Oppenheimer

As one commenter said on the YouTube video above, “Christopher Nolan really is the brand itself”. As the trailer for Oppenheimer has racked up 37 million views over the past month for this video alone, for a trailer focusing on the inventor of the atom bomb, there’s a kernel of truth to this observation.

Ethereal synths wash over the first half minute of the trailer as the narrator reflects on how “we imagine a future… and our imaginings horrify us”. The sonic design prepares us for this narrative: at the outset, the all-encompassing sound of a nuclear bomb detonation washing over the ears, similar to how the explosion itself occupies the entire frame. Our senses are heightened as the effect of water foley is heightened against the visual of rain against the window—an intimate scene contrasting the epic explosion that happened previously. And elemental is the harmonic alternation of tonic-dominant beginning at :30, which recurs as an undercurrent throughout.

This scene of the explosion is a recurring piece, returning at 0:29, 0:44, and 0:47. By 1:06, epic percussion enters the arrangement. As the abstract visuals of explosions and what looks to be a nuclear detonation instrument punctuate other scenes, this gives us glimpses of the people and military apparatus surrounding The Manhattan Project.

From 1:20 to 1:22, we’re treated to the foregrounded harmonic cadential progression, which one could interpret as the sonification of the basic particles we observe. At 1:26 the orchestra enters in full bore following the director’s title card, now with percussion taking a more prominent part of the arrangement. The montage quickens alongside a doubling of the rhythm; everything is sped up, reaching its apex. Notice at 1:50 how there is a resolution to the parallel major key rather than the expected minor, to make for a particularly dramatic, epic moment—and this is where the trailer ends, on this oddly triumphant moment, odd for its glorification of the most destructive weapon the world has known.

Besides a standard arrangement that steadily builds over the course of the trailer, with elements in the arrangement progressively added, the ethereal synth provides an effective sense of intimacy with something so abstract and terrible as a nuclear explosion. Yet the grounding in the elemental progression keeps our feet on the ground. The intimacy provides a foil to the scenes with human actors, and the orchestral score that accompanies the synthesizer later. In these snippets where the explosion fills the entire frame, along with the synthesizers, the trailer conveys the subject as both intimate and unknowable, relishing in that paradox. It compels us to reassess the reality of the nuclear bomb as Oppenheimer knew it, when it was unleashed on the world as the terrifying spectre that it still is.

— Curtis Perry