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Although biopics about great scientists have been a Hollywood staple ever since the early days of the talkies, they pose distinct challenges to filmmakers. How, after all, to make the sight of somebody working out a mathematical problem in his head visually exciting? Still, from The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Madame Curie (1943) to The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game (both 2014), the genre has yielded some first-rate results. The latest such achievement is the epical Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk).
It’s the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), “the father of the atom bomb” – not to be confused with Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” Before seeing it, I read American Prometheus, the 2007 biography by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird on which it’s based. The book is fascinating, but after finishing it I wondered how Nolan had managed to make it cinematic. Yes, in films like this, sooner or later you know you’re going to see the hero excitedly scribbling complex equations on a blackboard. But in The Theory of Everything we also experienced the human drama of Stephen Hawking becoming increasingly weakened by ALS; in The Imitation Game, Alan Turing’s autistic personality made for plenty of interpersonal conflict; and A Beautiful Mind actually put John Nash’s imaginary friends onscreen.
But what to do with Oppenheimer? The man was a puzzlement, complex and contradictory. Obsessed with the paradoxes of the cosmos, he nonetheless found time to become a multilingual polymath of surpassing erudition — an aficionado of Picasso, Stravinsky, and The Waste Land who taught himself Italian so he could read Dante and learned Sanskrit just for the hell of it. Different people described him in strikingly different ways: for one, he was “angelic, true and honest”; for another, he was a guy who “could cut you cold and humiliate you down to the ground.” In more than one way, his story is similar to Turing’s. Both were geniuses who played outsized roles in winning World War II but who, years later, were punished by their governments for matters unrelated to their work (in Turing’s case, his homosexuality; in Oppenheimer’s, his intimacy with Communists). While Turing’s wartime work gave birth to the computer age, Oppenheimer’s ushered in the atomic age. Both men’s discoveries had their positive and negative consequences; but while the downsides of computers took decades to come into focus, the downsides of nuclear energy were clear from the git-go.
In Oppenheimer’s youth, to be sure, physics seemed innocuous — a matter of working out abstruse calculations about the behavior of atoms and the movements of galaxies that had no conceivable connection to everyday human life. Inclined, in any event, far more to theoretical than to applied science (in chem lab, he was a klutz), he took his undergraduate degree at Harvard, then — in order to immerse himself in quantum mechanics, which back then (it was the 1920s) had yet to gain a foothold in the U.S. — did advanced work at Cambridge, Göttingen, Leiden (where he picked up the nickname Opje, later anglicized to Oppie), and Zurich. Reading American Prometheus, I feared that any film about Oppenheimer would have to jettison these years in Europe, which, though colorful, might be dismissed by some screenwriters as tangential. But my concerns were unfounded: Nolan works just enough of this stuff in to get the gist of it all, and, bless him, puts in every last one of the details I was particularly fond of — such as the spectacle of Oppenheimer, newly arrived in Leiden, delivering a lecture in Dutch, which he’s just taught himself for the occasion.
After completing his education in Europe, Oppenheimer returned to the U.S. — where, teaching at Berkeley and Caltech, he helped introduce the quantum revolution to America and predicted the existence of positrons and of black holes. He was right in both cases, but the experimental proof would be a long time coming. How do you cinematize such abstract-seeming feats? Nolan pulls it off, here as elsewhere in the film, by using remarkable visual and aural effects to suggest the cataclysmic nature of the things that Oppenheimer is imagining in his head and that are, in fact, really going on out there among the distant stars or right here on earth, in the very atoms that make up you and me.
Among the delights of American Prometheus are the episodes in which Oppenheimer interacted with some of the immortal physicists of his day. Surely, I fretted, Nolan wouldn’t be able to squeeze very many of these colorful personages into a single film. But he does, giving us a superb gallery of terrific performances, including Edward Safdie as Teller, whose enthusiasm for the H-Bomb Oppenheimer failed to share; Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winner at Berkeley whose emphasis on applied science clashed with Oppenheimer’s theoretical bent; Tom Conti as Albert Einstein, who gave Oppenheimer sage, fatherly philosophical counsel; David Krumholtz as Isidore Rabi, who became a fast and loyal friend; Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, the Danish Nobelist who, having escaped Hitler’s reich, shared Oppenheimer’s deep concern about the postwar uses of atomic energy; and Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs, who fled from Germany to Britain and then, while at Los Alamos, shared atom secrets with the Soviets. I could easily imagine all five nominations for this year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar going, unprecedentedly, to Oppenheimer.
