Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Christopher Nolan
Starring Robert Downey Jr, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett
Release Date July 21st, 2023
Published July 21st, 2023
Oppenheimer is the kind of epic filmmaking that we've not seen in years. It's expansive, expensive, and visionary work that encompasses American history within a singular story. The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of contradiction and controversy. Oppenheimer gave the humanity the ability to destroy itself and placed that power in the hands of egomaniacal world leaders. Then he spent his life trying to convince people to use this power responsibly. He was somewhat successful, we haven't been incinerated by Oppenheimer's creation. But that that is cold comfort, Oppenheimer's creation still hangs like the sword of Damocles over all of our heads, even as we all do our best to ignore it.
The expansive story of J. Robert Oppenheimer exists in movie form in three separate threads. In the first thread, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) is facing a Congressional hearing over his appointment to a position in President Eisenhower's cabinet. Though a top aid to the President, played by Alden Ehrenreich, assures him his approval is a near guarantee, Strauss is concerned that his past interactions with J. Robert Oppenheimer, a former friend and subordinate, will cost him his position. As this story plays out there were many twists and turns in the relationship between Oppenheimer and Strauss and that we only remember one of them historically says a lot.
In the second thread, we see J. Robert Oppenheimer rising through the academic ranks in the world of physics before ending up at Berkley. There he forms a friendship and partnership with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), the man who would take Oppenheimer's theory and turn it into a reality. Both men are brilliant and one doesn't succeed without the other, even as Oppenheimer is the one who goes on to infamy as the man who founded Los Alamos and led the charge to create the bomb. Nevertheless, without Lawrence, Oppenheimer may not have been sought to lead Los Alamos, it was Lawrence who joined The Manhattan Project first.
The third thread finds Oppenheimer, known by colleagues as Oppy, though that always feels far to whimsical for a man this serious, takes charge of Los Alamos, essentially a town founded with the specific goal of uniting America's best scientists in one place in order to build the bomb. Here, Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves work as leaders and adversaries in the 2 billion dollar effort to beat the Nazis and then the Russians to the development of a weapon of mass destruction. The point of the Manhattan Project was beating the Nazis but the war in Europe is won before the bomb is built.
This leads to a number of ethical debates about whether the the bomb still needs to be built. Oppenheimer here is shown as ineffectual in trying to make the case against developing the bomb. At a certain point, he just wanted to know if it could be done and this ambition allowed him to passively be convinced that dropping the bomb in Japan was a necessary evil intended to end the war in the Pacific and show Russia the full force of the American military. Oppenheimer was of two minds, understanding the bomb as a deterrent to future wars while also worrying that developing the bomb would cause a dangerous and divisive arms race.
Simmering in the background is Oppenheimer's personal life which is divided between two women, among several he may have carried on relationships with. Oppenheimer's first love was communist author and psychiatrist, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). She tries to recruit Oppenheimer to communism but finding him noncommittal to the cause, she settles for a tumultuous affair with Oppenheimer that unfortunately collides with Oppenheimer's relationship with the woman who would become his wife and mother of his children, Kitty Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt).
These two women reveal different aspects of Oppenheimer, aspects that cut to the core of the human being behind the pragmatic scientist turned unlikely patriot. From Jean Tatlock we learn about Oppenheimer's approach to politics but also to passion and how emotion can collide with his dedication to reason and education. Through Kitty we see the conflicted Oppenheimer, the vulnerable, awkward, self-effacing man behind the confident veneer of a world famous scientist. In the performances of these three actors we see this incredibly tense and passionate attempt to get Oppenheimer to open up and confront himself and his creation and we watch Murphy do everything he can to maintain composure in the face of world altering history on a very human scale.
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