the physicists as they try to turn the theoretical into the practical, the victory of the go-get-em American spirit as it conquers the seemingly impossible, and the victory of the righteous Allies over the Axis’s forces of evil. There are elements of all of these as Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) assemble the team of scientists, build Los Alamos out of nothing, and build and test the bomb that will later bring destruction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And this part of the movie is Oppenheimer at its best. Murphy’s Oppenheimer carries himself with a striking confidence assured of his ability to pull off the feat. The scientists play off each other as they work on the bomb, understanding that they are doing something horrible but knowing that beating Hitler to the bomb outweighs the horror. By the time we reach Trinity (the name of the test of the bomb), we have seen Nolan, Murphy, and the rest of the cast and crew treat us to a truly cinematic grand narrative of the human quest for achievement. Which, again is remarkable for a blockbuster without a single car chase (but with one really, really big explosion).

This story, however, is not the only story of Oppenheimer. Throughout the first two hours, the scenes of Oppenheimer’s life leading up to Trinity are mixed with scenes from the 1950s. Oppenheimer is subjected to a hearing before a small legislative committee questioning his past connections to communism, the unforgivable crime of the era. The movie conveys the idea that Oppenheimer is facing this trial because, as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, he has had second thoughts about whether or not humanity should still be pursuing nuclear weapons research. Those second thoughts–the point at which the two plots merge into the single story of the third act–come to the forefront in a fever dream of a scene where Oppenheimer is speaking to a pep rally of sorts at Los Alamos after the bombs have been dropped. The crowd of Los Alamos workers become a bloodthirsty throng cheering for him as he sees imagined sights of the devastation his work has caused provides a vision of a seeming change of heart towards what he, and we, have done. Where he had rationalized prior to achieving his vision, he now forces himself to rethink what he has done. And this rethinking, which he engages in publicly, leads to betrayal from some of his colleagues on the project and a fight to retain not only his position in the government, but his reputation as a faithful American servant.

This other story is still very, very good–but it’s not at the same level as the race to Trinity. For me, there was a sense that Nolan–whose career has very much been dedicated to the bombast of giant works of spectacle (The Dark Knight, Inception, Tenet)–had second thoughts of his own of depicting Oppenheimer as hero for the work that he did on the bomb as the first two acts certainly did. He makes Oppenheimer’s change of mind as to the wisdom of pursuing nuclear weapons to change him from antiheroic patriot to sympathetic victim. The same America that was worth building the bomb for was no longer worthy because it did not have the same second thoughts.

This change of characterization did not entirely work for me. Some of the characters are revealed to be working to bring Oppenheimer down, and those revelations rang a little too simple for me–I could imagine their melodramatic twists of their mustaches. Part of that may have been the desire for the plot twists themselves, which really were not needed. The motivations of the characters were on the screen the whole time–there’s no good reason to hide the ball on those actions which were consistent with their intentions.

That said, Oppenheimer is still a great film in the mold of Nolan’s other thinking-man’s blockbusters (Interstellar and Dunkirk especially come to mind). Murphy is nearly flawless in the title role. The casting of a star-but-not- that-big-of-a-star allows Murphy to fully inhabit Oppenheimer and let us see the character instead of an actor we are all too familiar with. Damon (who is very much Matt Damon throughout), Robert Downey Jr. (as AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss), Davis Krumholtz (who you might remember as the main elf in The Santa Claus), Tom Conti (as Albert Einstein), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo), and the cast’s two women, Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife and Florence Pugh as an earlier lover, are just a few of the fantastic performances delivered by a top-rate cast. And it’s a Nolan movie, so the effects (all practical) and visual/sound/score/etc. are all impeccable. It really is a great piece of filmmaking.

Nolan wants us to feel the conflict that he assumes Oppenheimer felt about building the bomb. This commitment to Oppenheimer’s second thoughts doesn’t quite fully deliver. But there is enough cinema here that the positive outweighs any fumbling of the search for a deeper meaning. Oppenheimer is a fascinating story well told that has more than enough to merit its commercial and critical success.

Oppenheimer is in theaters now.

(Photo credit: Universal)