Needless to say, Los Alamos is at the heart of Oppenheimer’s story. He loved the New Mexico desert and knew it intimately, and it was he who chose the site for the secret lab. It was the most dramatic of life changes; he’d spent years being immersed in seemingly harmless theory, only to be put in charge of turning his equations into instruments of death. Invited by General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), director of the Manhattan Project, to run the secret atom-bomb lab, Oppenheimer threw himself eagerly into the task. The film beautifully limns the richly nuanced relationship between the slim, pensive, soft-spoken Oppenheimer (played excellently by the Irish actor Cillian Murphy, of Peaky Blinders fame, who’s so gaunt here that you can’t help being reminded of Holocaust survivors) and the gruff, beefy, no-nonsense Groves, who, despite his concerns about Oppenheimer’s leftist past and effete affect, ended up being his strong supporter and admirer.
The big bomb test in the New Mexico desert is the most obviously cinematic material in the whole movie, and Nolan handles this sequence masterfully, ramping up the suspense and then providing a spectacular payoff. He spares us Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but after those two bombs end the war, we see Oppenheimer’s exultation turn into doubt, guilt, horror. (Murphy looks and moves very much like the real Oppenheimer, skillfully embodies his ambiguities, and, when the camera closes in on his hollow eyes, perfectly captures his tragic depths.) Admittedly, even while the A-Bomb project was underway, there was intense ethical debate among the Los Alamos scientists. For some, the whole point had been to beat Hitler to the bomb, and after the fall of Germany they considered it unfair to drop it on Japan (“those poor little people,” said Oppenheimer, in a line omitted from the movie); after V-J Day, these doubters were increasingly inclined to step back from their work and take some time for moral reflection. Others, however, were eager to move on to a bigger bomb and a new enemy, the USSR. In this debate Oppenheimer was something of a fence-straddler, although his anguished expression of guilt feelings at a brief Oval Office meeting was enough to lead a disgusted President Truman (Gary Oldman) to call him a “cry-baby.”
Which brings us to Oppenheimer’s politics. On the one hand, during his years in Europe, many of his fellow students were struck by his deep patriotism. On the other hand, he spent much of the 1930s engaged in left-wing activism, supporting the Republican cause in Spain and trying to unionize professors at Berkeley. He was, as the film acknowledges, very close to a great many Communists or ex-Communists — including his bibulous wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt); his neurotic mistress, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh); and his beloved brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold), a fellow physicist. In the early 1930s, according to American Prometheus, Oppenheimer identified the USSR with “freedom,” although he supposedly cooled on Communism after Stalin’s arrest of Soviet physicists, and following the fall of Paris he allegedly said: “we can have no truck with Communists.” During the war, when his friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall), a professor of French literature at Berkeley, asked if he wished to share research secrets with the Soviets, Oppenheimer purportedly closed him down instantly, saying: “That would be treason!” But was Oppenheimer ever a card-carrying Communist? Some members of his 1930s circle said yes; others, no. He always denied it, and he certainly doesn’t come off as the kind of person to submit entirely to anyone’s ideology.
Nonetheless, having been elevated in 1945 to the level of war hero nonpareil, he was, nine years later, in the midst of the Red Scare, put through a humiliating secret Atomic Energy Commission hearing that resulted in the revocation of his security clearance. It was far from a Stalinist show trial (for example, he kept his job at Princeton), although Nolan labors to make it feel eerie, chilling, Kafkaesque. In any case, vindication eventually arrived, when AEC chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who’d played the Javert to his Jean Valjean, was brought down in his own hearing — a 1958 Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Commerce — largely because of the way he’d treated Oppenheimer. More than a few movies — The Social Network comes to mind — are told in the form of flashbacks from some kind of hearing or trial or inquiry; but I don’t remember ever seeing a film that shuttles back and forth between two hearings, spaced four years apart, with the earlier narrative elements presented in flashbacks that are not in chronological order.
