By TONY MOCHAMA

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The Frankensteinian film Oppenheimer, like the original Frankenstein creature, is both big (at three hours running) and a bit awkward and unwieldy in its transitions, but I will return your ticket money if you are bored at any point.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of those geniuses right from childhood. He finished his eight-year primary school in six years, doing third and fourth grade in a year and skipping seventh grade altogether in New York.

He got into Harvard University at 18 and was done at 20 (top of the class), mostly by taking six courses instead of the normal four.

He went across to Cambridge to continue with his master’s in physics, getting it over with in two years (and was almost expelled for attempting to poison an apple of a lab teacher he disliked), then onto Gottingen in Germany for his PhD, all within a year.

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"I was relieved when it was all over," his supervisor James Franck later confessed.

"The young man (Oppenheimer was then only 23) had begun to question me about theoretical physics in his oral examination."

The three-hour long movie spends half an hour on this period of Oppenheimer’s life, and it is when Lt-Gen Leslie Groves comes in with the ‘Manhattan Project’ – the attempt to build a super weapon in 1942, during World War II, before Adolf Hitler’s scientists in occupied Norway do, that the film crackles to life.

"Build me a scientists’ town in Los Alamos, New Mexico," is the only request that Oppenheimer asks of Lt-Gen Groves, and the US government does, building a facility that will eventually shelter 5,000 people and cost $2 billion, in the race for the atomic bomb.

Matt Damon as Lesley Groves is a brutally brilliant actor.

Oppenheimer is the project director for this earth-shaking endeavour, a tall, thin ardent chain-smoker given to bouts of the blues, as well as given not to eating during his frequent long periods of utter concentration, as he throws himself manically into this "Manhattan" in the desert.

Cillian Murphy, as Oppenheimer, may yet have those ice chip blue eyes of his see an Oscar for this film, well written and delightfully directed by Christopher Nolan, with a film score by Ludwig Goransson that is to die for.

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I would tell all about this Manhattan, but I read that one Russian in the Arctic Circle recently stabbed his colleague … for repeatedly revealing the endings of books.

It also, very deliberately in this politically correct age, avoids showing the devastating end effect of the ‘Fat Man’ and ‘Little Boy’ uranium and atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Those events now lie 78 Augusts ago in the dust, or rubble, or atoms of time, but oddly enough, the nuclear threat is back, again.

In the film, J. Robert Oppenheimer is haunted by apocalyptic visions. His lit brain sees the scorching shower caused by thermonuclear weaponry, the moronic fist of the mushroom cloud, clouds on fire, earth’s atmosphere ignited in an endless chain reaction, things that don’t bother Teller (played by Benny Safdie).

There is a second drama within ‘Oppenheimer,’ that follows his witch-hunt for ‘UnAmerican Activities’ on the sidelines of the Senate. Does he survive this nuclear blast to his reputation?