Every few years there’s a film that gets everyone talking, and this year, it’s Oppenheimer.
Clocking in at over 3 hours long, with multiple storylines and a nonlinear narrative, the fingerprints of Christopher Nolan are all over this movie. It’s not quite Inception in its levels of gratuitous overcomplexity, but it’s a film you’re either going to love… or endure. I certainly found myself leaning toward the latter category, and judging by the muted response of a cinema audience who staggered bandy-legged from their chairs like survivors from a Pacific sailors’ brothel, I wasn’t entirely alone.
The biography of a nuclear physicist is perhaps a strange choice for a summer blockbuster movie. But as we shall see, there’s more than enough explosive material in Oppenheimer’s life to make for a gripping story.
If you compiled a list of scientists whose lives might just be interesting enough to turn into an epic motion picture experience, Oppenheimer would probably top the list. He worked on the most high-profile project of the twentieth century, creating a weapon whose very existence casts a continuing shadow over the rest of human history.
Sandwiched between the institutions and factions of the US military-industrial complex, Oppenheimer’s life was one at the centre of grinding forces of destruction that routinely destroyed people through vicious political intrigue.
So how did they manage to bring this story to life? Is Oppenheimer the cinematic masterpiece it’s cracked up to be? Would you better off skipping it for the Barbie movie, the cinematic equivalent of a forced lobotomy with a pink plastic spoon?
Let’s get into it.
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The visuals, sound, and cinematography are everything you expect from a big-budget Hollywood movie. There are some spectacular set-pieces, and the Trinity atomic bomb test is shown in a clever and visually stunning extended sequence that subverts your expectations from the lead-up. The film makes the odd choice to render scenes from the future in black and white, while the scenes from Oppenheimer’s past are in colour – I think this is done to draw attention to the different perspectives of the two perspective characters, the scientist Robert Oppenheimer and the politician Lewis Stross, and your mileage may vary on whether it adds much to the experience, but it was certainly a bold decision.
Likewise, you’ll find very little to fault with the acting. Nolan veteran Cillian Murphy puts in what’s possibly the biggest performance of his career as the lead character, and manages to achieve a compelling range of emotional complexity for a character who’s written to be aloof and enigmatic, almost larger than life. Emily Blunt’s portrayal of his alcoholic wife Kitty is far more emotionally driven, and you’re presented with a fierce and unpredictable woman who’s never quite completely dysfunctional, rising on several occasions to show the intelligence and depth that characterises their relationship. Robert Downey Junior, Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, and Kenneth Branagh all put in excellent performances, and the relative newcomer Florence Pugh playing Jean Tatlock doesn’t look remotely out of place in this star-studded cast, playing a forceful but mentally-troubled Communist Party girlfriend from Oppenheimer’s early years.
The real challenge for a historical epic like this film is the story. How do you fit the life of a strange and complicated genius into just 3 hours? How do you tell the story of the atomic bomb and do justice to the hundreds of scientists and thousands of workers that made it a reality? How do you treat the moral and physical dangers of nuclear war with tact and sensitivity? Just like a plutonium warhead, there’s a lot of potential in this story, and it requires a real work of genius to strike the right balances and turn the story of Oppenheimer’s life into a masterpiece that matches his work.
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The film kicks off with the lead character attempting to poison his teacher by injecting cyanide into his apple. This episode did actually happen, but in the film its played off sympathetically by turning the Cambridge professor who was the victim of this youthful murder attempt into a nasty and mocking teacher – in reality, Patrick Blackett was a renowned physicist, who created the physics department at Imperial College London, and has an entire building named after him. Though given that the building was knocked up in the awful modernist style of the 1960s, perhaps the apple would’ve been a mercy.
This is not the larst time the film veers off the slippery track of history for the sake of dramatic effect. Indeed, this is the challenge that all writers of historical fiction face. How do you strike a satisfying compromise between historical fidelity and a good dramatic story?
