Seemingly every week we are treated to spectacles: ordinary people with superpowers, vehicles with impossible functions, events that can never happen. Oppenheimer may be the only movie confined to historical fact that gets close to all the extraordinary nonsense continually thrown at us. In 1945 a group of American scientists split the smallest thing known to man, an atom, and created the largest explosion the strength of 25 kilotons of TNT. Human beings had unlocked an unseen but potent energy in the universe and had harnessed for themselves the primal powers of the sun, nuclear fission. A month later, those same humans, specifically Americans, dropped two of these bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a bid to end the largest war human beings had ever conducted against each other. It worked. The war was over, but an unease settled upon those responsible. After all, this wasn’t magic, it was science. Anyone could do it. And someday they would. And they could build an even bigger bomb using nuclear fusion. Then instead of killing 70,000 people in an instant like the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, millions could die with one hydrogen bomb over New York or Moscow. The Project Head, Robert J. Oppenheimer would later describe his reaction upon seeing his experiment work that very early morning of July 16, 1945. He thought of an ancient sacred Indian text in which the deity Vishnu reveals himself in his sacred multi-armed form and states, “Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
‘Oppenheimer”, Writer/Director Christopher Nolan’s latest movie is a story of two rooms and a flashback. The first room takes place in 1954 where Oppenheimer is appealing a decision of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to not renew his security clearance. The second room takes place in 1959 where Lewis Strauss is seeking to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. In both rooms, the subject of testimony and cross-examination is the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), which is shown in the flashback from his school days through the The Manhattan Project, which culminated in the Trinity Test, the first successful testing of an atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Having a cursory knowledge of American history I knew about The Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test. I did not know that Oppenheimer was denied a renewal of his security clearance less than a decade later because of suspected ties with communism. As for Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.), I had never heard of him before and you probably haven’t heard of him either. Though his senate confirmation hearing pales in importance to everything else in the movie, it is itself a remarkable and curious moment in American history. A president’s appointments to his own cabinet are almost never contested, let alone denied. Before Strauss was rejected it had only happened once in the past 100 years.
This movie is based on the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. As with all material based on real life, the challenge is not in the creation but in the editing. (My favorite metaphor is that fiction is like painting, documentary is sculpture). Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of this book and the editing of the movie is a marvel in organization. The movie is long but moves quickly. The cast is enormous, but characters are efficiently and memorably introduced. The movie switches between time periods and locations, but the viewer is never confused as to when and where they are. Nolan affects this by shooting the 1954 room and the Oppenheimer flashback in color, whereas the 1959 room and Strauss flashback are in black and white. Nolan even organized enough room for a twist in the plot, not an easy thing to do in a biopic.
Then there is the IMAX. I saw this movie in June in a normal movie theater and was compelled to see it at the Lincoln Center IMAX in September. It will be a good movie no matter how you see it, but you really should see it on the largest screen possible. Nolan uses the IMAX expertly, saving it for close ups of the quantum world, very large explosions, and expansive landscapes. It would not be incorrect to categorize Oppenheimer as a tentpole summer blockbuster. It is a BIG movie with lots of Stars. (This would be an indispensable movie for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon games. In just one example of many, Gary Oldman shows up as President Truman in a great “the buck stops here” scene). It also happens to be very good in the classic sense. The subject matter is compelling and morally complicated. It is rare that you see these two things together. Rare movies like Apocalypse Now and Citizen Kane come to mind.
Christopher Nolan has been a very good director for more than two decades. He is old enough to be a stubborn proponent of obsolete technology preferring shooting his movies with film cameras as opposed to digital cameras. He is also British and makes movies about billionaires, space, and World War II. He then could be characterized as a conservative filmmaker. But, this has never been the case, and continues not to be true. There are several instances of radical choices, for instance, In the first room, Oppenheimer is cross-examined as to adultery. One not only marvels at the presence of nudity in that particular setting but also how well it works. Nolan continues to be an expert on how to use time in his storytelling. The idea of splitting the movie into two rooms in the 1950s and a flashback that generally moves forward from Oppenheimer’s school days to the present and into the future past the two rooms (there are a few scenes in the 1960s) may not seem all that impressive until one considers how the movie would work if it was entirely linear. If the storytelling was linear, the movie would be ten hours long and irretrievably boring after the third hour when the bomb goes off.
About halfway through the movie, Nolan drops the two rooms and tells the story of the Trinity Test for an uninterrupted 30-40 minutes. Here are the most fascinating scenes in the movie. In particular, it is of continual concern to the scientists that the project is justified, after all, as one scientist points out, a bomb falls on both the just and unjust. The only reason why they feel compelled to build a bomb in the first place is because they do not want the Nazis to get there first. Then right before the bomb is built, Hitler kills himself in his bunker and Germany surrenders. There is a scene in which the scientists argue as to whether they should continue. Oppenheimer argues that the science will always be there, that people won’t understand it until they use it, and once they’ve used it, the horror of that understanding will usher in world peace since war will become unthinkable. (I will speculate that there is a much simpler reason why they continued. The scientists wanted to see if it would work.) Then once the bomb is built, Oppenheimer attends a meeting of the U.S. Military brass and they discuss whether and how they will drop the bomb on the Japanese. In one of those “you can’t make this up” moments from history, one of the potential target cities, Kyoto, is struck from the list because of its cultural significance and also because the general in charge of the list honeymooned there.
I am compelled here to note that science, capitalism, and democracy, those things that are the foundation of America as an idea, do not provide strength because they are right. Not all scientific experiments are successful. Capitalism doesn't always provide correct values. Not all democratically elected leaders are good at their jobs. The strength in these three things is that they are processes, not end results. And what they do is that they can be used to point out something that is wrong. The experiment fails, the stock market crashes, the politician is marred by scandal. And just as importantly, once this something that is wrong becomes apparent, the participants have the opportunity to self-correct. You can change the experiment or change your theory, you can create regulations (or remove barriers) to improve market conditions, you can vote out politicians that have proven themselves incompetent.
Before, during, and after the bombs were created and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the participants questioned whether what they were doing the right thing. This movie shows those arguments. It isn’t sure whether the bombs should have been created. It isn't sure whether the bombs should have been dropped. Moving forward, Oppenheimer acts to dissuade the U.S. Government from building the larger more destructive hydrogen bomb. Does that make Oppenheimer a hypocrite? No, it makes him a scientist. The enemies of the Open Society will look at this movie and see only weakness. They believe that history is a story told by the winners and that there is no truth but what power dictates. America won World War II. It won it unconditionally. Does this movie feel like a story told by winners? No, it doesn’t, and that is because we aren’t Nazis or Communists. We are allowed to second guess ourselves. To see the benefit of this openness, just imagine if it was the other way around and Hitler had gotten there first. Then this movie would be a propaganda reel with nothing but admiration of the creators and demonization of the victims. It was a good thing for humanity that America got to the bomb first.