It sounds impossibly complicated, and this sort of thing rarely if ever works, but in this case it works like a charm; indeed, if we all aren’t wiped out in the interim by nuclear war, film instructors of the future could do worse than to engage in a close study of the way in which Nolan and his editor, Jennifer Lame, have taken all their strips of celluloid, which could have been cut together in any one of thousands of ways, and have presented them in a sequence that, one feels as this movie unfolds, could not have been improved upon in the slightest. Indeed, a film class might well profit from viewing Oppenheimer, which clocks in at three hours but feels shorter, in conjunction with the recent Everything Everywhere All at Once, which runs 139 minutes but feels longer: the first is a brilliantly formed jewel, the other a ridiculous mishmash; both make unusual use of sudden, extreme visual and aural effects, but while in Everything it all comes off as a whole lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, in Oppenheimer it succeeds in keeping us on edge and at suggesting the cosmic — and subatomic — momentousness of the lab work underway at Oppenheimer’s quiet desert hideaway.
But back to politics. Throughout the film, Nolan allows us to speculate as to whether Oppenheimer was ever really a Party member. But we’re also expected to believe that, whatever his political loyalties were in the 1930s, he absolutely never passed anything to the Soviets in the 1940s. That he was innocent of any such crimes has certainly been Democratic Party orthodoxy since President Kennedy rehabilitated him by inviting him to a 1962 White House dinner and, the next year, selecting him for an award (which, as seen in the film, LBJ presented to him shortly after JFK’s assassination). Last year, Biden’s Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, reaffirmed Oppenheimen’s rehabilitation by posthumously restoring his security clearance. In doing so, she ignored an abundance of evidence of his involvement in actions that never came to the attention of his 1954 prosecutors. For one thing, there’s the testimony of a Soviet spy chief, General Pavel Sudoplatov, who in his 1994 memoirs stated that Oppenheimer, while at Los Alamos, had passed nuclear secrets to the Soviets without which they’d never have been able to build their own A-Bomb so quickly. Also ignored by Granholm was a 1944 letter from a Soviet security official, Boris Merkulov, to Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s notorious chief of secret police, in which he stated that Oppenheimer had reported to the Soviets on his work at Los Alamos via CPUSA president Earl Browder. Moreover, in the famous Venona Project documents — which are decryptions of messages transmitted over several decades by Soviet intelligence agencies — Oppenheimer is identified by a code name, which was standard Kremlin practice when referring to Soviet assets.
Now, it may well be that Oppenheimer did shake off Communism by 1940, and that he passed secrets to the Soviets only because he sincerely (if naively) believed that doing so was the best way to secure world peace. Whatever the case, none of the evidence of his perfidy finds its way into American Prometheus, or into Oppenheimer, or into any of the numerous legacy-media reviews of the movie that I’ve perused. This isn’t terribly surprising. The biographers were both close to the far-left weekly The Nation, which has a long history of trying to whitewash Stalinists. (Sherwin, who died in 2021, was a Nation board member and regular contributor; Bird has been a Nation editor and columnist.) In their acknowledgments, they credit as “a friend and mentor to us both” Victor Navasky, the longtime Nation editor who died in January and who was famous for having spent decades fiercely insisting on the innocence of Alger Hiss, who was ultimately proven to be a Soviet spy.
