Few will have missed that Christopher Nolan’s film, Oppenheimer, has entered cinemas. Not many films receive this kind of intensive media attention. The Hollywood film industry has used all its advertisement power to bring this film to our attention, even by trying to make us believe that there is good reason to see this film back-to-back with director Grete Gerwig’s film Barbie. Christopher Nolan is known for his complex storytelling in films like Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, Interstellar, the Batman series and Dunkirk. Now, for the first time, he turns his formidable talents to biography in Oppenheimer, interweaving scenes from the past, present, and future into his 3 hour depiction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb.”   

Oppenheimer is in more than one way a fascinating film. Some may be interested in the historic, political context with the role of the atomic bomb in ending the Second World War and with the period of McCarthyism in the 1950s when many prominent American politicians, scientists and artists were accused of communist affiliation and espionage. Others are fascinated by the scientific discoveries and debates leading to the development of the nuclear weapons, which gives the film a rather brainy element. My major fascination was with the psychological element in the struggle of Oppenheimer – around who he is, who others want him to be, and what he has done to himself and others. To a high degree this is a film about Oppenheimer’s personal torment, well aware of the terrible destructiveness of what he had helped to create. Prominent in the film is his citation from the Bhagavad-Gita, made after the one and only 1945 test in the New Mexico desert: ”Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds…” He was a brilliant and gifted man, with the not uncommon human complexity of major character flaws.

We journey with Oppenheimer from his fascination with developments in new field of quantum-mechanics, to his critical role leading hundreds of scientists to the creation of the bomb, and culminating in its eventual deployment in Japan. Then we see the the disillusioned man of the 1950’s, constantly pressured and haunted for his prewar communist connections, sick of being treated as a celebrity, disappointed that he had not succeeded in establishing postwar international atomic control. His scrupulousness in listening to his conscience is weaponized against him by unscrupulous prosecutors. His life is a lesson in the challenges of maintaining one’s integrity, especially when one gets involved in power echelons and events so much greater than the scope of any individual. But in fact, every life reverberates far beyond the boundaries of a single self. Each of us weighs potential gains and losses, we align with power or choose to maintain distance from it, we stay silent or decide to raise our voice, inevitably setting off a chain reaction of consequences that we can rarely foresee. And then we face a hard reality: our intentions have little or no importance. In the end, it is only the effects that matter.

Oppenheimer is convincingly played by actor Cillian Murphy, who features in many of Nolan’s films. This is without a doubt his major one. All of Oppenheimer’s strength and weakness becomes visible in his face…and his face is very prominent throughout the film! Attending to this film, start to finish, is well worth it, given the many pertinent life issues it invites us to think about!

Rinus, August 2023

Recent Posts