Title: Oppenheimer
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Alden Ehrenreich
I finally saw Oppenheimer, and if you have an interest in the subject, it’s well worth seeing. It’s a near-great film that’s great when it covers the atomic bomb project, and considerably less great when It Has Important Things To Say.
The movie covers much of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), director of the Los Alamos part of the project to build the atomic bomb. The movie has a non-linear format, using the framing device of two different hearings (on the renewal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and the cabinet confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who lured Oppenheimer to Princeton and oversaw the Atomic Energy Commission, and who is eventually revealed to be the film’s antagonist) interspersed with Oppenheimer’s life before and during the The Manhattan Project.
When the film is good, it’s flat out great. The scenes here tend to be small in scope, seldom more than a minute long, slowly building up Oppenheimer’s life, his love and study of physics, his dalliance with communism (he was a fellow-traveler who never joined the party, but did take a commie (Florence Pugh) as his first wife and an ex-commie (Emily Blunt) as his second), his dismay as a Jewish American at the rise of Nazism, and his involvement in the atomic bomb effort.
The brevity of the scenes is one of the film’s greatest strengths. Though mostly quiet and understated in themselves, they slowly build up a heady steam of narrative momentum. By the time they get to Los Alamos itself you’re absolutely riveted.
And it gets better. The scenes leading up to the Trinity detonation are a masterpiece of film editing, successfully ratcheting the tension higher and higher just by showing scenes of the elaborate preparations leading up to the blast, under-laid by Ludwig Göransson’s tense, violin-heavy score. I saw the film in IMAX, and I think I got my money’s worth out of that sequence alone.
But that headlong pace enfolds within it a problem: Things move so fast, that some scenes have a certain checkmark quality to them, so that you know exactly what’s coming. Gee, when commie girlfriend picks up a Sanskrit text, what do you want to bet that the passage he’s reading is “I am become death, destroyer of worlds?”
Please, no wagering.
But that’s a minor problem compared to the biggest flaw of Oppenheimer, which is what they chose to include as the main non-Trinity storyline. Why have the climax of your film feature the literal explosion of an atomic bomb when you can spend the rest of it on the pulse-pounding excitement of committee meetings?
To be fair to Nolan, this is obviously the film he wanted to make, and the film is called Oppenheimer rather than The Making of the Atomic Bomb. And the committee meeting scenes are as well-acted, well-directed and well-paced as you could reasonably ask of a big-budget, A-list Hollywood film. But the real reason they’re there is so the leftist screenwriters can Say Important Things.
Oppenheimer must feel massive guilt and remorse for having helped usher in the atomic age, because this is Approved Opinion. Leftists, even commies, must be shown in a positive light, because this is Approved Opinion. Likewise, McCarthyism must be shown to be Very Bad, so all the crimes of communism have to be kept offstage.
Indeed, an awful lot happens off-stage, including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then again, Oppenheimer is the viewpoint character.
From my better-than-the-average-layman-understanding-at-how-an-atomic-bomb-works-but-hardly-an-expert vantage point, the historical accuracy for the film seems painstaking and effective. I understood why Klaus Fuchs was important when he was introduced, appreciated the Nixie tubes in the Trinity countdown, and figured out the guy with the bongos must have been Richard Feynman. Everything sure as hell looks accurate, and the New Mexico photography is gorgeous.
But with so much time spent on the commie and Strauss plots, and Oppenheimer having visions of particle physics (early) and atomic destruction (late), the rest of the film (the far more interesting part) feels a bit rushed. Plus the sheer smallness of the stakes that drive the frame-story/post-Trinity portion feels like a distinct anticlimax. Indeed, the primary subplot turns out to be (spoilers) Strauss secretly shiving Oppenheimer by getting his security clearance yanked for…his supporting export of radioactive isotopes to Norway? It’s like if during the climax of Kill Bill, you find out that the Bride’s entire motivation for her revenge spree was Bill never returning her DVD of Steel Magnolias.
All that said, this is still an exceptionally good film, and even the ostensibly bad guys Have Their Reasons. Even hydrogen bomb father Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who the writers must have been tempted to turn into a secondary villain, comes across as a smart, sympathetic figure. And history validates both his and Strauss’ view that America was right to move forward on the H-Bomb, as the Soviets were utterly untrustworthy as arms control treaty partners.