Nolan, for his part, by ignoring the proof of Oppenheimer’s guilt, is following in a long Hollywood tradition of depicting Stalinists as heroes (see, for instance, the nauseating 2015 movie Trumbo, in which Bryan Cranston played Dalton Trumbo, who was at once both a Communist Party hardliner and the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood); various TV productions about Oppenheimer over the years have similarly omitted any mention of his Soviet collaboration. And naturally you can’t expect the legacy media to call foul on this whitewash. Bottom line: viewed in light of what the Soviet sources tell us about Oppenheimer, the AEC’s treatment of him in 1954 looks absurdly gentle. Not a whit of this, to be sure, takes away in the slightest from the extraordinary aesthetic merits of Oppenheimer, which deserves to win the Oscar for Best Picture. But to the extent that the information about Oppenheimer’s espionage activities belies Nolan’s depiction of the man as a noble and conscientious patriot, it puts a big dent in the film’s value as the serious moral work that Nolan plainly intends it to be.
The sex scene where Oppenheimer quotes Hindu scriptures sounds like a Monty Python skit. No thank you, I’m swimming in propaganda, the empty headed local news people are in on the act.
Christopher Nolan has never made a bad movie so I’m going to see “Oppenheimer.”
Dunkirk was pretty awful
Interstellar was absolute crap
Was communist spy, Klaus Fuchs portrayed in the movie?
Yes and is revealed as having passed the bomb to USSR
His name was Fuchs? Ha haw!
Yes. From Bruce Bawer’s essay – “Surely, I fretted, Nolan wouldn’t be able to squeeze very many of these colorful personages into a single film. But he does, giving us a superb gallery of terrific performances, including … Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs, who fled from Germany to Britain and then, while at Los Alamos, shared atom secrets with the Soviets.”
Thanks for the backstory. Seldom does information from gained from the fall of the USSR make it to history books. Leftist aren’t motivated to correct their mistakes. Some still defend Hiss?
In oct 1945 Oppy went to see Truman and said ”I feel like I have blood on my hands” , so Truman replied ”Dont worry it will come out in the wash ” !
Later he told his aids, ”DONT EVER LET THAT CRYBABBY SCIENTIST SOB IN HERE AGAIN ”
Another reason why Truman is one of the best Presidents
Truman was a Dirtbagocrat but a real man. He knew it was necessary to nuke Japan to end the war. It wouldn’t have ended otherwise.
He seriously F’ed up the Korean War, though.
That’s for sure.
The best stuff I’ve read about Los Alamos was in Feynman’s books, such as “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman”.
Guessing that by the mid ’20s world scientific ‘consensus’ concluded such a device could be constructed. Look to the Sun! By 1945 the Soviets had absolute proof (with a bit of espionage!) and channeled their economy towards parity.
More interesting might be how the h*** the American political class was convinced to pour such an immense amount of money towards such an effort. Politicians are notoriously stupid – science wise! The B-29 was an immense undertaking – yet easily explained to the Political elites.
Forward to now(2023) – the very same – rather stupid – Political class – is channeling money and power towards the scientific ‘consensus’ of climate change???
If only they had dropped nuclear bombs on Mecca and Medina after 9/11 Islam would be as dead in its tracks as Shintoism is now.
And if nuclear is too scary for you MOABS would have razed those two Holy Shitholes to rubble too.
Imagine if Truman had been a Shintoism sympathizer because that’s what we have in G.W. Bush an Islam sympathizer.
“A proper war in self-defense is one fought without self-crippling restrictions placed on our commanders in the field. It must be fought with the most effective weapons we possess (a few weeks ago, Rumsfeld refused, correctly, to rule out nuclear weapons). And it must be fought in a manner that secures victory as quickly as possible and with the fewest U.S. casualties, regardless of the countless innocents caught in the line of fire. These innocents suffer and die because of the action of their own government in sponsoring the initiation of force against America. Their fate, therefore, is their government’s moral responsibility. There is no way for our bullets to be aimed only at evil men.” – Leonard Peikoff, “End States Who Sponsor Terrorism”
When G.W. mouthed off phrases like “religion-of-peace”, hosted muslims at the White House to reassure them (not read them the riot act), and kissed ass at a mosque, right after 911, I knew we’d be fighting more to win a Miss Congeniality contest, than to miserably destroy the march of islam.
The fact that Bush didn’t immediately fire his bullshit Transportation Secretary, Norman Mineta spoke volumes. Mineta was ready to cry at any hint of “profiling” poor abused muslims.
