Why I spent a year watching Oppenheimer on (nearly) every flight
As Nolan intended.
After a luxurious six weeks at home in New York, I am back on the road. I love to travel, both for work and for fun, and over the course of last year, I learned something about myself: I’m a Christopher Nolan stan. But I only discovered this about myself through the most inane self-imposed social experiment: I watched Oppenheimer nearly a dozen times across as many flights last year. I made it my go-to in-flight to-do for nearly every trip.
In fact, I’d argue that second to a theater or IMAX experience, watching Nolan films on a flight is one of the best ways to experience his denser, twistier, yet still commercially-savvy work. He would hate me saying that—well, maybe—but in this hyperconnected, multiscreen existence, it’s so rare to find a moment where you can truly just focus on one thing. Sure, you could always raw-dog a flight and completely disconnect, but I wasn’t looking to practice digital abstinence so much as digital moderation; amidst this bizarre stunt, I wanted to relearn how to simply focus on one screen at a time. Which, it turns out, is really fucking hard.
For the past several years, I’ve found it far more difficult to simply sit down and enjoy a movie that demands my attention. In this post-COVID era, I’ve come to unwittingly embody the mantra of, “I can’t watch a two-hour movie, but I’ll watch eight half-hour episodes of some random shit on Netflix instead.” There’s comfort in having off-ramps between every episode in a series, even if I always kept watching. I’ve also found it hard to simply turn off distractions; it was always all too easy to multitask, checking my phone or puttering on some other small screen (hi there, Steam Deck) while the bigger screen in front of me kept me company with cozy reruns. More and more of my time became consumed by lower-c content that could pair together, like podcasts and more lighthearted streaming shows that I could have on while I played games, checked email, or doomscrolled social media.
I didn’t set out to spend an entire year watching this one film exclusively from 30,000 feet in the air. It started from circumstance, a six-ish-hour flight to California last March with no in-flight wi-fi and no backup plan (left the Steam Deck at home, alas). And so it happened that I rather abruptly had a chance to truly disconnect from outside distractions: no live TV, no internet, and no way to truly be comfortable in a window seat adjacent to two strangers who somehow found a way to sleep through an exceptionally bumpy mid-afternoon route and deny me even a chance of a mid-flight bathroom break. The screen was shit, always finding a way to reflect light coming from the smallest of sources, and the headphones only worked in one ear. But absent any other diversions, I found myself savoring this slower-paced biopic that is ostensibly about the creation of the atomic bomb but seems more interested in a more human-centric examination of how even the most consequential events are still borne of broken, nuanced people at various times in their consequential lives.
If the first viewing was serendipity, the second was bemusement—a silly bit I could post about on social media rather than engage with the toxicity of everything else. But the more I committed to it, the more details I found to really appreciate. In between flights during downtime I would watch interviews with some of the key collaborators like Ludwig Göransson, quite possibly my favorite composer of the moment, and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, and then spend the next trip really focused on that one aspect. And while Cillian Murphy (the eponymous Oppenheimer) and Robert Downey Jr. (de facto antagonist Lewis Strauss) are the main forces that drive the plot, every performer managed to give depth and nuance to their performances, however small. And yes, because it’s Nolan, this isn’t a linear tale, but the structure is very smart and likely one of the easiest of his films to follow. (And before we get too far into this: yes, I would often skip through the sex scene—or turn down the brightness on the screen as low as it could go—for sake of any seatmates that might take issue with passing nudity. I know how easy it is to glance at other in-flight screens, which is how I’ve now seen most of Anyone But You, in various disparate chunks out of order Memento-style.)
So my ultimate review of Oppenheimer—after a total of 10 watches across 11 months on a 13-inch panel that would often shake whenever the passenger in front of me adjusted their seat—is that it’s Christopher Nolan at his most restrained. More so than any of his other work, it’s a film that puts performances at the forefront, and his masterful collaborators all coming together to do some of their best work yet—but always in service of the humans on screen rather than anything exceptionally flashy or high-concept. It would make for an incredible theater adaptation, albeit one with far less practical explosions.
But for me, the lasting impact of this very silly test was that I taught myself how to focus again. When I wasn’t watching Oppenheimer, I’d put on other longer movies that I had put off for various reasons. I made a double-feature out of Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film I had never watched until last year. I rewatched Tenet, which can be confusing, sure, but I found it much easier to follow when I wasn’t also multitasking. Sometimes I’d actually read books! A very small victory but my own way of embracing vinylfication.
We talk a lot about 2025 being the year of distraction—of embracing and celebrating creativity in all forms and formats, high brow and low. But to do that, I needed to remember how to single-task again to give these creative endeavors the attention they deserve. It took watching the very cinematic Oppenheimer on a very un-cinematic in-flight screen for me to recapture that. As the saying goes, “It's paradoxical, and yet it works.”
I’m looking forward to one day watching Oppenheimer on a big screen, which I suspect will happen at one of the anniversary milestones or maybe just before The Odyssey premieres next year, but I’m also glad I didn’t wait. My return flight is this Friday, and on my way here I was sad to discover there are no Nolan films on JetBlue’s TVs. It’s okay, I downloaded Oppenheimer to watch on my laptop. One more time.