Photo © Universal Pictures
Oppenheimer
On July 16, 1945, a billowing pillar of fire rose 10 miles above Los Alamos, NM. The man who guided that test firing of the atomic age, J. Robert Oppenheimer, knew that this revelation had shifted the course of history and could determine the fate of humanity. Aware of the gravity, he called the test site Trinity and recited a verse from the Bhagavad Gita as the bomb’s light filled the horizon. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
With Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan engagingly and imaginatively adapts Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s landmark biography, American Prometheus, into an accurate, complex picture of the man and his world. Nolan’s account runs on three parallel tracks. A chronology of Oppenheimer’s adult life (filmed in color) is interspersed with his testimony before a Red-hunting hearing board (filmed in color) and confirmation hearings several years later by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), Oppenheimer’s opponent on the Atomic Energy Commission (filmed in black and white).
What emerges through Nolan’s screenplay and Cillian Murphy’s performance as Oppenheimer is a brilliant man who overcame ethical doubts during the development and deployment of the atom bomb and spoke out against the arms race that followed. He was placed on the pantheon next to Einstein, only be stripped of his security clearance and accused of disloyalty.
Murphy, known to Britbox fans for playing an Irish mobster in “Peaky Blinders,” submerges himself into a character whose complexity is on full display. Oppenheimer could be condescending—he was often the smartest man in a roomful of many smart people. Responsible for introducing quantum physics to the U.S., Oppenheimer saw beyond the world of physical appearances while missing what was right under his nose. He proved that genius is no guaranty of wisdom. And he was willing to lie to cover his tracks.
Nolan superbly condenses Oppenheimer’s back story. He was a Jew who grew up distant from Yiddishkeit, as revealed in a brief conversation with a fellow Jewish New Yorker, but was devoted to the Manhattan Project given the persecution of Jews under Hitler. Nolan whizzes through his grad student years in Europe, meeting Niels Boher (Kenneth Branaugh) and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighofer). He’s glimpsed reading T.S. Eliot and contemplating a gallery of modern paintings whose simultaneity of time and motion paralleled the emerging theories of physicists.
As Oppenheimer puts it at a cocktail party, “the universe is mostly empty space, bound by forces of attraction.” Those forces of attraction turned out to be a good pick-up line.
The controversy that dogged Oppenheimer, cutting short his stature as America’s most prominent atomic scientist, concerned his political affiliations. Oppenheimer married a Communist, his brother was a Communist, and while he attended many parties with party members in Berkeley, he never joined. When one of them takes him to task by quoting Marx against him, Oppenheimer dismisses her, saying, that he read Das Kapital in the original German, not the ambiguous English translation she knows. Kapital or not, he can’t tow any party line. “Why limit yourself to one dogma?” he demands.
Although the Manhattan Project was infiltrated by Soviet spies working with the American Communist Party, Oppenheimer wasn’t one of them. Nolan follows the book in showing Oppenheimer shrugging off questions from Communist friends about the secret project in the New Mexico desert.
Oppenheimer is a long feature at three hours, yet Nolan keeps the many pieces in motion through strong visual storytelling on large format film stock. It’s meant to be experienced on a big screen, not a cellphone. Nolan is a master of optical shorthand. At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer demonstrates the progress toward producing enriched uranium by filling a glass bowl with marbles. His turbulent personal life also gets full play, including the suicide of his former girlfriend. Sparks fly with the arrival of the Manhattan Project’s commanding officer, Gen. Groves, played with snappy swagger by Matt Damon. There is even a moment of humor when Oppenheimer asks Einstein about the troubling theory that a nuclear chain reaction could set the atmosphere on fire and destroy the Earth. Can that be ruled out? Oppenheimer asks. What—you’re a quantum physicist and you’re asking me for certainty, Einstein replies. The master of relativity had no patience for quantum science.
The reasons put forth for continuing work on the atom bomb after Germany’s surrender and for dropping it on Japan are given in high level conferences. Oppenheimer agrees that the casualties from an American invasion of Japan would number in many millions. Troubled as he is by harnessing the elemental forces of nature, he supports using the weapon, thinking that the bomb’s irradiated devastation will convince the world that war in the atomic age is impossible. He was only half right. Wars continue, but so far anyway, even the most belligerent world leaders have balked at pressing the red button. What lessons can Oppenheimer’s decisions teach us about the potential power and the need to restrict the newest leap from theory to practice, artificial intelligence?