The “Six Flying Imams” should’ve been beaten to a lifeless jelly. Instead, they were coddled & awarded a huge settlement after doing a dry-run on a plane. They knew under Mineta they could safely pull garbage like that and even get paid to do it.
Of course both Bushes shipped in massive adherents of islam.
Indeed you are correct, but Bush held out the white flag of surrender emblazoned with “Religion of Peace”
And do you really think dropping nukes and MOABS on Mecca and Medina would have been the end of it?
Within a year of that attack NYC and D.C. would have been nuked by Russia or some surrogate smuggling nukes into the country.
I can see why you don’t have a PhD in military strategic thinking, or anything else for that matter. And Thank God your Pansy boy Peikoff is not on the JCS. It’s easy to talk nukes when there is no price to be paid, Mr. Tough Guy.
Nuke NYC and Washington DC?
You have an issue with that?
We might have spared a few bombs for Moscow and Beijing, too. We really should have stopped communism in its tracks.
Too many communists in our own government for that to happen.
As far as the morality of the bomb goes my dad was staging in the Phillipines waiting for the invasion of mainland Imperial Japan. He was a rifle man infantry and most likely I would never had been born if Oppie and crew hadn’t succeeded. That said anything with the old fraud Howard Zinn acolyte hero worshipper Damon in it ain’t getting any Hoorahs from this old former Marine.
Oppenheimer by all accounts seems to have been an extremely intelligent individual but compartmentalization or simply not thinking completely through an issue is quite common even in extremely intelligent people. Einstein was a pacifist, a position that doesn’t take much thinking to see how irrational it is.
But I believe the key to highly intelligent people’s acceptance of socialism and rejection of capitalism is altruism. Or more specifically altruism versus selfishness. So long as altruism is viewed as the highest moral ideal and selfishness is viewed as evil capitalism will be rejected as evil and socialism will be viewed as moral. Freedom, liberty, and Capitalism are SELFISH. The pursuit of happiness means the pursuit of personal, individual, self-interested happiness.
But beneath this belief lies other implicit beliefs. One, that we live in a fallen, malevolent, universe where failure is the norm to be expected, the fallen universe is inimical to human life. And two, man cannot be trusted he is innately evil. The religious world view is implicit even among atheist-socialists because in fact Marxism comes from Christianity. It takes all the philosophical fundamentals of Christianity and cloaks them in pseudo-scientific jargon. For example, God is replaced with Almighty Society. The priesthood is replaced with technocrats.
“To redeem both man and morality, it is the concept of “selfishness” that one has to redeem.” – Ayn Rand
When was the last time you ever thought through an issue beyond whining about your pet peeve of altruism.
“Oppenheimer by all accounts seems to have been an extremely intelligent individual”
Well, knock me over with some more useless hot air. I’m not surprised you go after probably the two smartest people in the 20th C. Men of actual accomplishment, unlike you.
The truth is you will never be in that pantheon of scientists. You wouldn’t be allowed to breath their air. Your flawed hindsight isn’t even 20/20.
Where and how you get from Oppenheimer and Einstein to your petty obsessions about God, Christianity, acceptance of socialism and rejection of capitalism as altruism, the religious world view, and your silly version of rational selfishness defies logic. But it does say a lot about your pettiness, and small mindedness.
Enjoy being less than average.
This business about being a “card-carrying Communist” really has to stop, that is, the notion that you can’t be supporter of Communism without having that card. The were many many supporters without “the card”! Thanks for the research on the subsequent allegations.
The difference is important. You can be a Muslim without being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. There are Muslims that are enemies of the Muslim Brotherhood. You can be an antisemite and a racist without being a member of the Nazi Party or the KKK.
Freedom means an individual has the right to believe in stupid and/or evil ideas but he does not have the right to initiate or plan to initiate evil actions against others. Or be a member of a group dedicated to violence and the overthrow of a free or even semi-free government in order to establish a dictatorship.
A card-carrying member of the Soviet Communist Party was the equivalent of a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party.
