Watching an opera in a movie theatre requires some adaptation; popcorn and sodas are noisy! The audience hasn't yet figured out whether to clap or not at these events. After each act about 20% of the audience would clap, but that's not enough to sustain applause. Personally I think we should applaud. Of course the performers can't hear us, but I think it binds the audience together and forms a collective experience instead of an individual one; that's better than just slinking silently out of the theatre.
The Manhattan Project's scientists felt confined to Los Alamos, and the opera's staging reflects that; the chorus spends a lot of time trapped in a three-deep stack of boxes (below), and the principals are often standing in assigned spaces, marked by chalk outlines on the stage. The music feels pretty static, too, gently oscillating beneath the vocals with only a few crescendos where the music becomes more active.
But those crescendos are spectacular. Gerald Finley and Sasha Cooke are both superb as the Oppenheimers, Robert and Kitty. The high point of the opera is certainly the aria by Robert Oppenheimer that closes Act I, based on a John Donne poem titled "Batter My Heart". The libretto is assembled from bits and pieces of letters, poems, and conversations, and most of it is kind of pedestrian, but "Batter My Heart" is an actual poem, and it shows. Here's a YouTube video of the aria, illustrated with still photos (the trailer also has an excerpt):
Like the other Adams/Sellars operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, the text's relation to the actual subject is often elusive; often it seems to show the mood and internal state of a character without actually referring to the events going on around them.
Act I is better than Act II, I think; act I is the longer of the two, but II dragged. The first act seems to just zip along -- Oppenheimer and Edward Teller argue, an achingly sexy duet between the Oppenheimer, and then "Batter My Heart". Perhaps it's because the intermission broke the mood, or because I didn't understand Kitty Oppenheimer's aria that opened the second half. Act II does have a great finale, a devastating and suspenseful countdown in which the orchestra becomes a great ticking and chiming clock. Then a screen comes down between the audience and the players.
And then one final historical nod breaks your heart.