The advantage of writing historical fiction is that truth is often stranger and more powerful than the author’s imagination, and has the added zing that ‘this really happened’. Human history has seen no shortage of epic characters and gripping stories that pass under the radar of the average person, unless they’re picked up by Hollywood, a major novelist, or the agenda-driven writers of the national history curriculum.
But the price you pay for getting a great story for free, is that you have to constantly wrestle between accuracy and story. Which characters do you cut, for the sake of brevity? Which people, which storylines do you place front and centre? What reasons for people’s decisions do you simplify, in order to fit the runtime? How do you portray the great men and women of history in such a way that does justice to their lives?
Some writers are masters of striking this balance. Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy includes a tour de force of the main cast of the late Roman Republic, with big cheeses such as Julius Caesar, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and Cicero himself rendered in a way that’s both faithful to the historical material and deeply compelling to read. More populist authors such as Bernard Cornwell and Conn Iggulden are able to take a more relaxed view to the history, but still deliver a compelling story without doing injustice to the historical figures and events of their stories – either by focusing on side-plots to the main events of a war, such as in Sharpe, or focusing on the character-driven drama of the Emperor and Conqueror series.
Oppenheimer makes a bold attempt at satisfying both history and story. But I think the film gets this balance wrong both ways throughout its runtime.
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In a long tradition of American war films, the first thing it sacrifices for the sake of story is virtually the entire war contribution of every other Allied nation.
As a story of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer is woefully Yankocentric. The Manhattan Project would never have started without the work of Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, émigré scientists who were cut from the film because they made the foolish decision of working for the British rather than the Americans. Working on the British Tube Alloys project (codename for Britain’s wartime atomic bomb research), these two nuclear physicists demonstrated that a nuclear chain reaction could be triggered in just a few kilograms of enriched Uranium – as opposed to a few tons, which had been the previously estimated minimum critical mass. Yet in the film, the key discovery of Uranium fission is not made in a British imperial research institute, but in the lab at Berkeley next door to Oppenheimer.
In fact, there are only three members of the British nuclear project who are shown in the film. Patrick Blackett’s character assassination – literal and figurative – we have already covered. The other two are the Danish physicist Nils Bohr, who the film does not associate with British research in any way. And when the British contingent shows up to Los Alamos in 1943, we are only shown Klaus Fuchs – the émigré physicist who later passed bomb secrets to the USSR.
In reality, British scientists headed four of the Manhattan Project’s research teams, as part of a major international collaboration. Britain had an 18 month headstart on the USA, though progress was slowed by wartime demands and severe budgetary constraints. Polish, French, and Canadian scientists also contributed significantly.
The most glaring scientific omission from the film Oppenheimer is that of the leader of Britain’s delegation to Los Alamos, Nobel Prizewinning physicist James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron. In fact, Chadwick’s collaboration to the Manhattan Project was seen as so vital to the progress of research that it tipped US opinion in favour of merging the American and British research projects in the first place.
It's fair to say that as a history of the development of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer falls short.
*
But the movie tries to be a lot more than a story about the Manhattan Project. It wants to be a story about the McCarthyite intrigue that plagued the lead character’s postwar years, and serves as an intermittent framing device to the film. It wants to tell the moral dilemma of building a superweapon to win a war in which you’ve never seen a shot fired, to warn against jingoism and the dangers of nuclear conflict. And it wants to tell the biography of a man who occupies a unique place in human history as the father of the atomic bomb.
In fact, the central problem of Oppenheimer is that it tries to do too much. None of these competing story threads is allowed enough time to build, breathe, and land with the impact it deserves. The source of tension in the story shifts constantly between the dangers surrounding the bomb – which had a non-zero chance of detonating the atmosphere and destroying all life on earth – and the race against the Germans, and the intrigue against Oppenheimer.
Ultimately it’s a film that would benefit greatly from streamlining its subject matter and employing a tighter focus on one or two meaningful storylines. Too much time is spent swanning around idealistically-rendered 1930s communist clambakes, and while the Lewis Stross subplot is masterfully executed, it seems to intrude as much on the viewer’s experience of the film as it did on Oppenheimer’s life.
