I’ve always heard that the newspaper USA Today was written at a third grade reading level. A reading level is an interesting concept. Try this sentence from USA Today’s The Weather Book by Jack Williams, “A fusion reaction fuses atoms together, creating other kinds of atoms and giving off energy.”

No third grader on earth could understand whatever that means. A few savants may sound smart trying, but keep in mind that they would never actually be explaining that sentence to us.

I also remember that in the 1950s children encyclopedia, so-called The Book of Knowledge, the author of the chapter on “atoms” began by having a child imagine cutting up a candle into smaller parts. And then smaller parts. And then smaller parts. Even then, you could still reform the candle parts back into shape. But, the author went on, there are even smaller parts, which when the candle is cut down to these teeny sizes, it wouldn’t matter what happened, they could not reassemble to build a candle.

Can anyone explain that concept? I feel like I get it. But it’s basically saying that there is something besides the obvious ingredients comprising the obvious objects. And that fact is something I can repeat, but I do not understand it.

The problem, so far as I can tell, is essentially one of “barrier to entry”. Atoms and Fusion Reactions require knowledge of such things as very few of us will ever think it worthwhile to learn and master.

Therefore, allow me to state the obvious: if you leave the theater believing that you now know something about atom bombs, you’re fooling yourself.

Mr. Nolan doesn’t abstain from attempting a layman’s explanation, but he also doesn’t belabor the point. Perhaps he doesn’t get it either.

The reason I open the review with this lengthy aside is because I, as I suspect you, had nursed the idea that maybe Nolan could succeed where others failed when I first heard he was making this movie. But he didn’t really even try. And I was a fool for thinking he might. The film is called, “Oppenheimer,” not, “Atom Bomb.”

Moving to my next hope for the movie.

Does Mr. Nolan satisfy my curiosity about the man Oppenheimer, which is bracketed by the following two questions:

1. What exactly was his role in the “invention”?

2. How would some nerdy academic handle being responsible for such death then and forevermore?

Yes. And no.

The way he accomplishes this paradox is by sticking to purely emotional storytelling where paradox is not forbidden. While there are many moments which caused me to wonder, “Did that really happen?,” there were many more which unexpectedly evoked near tears and kept me deep in contemplation about implications of what Nolan seemed to be trying to say rather than poised to fact check every seeming “they must have a record of this” moment.

On the whole, everything about the movie works. The chosen vessel for storytelling works. The casting works. The psycho-sapio sex scene works. The conveyance of palpable stress works. And, most importantly, the a-bomb test works.