Oppenheimer

This bio-pic seemd to be a fair representation of Oppenheimer's life, showing him as an egotistical, brilliant, flawed man. He was detached, yet he genuinely loved women. He wanted to do science at the highest levels, yet he also learned difficult languages to read classics in their original form. He once called the Bhagavad Gita, which he read in Sanskrit, "the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue”.

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Oppenheimer's story would have been interesting enough if the director would have chosen to focus on the internal conflict of a man who was sensitive and sympathetic to suffering yet built a bomb that he knew would kill and hurt a lot of people.

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Oppenheimer was supportive of the ideas behind communism, he gave money to German physicists fleeing Nazi Germany, he campaigned against the persecution of Jewish scientists in Nazi Germany, he hosted fundraisers for Spain’s second Republic, he was a member of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, he was on the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union (which at the time, the FBI considered a front for the Communist Party), and he left his entire estate and inheritance (worth millions) to the University of California for graduate scholarships. But he actually chose the cities in Japan that the bombs would be dropped on!

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Instead of focusing on internal dissonance, the director, Christopher Nolan, tried to make this bio-pic an action movie. The excessive splicing of the story into three timelines was an unfortunate decision. Too, the choice to make a piece of the story in black and white was a bad idea, in my opinion. It would have made more sense if the black and white bits were the older parts of the story, but they weren’t. I also don’t think the inclusion of visual representations of quantum activity added anything to the storytelling.

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We’re shown that Oppenheimer did have some remorse for his part in the pain and suffering brought to Japan, but he knew from the very beginning what he was doing and where his research would lead, that hundreds of thousands of people were going to die because of it. What was his reasoning? That some other scientist might get there first? That a big, scary bomb would bring peace? Patriotism? It seems to me that the chance to get a Nobel Prize was impossible to pass up.

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While I enjoyed learning about Oppenheimer in a way that showed him in a balanced light, Christopher Nolan was the wrong director for this project. A quick read of Oppenheimer’s wikipedia page will tell us all the things he did. A more interesting story would be a telling of why he did it.

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Ultimately, Oppenheimer was nominated four times for a Nobel and never received one. And this movie won an Oscar for best editing!