Oppenheimer
starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey, Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh
screenplay by Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
Of course, I’ve known who Robert Oppenheimer was since early high school. The father of the atomic bomb, the man appointed to manage the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. The Manhattan Project involved research at various universities and military installations across the United States. It took three years to create the Bomb. It involved about 4,000 people, and it cost about $2 billion US ($34 billion US in today’s dollars). Work was centered in Los Alamos, New Mexico where the first prototype atomic bomb was detonated in July 1945. When the project was successfully finished, it wasn’t just a new weapon that Oppenheimer and his team had created. It was a new world.
I’ve been interested in the atomic bomb since I read John Hershey’s 1946 book Hiroshima while preparing an essay on the Hiroshima bombing for my Grade 9 History class with Mr. Chapman. I re-read Hiroshima just two years ago.
To prepare for the movie, I watched a couple documentaries about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, plus I watched some educational shorts on YouTube, including interviews with the man himself. There’s no doubt in my mind that J. Robert Oppenheimer, although brilliant, was a really weird guy with a complex psychology. Oppenheimer was famously accused of being a Communist during the Red Scare at the start of the Cold War, enduring excruciating hearings before the Atomic Energy Commission and subsequently losing his security clearance to work on government defense projects. I suspect that his personality cultivated his own persecution at the hands of America’s security apparatus (like how Galileo cultivated his persecution in the 17th century).
Oppenheimer embodied the age-old question of whether doing harm to lessen overall harm is, in the end, more good than bad.
In the film, Matt Damon’s character, Gen. Leslie Groves (Oppenheimer’s immediate boss), described him as “A dilettante, a womanizer, a suspected communist, unstable, theatrical, egotistical, neurotic.” After researching him a bit, I kind of feel that isn’t terribly inaccurate. Oppenheimer was conflicted between two or three strong opinions about the implications of his work in the context of the World War - a kind of moral paralysis that at some point ceases being intelligent and becomes just annoying and boring. Boring!! After the defeat of Germany, the invasion of mainland Japan promised unacceptably high mortality to a nation that was tired of four years of costly war. The Americans wanted to end the conflict fast. So, Oppenheimer embodied the age-old question of whether doing harm to lessen overall harm is, in the end, more good than bad. He was like an American Prometheus in that, like the mythical God of Fire, he gave the US this gift of the power of the atom in the form of technology and knowledge. Once the power genie was loose, it could never be put back in the bottle. I mean, once the know-how is out there, it’s out. And once out, it instantly evaded the control of the scientists who created it.
Oppenheimer featured a fantastic ensemble cast. Gustaf Skarsgard - another Skarsgard family member. How many Skarsgards are there? The Skarsgards are like the Carradine brothers, or the Baldwin brothers in America. Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman, and Gary Oldman as Pres. Harry S. Truman, and more. When I saw and recognized Matthew Modine’s face I couldn’t believe it, and I had to check the credits to be sure it was really him! And David Krumholtz, too. Wow!
It wasn’t just a new weapon that Oppenheimer and his team had created. It was a new world.