I expect Oscar nominations galore.
If you’re the kind of person that would watch a three hour movie on the making of the atomic bomb, this is the one to watch.
Tags: Christopher Nolan, Communism, Ludwig Goransson, Media Watch, Military, movie review, movies, nuclear weapons, World War II
I was visiting the Air Force museum in Dayton, looking at the B-36 and it’s 25 foot long H-bomb and was getting a little depressed looking at the vestiges of uncountable wealth squandered on the cold war. Then I heard Russian voices behind me as saw a group of military age Russians speaking among themselves and realized – it was worth it.
It was worth it then.
The vast majority of the money wasted while the neocon’s dreamed of an empire, and all the stupid wars subsequent to the fall of the Soviet Union, lack any such justification.
Eh?
By my count: Yugoslavia, Panama, Iraq 1+2, Afghanistan, Kosovo, whatever the hell was going on in Syria/Libya/Yemen, Ukraine.
Yugoslavia and Kosovo I’ll grant you; the Europeans should have handled that to the extent any handling was needed. Panama has always been a critical strategic interest for the USA and trying to piss off the USA while holding the canal is not a good bet (the Chinese should take note). Iraq 1, given that the US was buddy-buddy with the Saudis at the time and the Carter oil shock was just over a decade prior, I have great difficulty seeing how it could have gone otherwise – except that they should’ve gone for Baghdad right then instead of pulling their punches. Afghanistan was totally justified; the problem was that instead of clobbering everything, napalming the heroin fields, shooting anybody engaged in bachi bazi on sight, shooting any human rights lawyer who made a fuss about that, and then pulling out while saying “Don’t make us come back”, they got all nice and bureaucratic and careerist about it. Iraq 2 only happened because Iraq 1 was half-assed; the correct target should have been the Saudis, with a treatment roughly similar to what I just described for Afghan.
Syria/Libya/Yemen was just a lot more careerist attempts to finesse looking like doing something while not doing anything, which made everything worse. And only because the pattern had been set by the previous halfassery.
Ukraine is proof that Russia has not changed and all of us who thought it had (me included) were wrong. The only provocation the US can credibly be accused of in that context is that of existing as an alternative to Russia.
To the extent most of these wars were problems, it is because they were carried out according to careerist and virtue signalling priorities, rather than making a priority of victory. This is not a defense of the neocons – a great deal of the nation-building overstretch and virtue signalling and failure to even try for a meaningful victory and thus end to military commitment came from them – but they didn’t fake the underlying American interest in fighting some of these wars in the first place.
Ironically enough, Jerry Pournelle was one of the most vocal anti-neocon commentators. If you go back and read his blog entries for 9/11 and immediately afterward, he is quite vocal in taking it for granted that the USA must and will become an empire and the historical dialectic allows for no other possible course etc. etc. etc. By Iraq 2 he was raging because the USA was failing to become an empire the way he wanted it. If you read his entries for March 2014 and later on Crimea, he was basically echoing the Putinist line, verbatim. Again, I’m not defending the neocons – they were drunk with delusions of grandeur and screwed things up pretty badly – but the mere fact of them advocating a policy doesn’t inherently make that policy wrong.
Florence Pugh’s character was not his first wife. She was just a girlfriend and, later, his mistress.
Iraq after Desert Storm was what it was because the Saudis and other Gulf states didn’t want a Shiia state at their north; they shut Desert Storm down once it became apparent that Saddam’s military was a joke. They refused to let the US and non-Arab allies take Iraq, because that would have left them with nothing between them and the Iranians.
The other thing you’re mistaken about is Afghanistan; the real enemy there was Pakistan’s ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence agency. The Taliban was and is a creature of that agency, and nothing went on inside the Taliban’s Afghanistan without ISI’s knowledge and approval. They had to have known and approved of the 9/11 attacks, in other words. So, the Afghans were basically patsies for a Pakistani/Saudi clique that wanted to attack the United States; there’s no other possible reading of the situation.
The 15 Saudi hijackers were all in the US on fresh, clean Saudi passports, and had been vetted by the Saudi government. As most of them were also known jihadis who’d been on the Jihadi Trail, the only way that those passports and visas could have been issued is with connivance of the Saudi government, or at least, factions inside it.
