Cillian Murphy ponders man-made horrors in the trailer for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

In the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) grapples with the horrifying imagination of man as the pieces of the atomic bomb fall into place.

“They won’t fear it until they understand it, and they won’t understand it until they’ve used it,” says Oppenheimer in the trailer. “Theory will only take you so far.”

Oppenheimer was written and directed by Nolan, and created with what’s considered a small budget for the big-budget auteur: $100 million. The central visual effect was not created in a digital graphics lab, but instead uses practical effects to recreate the first nuclear detonation.

“I think recreating the Trinity test [the first nuclear weapon detonation ever] without the use of computer graphics was a huge challenge to take on,” Nolan recently said. “Andrew Jackson—my visual effects supervisor, I got him on board early on—was looking at how we could do a lot of the visual elements of the film practically, from representing quantum dynamics and quantum physics to the Trinity test itself, to recreating, with my team, Los Alamos up on a mesa in New Mexico in extraordinary weather, a lot of which was needed for the film, in terms of the very harsh conditions out there—there were huge practical challenges.”