The setting is Los Alamos in the hours leading up to the first atomic bomb test in 1945. The journey is long, anxious and at times arduous. Yet the final catastrophe in John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, receiving its UK premiere by satellite relay live from New York’s Metropolitan Opera, is as imaginatively conceived and devastating as the ending of any opera.

This is not to steal the thunder from English National Opera, which will bring this co-production to the Coliseum for its proper British premiere in February. Only then will we sense the full impact of Adams’s score and Peter Sellars’s magpie libretto, taken from letters and documents of the time. Penny Woolcock, the British film-maker who made such a redemptive TV version of Adams’s controversial Death of Klinghoffer, directs.

Seeing opera in High Definition video at your local cinema is far from the full theatrical experience. You lose all sense of there being an orchestra, a conductor or even an audience. The emphasis on close-ups — and this was elegantly filmed and cleverly designed — gives us the reassuring impression of film, rather than the edgy risk of live performance. Yet it’s a worthwhile and increasingly popular alternative. At £25 it’s affordable but not given away. Last season, some 920,000 people in 23 countries watched these Met relays. In London and beyond, 18 Picture Houses and some Curzons and Everymans have joined the scheme. You’re guaranteed a good seat, there’s no need to dress up and you can eat popcorn.

The Met cast is impeccable. Gerald Finley, who created the role of J Robert Oppenheimer in the original San Francisco staging, repeats his triumph as the conscience-stricken physicist. Sasha Cooke as his wife Kitty, Richard Paul Fink as Edward Teller (an inspiration for Doctor Strangelove), and Eric Owens (army commander General Leslie Groves) excelled.

The first half is strong but the pacing falters after the interval. Sellars’s text, dismissively received but potentially brilliant, needs trimming here. John Adams’s brave gift, as with Nixon in China, is for tackling our modern mythologies. This is why he rides so high as the opera composer of our times. In the cinema, we clapped quietly to ourselves as Adams and Finley took their curtain calls. The camera panned to the Met audience. They were on their feet and cheering. There’s the difference.

Opens at ENO 25 February. Next Met relay: La Damnation de Faust, 22 November (www.metopera.org/HDLive).