The atomic bomb was unleashed only twice. But John Adams's gripping if flawed 2005 opera about the bomb's creation in the traumatic summer of 1945 has already been performed in San Francisco, Chicago and Amsterdam. That was in a staging by Peter Sellars, who wrote the stodgy libretto - gathered from memoirs, government memos and pre-existent poetry.

Now a new staging by British film-maker Penny Woolcock has been unveiled by the New York Met. It will be transmitted to UK cinemas on November 8, and staged by English National Opera in February. It has its unconvincing aspects. For much of Act I the chorus of scientists - some of the 4,000 top brains assembled in the New Mexico desert by J.Robert Oppenheimer - are trapped in giant, swinging walls of rabbit-warren offices, fronted by blinds that sometimes get farcically stuck. If the atomic bomb had been as sloppily engineered as Julian Crouch's set, the course of history would have been rather different.

And Woolcock's lame handling of the literally earth-shattering climax never comes close to evoking the terror of the real atomic test, nor of matching Adams's response. As the chorus hurls out the baleful Bhagavad Gita that Oppenheimer quoted at that moment (“I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds”) the composer conjures a ticking orchestral “countdown”, then a spine-chilling electronic rumble, and finally the taped screams of infants. It's a chilling piece of sonic montage, precisely conducted by Alan Gilbert.

And Adams's music is the prime reason to see the opera. Inspired by the bigness of the ideas he is conveying - the Faustian pact of the maverick Oppenheimer (convincingly portrayed by Gerald Finley) with a military establishment that gives him unlimited resources at awful human cost; the conflict between personal morality and national necessity; the fateful tampering with the natural order - the American has written his most eclectic and boldest score. Yes, there are dull patches, especially the meditations on Man's destructiveness, for Oppenheimer's wife and maid (radiantly sung, though, by Sasha Cooke and Meredith Arwardy). But they are greatly outweighed by striking musical ideas - Oppenheimer wrestling with his conscience in an anguished setting of Donne's Batter my heart, three-person'd God; or a ravishing duet for him and his wife; or the blistering orchestral unisons that convey Nature being torn apart by mankind's insouciance. Adams calls this story “the greatest mythological tale of our time”, and his opera gives dark, disturbing credence to that claim.

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