So Muslims who aren’t members of a jihadist network and Communists who aren’t in the party, and Aryan Brotherhood guys who aren’t announced Nazis are just OK with you…….as long as they aren’t those dastardly Christians.
You are what Lenin described as a useful idiot. But I always think of you as simply an idiot.
it’s a matter of practical effect. If you facilitate the ideology, you are a communist in my book. That includes useful idiots and fellow travelers. You should know better. If you don’t you are part of the communist mob.
Not being a scholar, I am so grateful for Bruce Bawer’s scholarship and research as displayed here. Most of us are just not able to sift through things as he is. It is important to know the truth. Thanks, Bruce!
You can read Oppenheimer’s security file here: https://www.osti.gov/opennet/hearing
And his FBI file here: https://vault.fbi.gov/rosenberg-case/robert-j.-oppenheimer
And judge for yourself.
BTW, in December 2022, the Biden Administration posthumously restored his security clearance…
In both Oppenheimer and Inception Nolan tortures the eardrums of viewers with a bombastic musical score. To what end? Distraction from plot and dialog
What? I haven’t seen “Oppenheimer” yet but I saw “inception” and it was an excellent movie. I don’t even remember the musical score.
There was a nuclear reactor in the basement of Etcheverry Hall on the UCB campus. We used to give computer labs on the ground floor.
Absolutely right. The background noise/sound effects/music(?) was primitive, loud, annoying, aggravating, disturbing and distracting. Because of it, much of the dialog was not understandable. The whole point of the movie was the dialog, and there is no excuse for the background noise.
Thanks for the tip. If I watch Oppenheimer I’ll wear my earplugs to drown out sound over a certain decibel level.
…”Alan Turing’s autistic personality’
REALLY???
There is NO evidence Turing was autistic, or even grappled with Asperger Syndrone. The fact that he had meaningful gay relationships negates both.
Turing’s peronality profile is typical of the profoundly bright indidvidual. Sir Isaac Newton is a case in point.
Did Alan Turing have Asperger syndrome?
Turing’s case highlights the subjective nature of autism diagnosis
Even so, Turing’s case highlights the subjective nature of diagnosis. This is particularly true around the edges of the autism spectrum where, as Lorna Wing put it, Asperger syndrome “shades into eccentric normality”.
Infamous American Traitors Beneduct Arnold, Hanoi Jane Bill Clinton Barack Obama Joe Biden
A few points of personal opinion,. This is the best review of a movie I have read; secondly, Dirac was first in predicting the existence of the positron and it was confirmed experimentally by Anderson who got the Nobel.
Third, Oppenheimer is fairly typical of highest level performers in Physics, Mathematics and Chess who step out of their pre-eminence to debate governmental, moral, economic and political matters. I don’t know if Babe Ruth was ever asked his opinion of the New Deal but that is not an unfair analogy.
Thank you for setting the history right. I’ve waited for reviewers or commentators to mention Oppenheimer’s well-documented treasonous acts. They have been on the public record for several decades. Had they been publicly known in the ’50s, he certainly would have gone from war “hero” to traitor in a hurry.
Bruce Bawer’s naive confidence in Soviet spy chief General Pavel Sudoplatov’s integrity, is rivaled only by his naive analysis in previous articles, “Drag queens chanting ‘we’re coming for your kids’ hurt gay rights,” (June 25, 2023), and “I fought for gay rights – but trans activists have destroyed the meaning of Pride,” (June 1, 2023). Trans activists are not “irresponsible types” seeking “attention.” They are not “playing rebellion” or “determined to be clowns, to make mischief, and to get easy thrills by terrifying nice people.” The radical gay/trans movement is the tip of the radical Marxist/collectivist spear aimed at America to destroy capitalism, Judeo-Christian culture, and the American family from within. Bruce Bawer fails to recognize trans activism as part of globalism’s strategic war on the nation state, and its tactical march through American cultural institutions.
I enjoyed the review. For me, this movie caused a nuclear blast inside my head. Meant as entertainment it was okay, but too many will take this as historical fact.