I suspect that the clean-up of the Saudi royal family and government under the current prince has a lot to do with those facts. I suspect that Trump basically told them “Fix this, or I will…”, and that’s where a lot of the Saudi willingness to negotiate the Abraham Accords stems from. That so-called “journalist” that was killed in Turkey? Dude used to be a known bag-man for al Qaeda, travelling between the faction in Saudi that financed bin Laden and Afghanistan. His death wasn’t murder, and the reason that Trump never made much noise about it is that it was fully deserved.
Or, so I surmise from reading the tea leaves of open-source intelligence…
Kirk said, “The other thing you’re mistaken about is Afghanistan; the real enemy there was Pakistan’s ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence agency. The Taliban was and is a creature of that agency, and nothing went on inside the Taliban’s Afghanistan without ISI’s knowledge and approval.”
Again Kirk for the win. A retired State Dept. official – back when they were still good – once told me that the Taliban was to Pakistan what N. Korea was to the PRC, an often rabid and entirely stupid junkyard dog on a leash that 3rd parties with economic and social control could sic on their enemies. In Pakistan’s case that enemy was and always will be India. In China’s case that enemy is S. Korea, Japan, and by extension the United States. Pakistan’s ‘anti-terrorism’ measures and reputation are a joke, calling them half-hearted was an insult to hearts.
After reading that Nolan’s film drew on the writing of two journalists for the Leftist publication Nation, I had misgivings about seeing it.
Now that Vox Day has declared the Manhattan Project to be “fake and gay” I have changed my mind.
https://voxday.net/2023/08/07/oppenheimer-and-the-manhatten-psyop/
One wonders if Vox Day believes that Worlds War II was fought at all…
Yeah, but she was presented as his first wife in the film.
Vox Day is a bit… Shall we say, loony?
Dude is so insecure that he’ll find this post, and I guarantee you he will be replying to it, one way or another. He can’t stand criticism, at all… Even managed to get into conflict with Sarah Hoyt, of all people, claiming that she’d “…never be an American…”
This, while he himself is about as far away from white-bread WASP as you can get, and would likely be ostracized by the very people he seems to think of as “True Americans”.
Interesting study in psychology, that guy. Someone could probably make a doctoral thesis or two out of interviewing him.
Guarantee you he’ll show up here, in response to his name being mentioned…
“ The more one reviews the details of 20th Century history, the more obvious it becomes that literally everything has been fake and gay for a lot longer than the last twenty years of open Clown World rule. There isn’t a single item of the mainstream history narrative that can be assumed to be generally true.”
Who then will disabuse you of your false conceptions and introduce you to the secret knowledge held only by the cognoscenti? Vox Day to the rescue!
This is how cult leaders operate. The (clown) world is holding you back from the rewards that are rightfully yours but an inspired leader will free you from your shackles and deliver you into a rebirth of all that is Good and True.
I was initially impressed with Theodore Beale’s insight and integrity when he began writing for World Net Daily but with each passing year his work becomes more cryptic and esoteric. There is no telling where this will lead.
It’s a fairly classic pattern. You start out as a contrarian, progress to maverick, become an iconoclast, and then end as a crank.
I think he’s had a lot of “right things” that he’s said and done, but… Jeezly Jones, but has he stepped through the looking glass a few times, or what?
That said, while I find points to agree with in his work, there’s a lot of that whole “cult” vibe he gives off that just leaves me a little less than enthused with the fact that I agree with some of what he’s had to say. Makes me question my own sanity and rectitude, ya know…?
Frankly, any time someone starts making pronouncements on anything and professing absolute certainty? Watch the hell out; they’ve probably crawled up their own fundament and are now staring out through what they think is a window into reality, but is actually just their own lower intestine…
It is a flawed masterpiece about a flawed masterpiece of a man.
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This clown was a commie, through and through. He himself admitted he was a member of every commie front group on the West coast. No he wasn’t a fellow traveller and if you believe he was then I am sure you believe every member of the View should be a Playboy Centerfold.
And no Oppenheimer wasn’t the father of the Abomb nor director of the project, Gen. Banks was.Teller has Oppenheimer’s number. No wonder thay Moscow gave him the oRDER OF kENNIN, tHE vENONNA TAPES ALSO INDICATE oPPENHEIMER WAS mOSCOW’S MAN.