I don’t go to the cinema much. I concluded decades ago that Hollywood would only change if they were starved of funds. That was before they went really woke of course. At the time I just wanted them to put out better content. Since then the movies produced by Hollywood have become significantly worse. The last movie I recall paying for was District 9 in 2009. I did see Wreck-It Ralph with my family in 2012 but we won those tickets. Thus it would be fair to say I’ve lived by my credo of trying to starve the Hollywood beast.
I nearly didn’t see Oppenheimer. Some comments by Robert Downey Jr. caused me to suspect the movie might be woke. While working on the movie Downey commented:
“Men start wars and the entire planet should be a matriarchy. But I’ve never changed position on that. This [the movie] was just a triple confirmation.”
Downey’s comments go directly against what we know about female rulers, who are more likely to start and continue wars than male rulers.
Ultimately I concluded that his comments didn’t reflect on the movie itself and that making a movie like this woke would be quite a feat.
This article contains minimal spoilers, such as they would be. Perhaps there wouldn’t be many spoilers with such well documented events.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist and is often called the father of the atomic bomb.
As a history and science nerd I’m familiar with the story and also the physics underlying the atomic bomb. Despite essentially being a biopic the movie is very fast paced and I suspect that people who do not have familiarity with the subject matter would struggle to understand some parts of the film. There is often very little exposition in the dialogue.
A good example of this is the difference between the types of weapons that Oppenheimer was working on, which use nuclear fission, and hydrogen bombs. Apart from one line about a small fission weapon being needed to start the fusion process of a hydrogen bomb there is nothing in the dialogue that explains the difference. It is assumed that viewers will simply know this.
Similarly, the fact that two designs were being worked on in parallel is evident from the story but not pointed out. The bombs shipped off to be used in war are never named in the movie either.
There were also a number of scenes where clues are dropped about an impending reveal. I recognised these due to my familiarity with the story but I don’t believe that the narrative would be harmed if someone missed them.
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg appear briefly which is a treat for any physics geeks that know their important contributions.
Two figures prominent in the historical events, General Groves and Edward Teller, were both regarded as very prickly characters. Difficult to get along with. I suspect some of their contemporaries might have described them as assholes. The movie somewhat plays this down in both cases. Yes they are shown as being difficult but the historical record seems to suggest they were significantly worse.
I judge that the movie was, unusually for Hollywood in the 2020s, not woke. This is with the possible exception of one scene. Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty is being interviewed during a small closed-door inquiry. The inquiry had interviewed many men, leaving them all twisted in knots from the questioning. Kitty deftly handles all of the questions put to her and leaves everyone listening in no doubt that she won the verbal exchange.
It’s notable that two of the three women Oppenheimer is shown to be romantically involved with were professionally trained. Kitty was a biologist but had traded the lab for diapers. His on-again off-again girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, was a clinical psychiatrist and thus a qualified medical doctor. Tell me again how women didn’t work until second-wave feminism came along. I talk extensively about women’s involvement in historical societies in my upcoming book, The Victorian Fallacy. Hint: the feminists are lying to you.
They make it clear that Kitty is an alcoholic and violent towards Robert Oppenheimer. They don’t dwell on this though. She isn’t shown hitting him but she does throw a small bottle at him during a drunken rage. I’d call this intimate partner violence but perhaps the writers and producers didn’t. In any case the movie is nearly three hours long and delving further in to this would have made it longer still. I don’t blame them for moving the story on.
Going in I was wondering if the movie would take a position on the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ultimately the movie took a nuanced approach to this which would have been closer to the positions of people alive at the time. Although it was not named the movie talked briefly about Operation Downfall, the planned land invasion of Japan by the allies. Planners projected a land invasion would result in many millions of human deaths, mostly Japanese.
Towards the end of the movie Oppenheimer laments dropping the bombs on an enemy which was nearly defeated. I suspect this is somewhat anachronistic. The world was at the end of a conflagration that had killed tens of millions of people. Contemporary news reports often spoke casually about the death and destruction happening around the world at the time. I believe that this is representative of how desensitised people were after years of war. The contemporary position in allied leadership was that the Japanese government and people were prepared to fight on and Operation Downfall would have likely proceeded had it not been for the atomic bombs. The decision ultimately fell to President Truman. He made his choice and the world has debated it ever since.
I actually think the movie could have been successfully released as two parts, or expanded further with more exposition and made in to a trilogy. In any case it was a fine movie and I’m glad I saw it.
Recommended.
