Oppenheimer (2023)
The atomic bomb is a tricky topic for a lot of reasons, but Hollywood and others who shall remain nameless have the tendency to paint the United States as the sole bad guy when that’s just not the case. Oppenheimer doesn’t fall into step with this philosophy; it’s one of the few recent movies, possibly the only one that I’ve seen that gets what was happening at the time and what people were feeling.
Oppenheimer is a blend of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s wartime service and the 1954 hearings in which his sympathies were questioned and his security clearance revoked. In terms of his life story, the movie goes back as far as his time as a college student discovering quantum physics, when he was rebellious enough to inject potassium cyanide into the apple on his professor’s desk. Going back and forth between black and white and color, the film tells Oppenheimer’s story both from his point of view and that of those who knew him. Or those who thought they knew him.
Most of all, the film lets us inside Oppenheimer’s head. It’s punctuated by his obsession with the movement of particles and matter, with chemical reactions, and with the chaos and order of the physical. Oppenheimer had a busy mind and absorbed knowledge of all kinds with impressive speed, learning languages as if they were nothing. In one scene he lectures a group of college students in Holland about quantum physics despite having only spent six weeks studying Dutch. In another he reads the Bhagavad Gita in its original Sanskrit, with its “Destroyer of Worlds” quote becoming a motif for the movie.
The thing with a Christopher Nolan film is not so much watching the story progress from soup to nuts but laying out all the pieces and then tying them together. While Oppenheimer is no different, the Second World War is getting farther into the rearview mirror, so there’s also the matter of laying out the history so that people from today know where these characters are coming from and why they do what they do.
Nolan does this with a deft hand, transporting the audience to the nineteen-forties while still bringing his own stamp to the proceedings. Some characters we think are allies are really enemies, while other characters who appear to be insignificant or less than friendly will play bigger roles than is immediately apparent. The casting in the film is perfect; there isn’t a single false note and there are plenty of cool moments, such as an almost unrecognizable Gary Oldman playing Harry S. Truman.
From the get-go the movie makes it clear that the Manhattan Project was a race against time. Not only did Germany and Japan have their own atomic bomb programs in the works, but Oppenheimer and his colleagues knew what their fellow scientists across the sea were capable of and where their advantages and disadvantages lay, so every move they made was monitored and used to their advantage. Despite his high security clearance, Oppenheimer himself was monitored very closely, with everything he did catalogued and analyzed.
The only thing the movie doesn’t do is emphasize how tight the security around the project really was for the average worker. At all of the testing and development sites, workers were only told what they needed to know about their jobs but not the purpose of those jobs or where it was all headed. They weren’t supposed to talk about their jobs, not even with each other, although they could ask about each others’ backgrounds. If anyone went to a nearby town to shop or blow off steam, they weren’t allowed to take any newspapers printed at the testing sites or any pamphernalia with them.
Certain words were banned, even within the performance of a job, to the point that workers would make up names for convenience’s sake, and they couldn’t even talk to their families about what they were doing. I read once about a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project just about having an apoplectic fit when his wife suggested naming their soon-to-be-born child “Uranium.” I can’t remember if she was joking or not.
Naturally, if anyone got too curious, even if they were involved in the Project themselves, it was considered a security risk. Nolan’s Oppenheimer glosses over this; but the gravity of the situation is communicated in other ways so it really doesn’t matter too much.
Oppenheimer asserts the viewpoint that the bomb was the lesser of two very bad choices. The film alludes to the alternative, Operation Downfall, which was to be a land invasion of Japan that would have made the war drag on for two or three more years, possibly longer. It was expected to be brutal, with the death toll projected at up to a million lives, most of them Japanese. Incidentally, Charlton Heston was among those training for that campaign.
When the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August of 1945, the response was mixed. On one hand, there was relief because the Japanese surrendered so quickly, but on the other, there was apprehension because a new era had begun, and the United States felt a collective responsibility to help prevent a future nuclear war. The jubilation in the film after the bombs fell is easily explained in the context of history; a lot led up to the dropping of the bomb, such as the Rape of Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, the Bataan Death March, and the way the Japanese treated prisoners of war, both civilian and military.
Oppenheimer not only addresses this consciousness of a new era, but it shows what was going on in Oppenheimer’s head at the time the bombs fell. While his Los Alamos collegues are cheering and stomping, all he can see are victims, and all of them are American. He hears cries of pain. He sees a man vomiting. He feels the tremendous weight of what he’s helped bring into existence and it haunts him.
That was, for me, the end result of Oppenheimer. It is a haunting film that shows how backed into a corner we were during the Second World War, and how rising to the challenge brought the world more than it could have possibly imagined. While the film doesn’t allude to current-day issues beyond the Cold War, the question of “What next?” still hangs heavy in the mind. We can be thankful a man named Oppenheimer helped America to win the war, but we can’t shake that uncertainty.
Oppenheimer is currently in theaters. Rated R.
My grade: A+
Principal Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Scott Grimes, Jason Clarke, Kurt Koehler, Tony Goldwyn, John Gowans, Macon Blair, Matthew Modine, Remi Malek, Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branaugh, Florence Pugh, Jack Quaid, Casey Affleck, Josh Hartnett
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan.