Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer leads the Manhattan Project in the desert of Los Alamos during World War II, determined to build the most destructive weapon ever conceived before Nazi Germany does. The film traces his rise as a brilliant theorist, the moral vertigo of creating the atomic bomb and the subsequent political ordeal of the postwar years, when his conscience and old sympathies make him a target of suspicion. Through temporal leaps and mounting tension, Nolan portrays the man who opened the nuclear Pandora's box. A monumental biography, dense and hypnotic.