Oppenheimer was a communist and did betray secrets. So did others in the team besides Fuchs. The idea he was a womanizer is bizarre. If you read spy records of the day the parties and women were planned for the opportunity to get information and influence him. He may or may have not known but he certainly gave away secrets. They played his ego and narcissism. Brilliant and arrogance are a dangerous combination.
The most important line was about Oppenheimer not being able to manage a hot dog stand. He was not the consummate manager of project S in ability or management hierarchy. Vanneaver Bush was in charge of the NDRC and OSRD, reporting directly to FDR and not some sort of bystander.
The movie treats Dr. Rabi completely shabbily. Many consider themselves the father of the atom bomb. I suggest that Rabi was more the father of the bomb and if not that he was the one who had the stretch marks. Dr Rabi was a member of the board for the NDRC/OSRD. Oppenheimer wasn’t.
The scene with the division to not bomb Kyoto. . Kyoto was on the list as a primary target and if not for cloud cover would have been bombed instead of Nagasaki. It was not a whim of a commander but the weather.
The number of people who think it was just racism that made America drop the bomb. Primary source documents show that Japan would not fold voluntarily and that loses in defeating japan would be 750,000 for America alone ( 1.2 million with American and Allied loses). The numbers they use for the total number of victims are willfully imaginary. A back of the napkin estimate for selling an image,.
So many others were shown in a poor light or not given credit so that this fictional account becomes thought of fact is horrific.
Good movie, bad intent. See Barbie before this – it’s historically more accurate.
Why is Edward Teller missing from this article?
Thank you for writing a fine review, including many details on Oppenheimer’s activities that the movie did not include.
“This weapon is so awful that we can’t let our side be the only one to have it.”
Well-intentioned?
Naive?
Deceptive?
Treasonous.
As Oppenheimer was a “theoretical physicist” he actually went further in his works. Unfortunately, he (like many others) was treated like a criminal by the very same government for which he worked. His morality, as I could see in the movie, was one of introspection and for the world of all the peoples that would be affected by the development of the nuclear bomb. His worries very founded when the United States dropped the 2 bombs on Japan, killing not soldiers but civilian women and children. In my humble opinion, Oppenheimer was a hero but, also was somewhat of a Communist as it was in the 1930’s.
Great movie and I would recommend it to anyone who knows of the Manhatten Project.
RE “the downsides of nuclear energy were clear from the git-go”
YES!
This movie omits the unnecessary and evil bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and also of its testing ground in New Mexico and the Marshall Islands as if there were no innocent victims and grave harm done (https://www.themarysue.com/oppenheimer-has-people-speaking-out-about-a-pretty-glaring-omission) which shows the lack of conscience of its creator/filmmaker/director. And much dark facts on Oppenheimer himself are also concealed in this Hollywood movie (https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/21/the-oppenheimer-file-missing-cast-and-forgotten-back-stories).
So this immoral director presents a whitewash of history, it’s a fake history account. Memory holing of real atrocities is immorality, a serious crime per any reasonable humane standard. But it is in line with what it is: a stylish propaganda movie of the genocidal US empire, made by its criminal Hollywood ‘dream factory’/propaganda apparatus. A celebration of the “wonders of technology” and the “brilliance” of its inventing conscienceless scientists. A celebration of madness.
It’s the programing of the naive/dumb public by the most murderous regime on earth to accept and want such horrific killer weapons –it’s part of the normalization of evil via the brainwashing of the forever naive/dumb public.
This inexcusable despicable conduct by the film’s acclaimed director parallels the fact that dozens of Nobelists worked on the creation of the atomic bomb proves that guilt and conscience never played a notable part in them.
Oppenheimer’s guilt and conscience, too, was of no real significance as his actions in establishing the atomic bomb demonstrated.
It shows the real fundamental condition and nature of “civilized” humans — they are inhumanely mad …. https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
“[…] I realized that the entire nuclear power program was based on a fraud—namely, that there was a “safe” amount of radiation, a permissible dose that wouldn’t hurt anybody.” — John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., 1918-2007, Medical Physicist & Radiation Expert