I also think it’s a mistake to tell this story without giving us the key to Oppenheimer’s personality – his childhood, which goes completely unaddressed. Despite a strong performance from Cillian Murphy in the lead role, we’re left with a protagonist who’s mechanical, detached, and almost a bit wooden. The film even lampshades this by having characters ask multiple times what Oppenheimer himself feels, but provides no answers. Here it seems that the authors mistakenly sacrificed story for the sake of historical fidelity: walking us through the documented events of his life, but shying away from providing a meaningful take on Oppenheimer’s internal character. Well I’m sorry, but that’s something you can’t get away with when the man’s name is the title of your movie.
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Perhaps the achievements and failures of Oppenheimer can be encapsulated by its greatest moment. The best scene of the movie by far is Oppenheimer’s post-Hiroshima speech to the cheering and stamping crowd of Los Alamos. This manages to capture both the exhilaration and alienation of being led into shouting empty slogans by the emotions of an irrational crowd, while showing us Oppenheimer’s growing realisation of what his work has done as he hallucinates a nuclear explosion melting away the ecstatic faces of his audience. It’s a really impactful scene that pulls no punches, and the stamping feet that lead up to that moment are intercut with his story throughout the film. It’s a scene that stays with you, and will no doubt be studied for years afterwards as an example of the power of cinema in the hands of a great director.
But this scene also highlights a repeated failure of the film, that stems from attempting to cram too many threads into a 3 hour runtime. The audience is given no reason within the framework of the movie as to why a crowd of intelligent and educated scientists, engineers, and their families would be driven to such ecstasy at having inflicted massive death and destruction upon an alien people. These men and women did not go from clinically-detached researchers one moment to frothing jingoists the next. They were brought to that state by four years of relentless and dehumanising war propaganda, which in this case presented the Japanese as a voracious insect race with less capacity for love, humanity, and reason than the antagonists of Starship Troopers.
Not one slide of this propaganda is depicted in the movie; its buildup and fallout are missing, and we are left with just one somewhat hollow transition point. I think the anti-jingoism scene sticks out awkwardly, and while it will rightly be remembered as a great scene, the movie should have done more to earn it.
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In any case I think it’s extremely refreshing to see something original come out of Hollywood – a brave attempt at the biography of a great man, instead of the cookie cutter Disney and Marvel superhero films and politically-correct cartoon remakes that have been plaguing the industry for the last ten years. With Ridley Scott’s Napoleon coming out later this year, we might be seeing a shift away from safe, unoriginal, money-grubbing special effects-fests and towards a new era of epic historical cinema.
I am certainly up for that.
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I was disappointed with the movie. The only thing I knew about Oppenheimer before the watching it was the iconic phrase (that in the movie was placed so awkwardly into the sex scene that made me laugh). I expected a movie about what was on the minds of the scientists that made the bomb, including their objection to its use, and their regret.
Instead I got a movie about a political man destroying the reputation of a communist because his ego got hurt.
I’ve never written historical fiction myself, although in recent times have had several encourage me to try my hand at it. I’m still debating whether I should or not, really. But I am glad to have been made aware of aspects that can be difficult to strike just right, as if I do attempt historical fiction maybe it will help me being aware before I begin.
I’ve written medieval type fantasies but with lean into fantasy more than medieval: consider the typical DND or renaissance faire type aesthetics. I’ve even written on using that setting since it is somewhat controversial these days….
Might I ask, how similar/same do you intend the writing and audio to be? I read along while listening and found some differences, but nothing that changed the meaning essentially. I’m just curious if this is intentional or not. Do you allow yourself the wiggle room for such?
“Yankocentric” is that a real term I’ve never encountered or one that will end up credited to a Mr John Wheatley in the future? It’s a fun one, regardless!
I am a little curious, too, if further discussion would be reasonable to request? On this piece, on producing for Substack and otherwise in general, and perhaps a couple little things related as well… would it be permissible to exchange in a messenger of some sort? I understand if not, of course!