I am not the world’s biggest movie fan and it’s not my intention to become a recurring movie critic. However, the movie Oppenheimer is worthy of discussion. In a movie market cluttered with “franchise films” (Mission Impossible…), comic book derived cartoons and real-life action (Spiderman, Flash) and nostalgia for childhood dolls (Barbie), the implied tagline for Oppenheimer could have been “at last, an adult movie about weighty subjects.” The movie is a historical period piece so it isn’t possible to spoil the movie in any real sense with a review (and that’s not the intent here, regardless). After seeing the movie, the best way to review the film is to first make some distinctions between what the movie did NOT attempt to accomplish and what it DID attempt before addressing those attempts on their own merits.
What the Movie Did NOT Try To Accomplish
Oppenheimer did NOT attempt to deliver a “scientific biography” of the Manhattan Project, primarily focused on the technical / financial aspects of the effort, peppering it with deep dives into the psyches of Oppenheimer and his team to understand how their personal and scientific selves approached the work and processed the aftermath of a working bomb. The actual project required synthesizing advancements in chemistry, metallurgy, theoretical physics, explosives, etc. References to those disciplines and the challenges of fusing them together into a “gadget” occupy a total of maybe ten minutes – in a three hour film.
If you were interested in how theory related to bomb design had to race in parallel with theory involving the creation of enough fissionable material by two alternate, unproven and (equally) astronomically expensive processes, that entire struggle is summarized into a simple recurring visual metaphor of marbles in a fishbowl (uranium) and a smaller cocktail glass (plutonium). I don’t recall Hanford or Oak Ridge ever being named, despite the costs and labor of constructing those plants dwarfing the infrastructure put in place at Los Alamos in terms of buildings and people.
What Oppenheimer TRIED to Accomplish…
The VAST majority of scenes and dialog in the movie (probably over eighty five percent) involve what could most appropriately be termed a Red-Scare inspired whodunnit regarding a career and public profile assassination. Obviously, the movie is historically based so it should not be a spoiler to note that Oppenheimer was subjected to exactly this treatment after failing to support new efforts at creating hydrogen bombs (thermonuclear bombs using FISSION bombs to trigger the compression of hydrogen to create FUSION reactions achieving megaton yields instead of mere kiloton yields). The movie has one small plot twist that unfolds in the last twenty minutes of the movie that I will leave undescribed. After about fifty minutes of the film had elapsed and it became clear the movie was not going to get into ANY technical details, the movie took on more of a Good Night, and Good Luck feel, only about nuclear politics rather than the news media.
The ACTUAL Movie Experience
How did Oppenheimer fare in achieving its goals? First, the elephant in the theatre must be discussed. Oppenheimer was filmed in IMAX. I watched in a Superscreen DLX theatre, not an IMAX theatre but after watching all three hours, nothing in the content seems to justify the effort and expense. The entire movie is a historical piece so all of the scenes are either shot in black and white or tinted to make them look like dimly lit 1940s settings. The scene depicting the initial Trinity test might have been a logical candidate for the hi-definition realism of IMAX but director Chris Nolan didn’t place five IMAX cameras around a desert valley and pay Los Alamos Laboratories to set off another atomic blast. Numerous press stories on the movie issued prior to release state that the “blast” in the film was all real but involved “conventional” explosives which means it looks like a Hollywood explosion rather than a nuclear explosion. A “realistic” bomb scene would essentially have been an entire screen of white bright enough to illuminate the bones in your hand like an x-ray for a few seconds. Anyone looking away from the blast could probably view the developing cloud through welder glass after a few seconds. Anyone looking AT the blast would probably be blinded for at least two to three minutes.
In other words, there’s no adequate or accurate way to convey the actual detonation visually. Nolan could have focused on secondary effects to emphasize the unique power of the new weapon. One famous anecdote from the Trinity test not reflected in the film explains how Enrico Fermi estimated the yield of the Trinity test by releasing torn up shreds of paper just as the bomb blast reached his observation point with the other scientists. The shreds of paper were blown 2.5 meters which he estimated to correspond to a blast of 10,000 tons of TNT. Later estimates put the yield at 25,000 tons.
Perhaps the point most effectively conveyed in the film involves how Oppenheimer’s scientific career advanced in the 1920s and 1930s despite him developing a reputation as a sloppy lab worker for experimental work and disinterested in the nitty gritty, mind-numbing math behind the rapidly evolving theories of the day. That dichotomy is summarized as he meets one mentor early in his career who invites him to work with him for a period. “I don’t care if you can read the music, it’s important if you can hear the music.” In other words, many scientific advancements are equally dependent upon those with visualization skills that make interrelated concepts “click” and those with the skills to translate such relationships into written mathematical or prose form. If you don’t have the vision, you’re just a scribe with nothing to write. If you can’t communicate an idea clearly, it cannot be understood, validated or advanced by others.
The most annoying aspect of the production involved Nolan’s use of modern cinematic ploys to add drama like rapid jump cuts between different arguments and interrogation scenes taking place at different points in time, all while annoying escalating “music” plays to remind the less sophisticated movie goer that this is all leading to something… At some point. But this is a three-hour movie. Interrogations are a key part of the overall screenplay so this effect gets used (abused) for minutes at a time, totaling what seemed like thirty minutes of screen time. And all that music means you can’t follow the dialogue, even if you might have normally been able to follow it, despite any presence of time or place cues.
Almost as annoying as the jump-cuts and drowned out dialogue is the failure to appropriately introduce any of the famous figures in the movie using any common cinematic devices. Maybe a newspaper clip showing a name and recognized headline about an event… Maybe a flashback scene with a brief caption with a year and city name, at least. Nothing. Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, who were instrumental with efforts in 1940 at the University of Chicago and creating the first sustained nuclear reaction are brought onscreen with a brief mention of “Chicago” and never appear in conjunction with their name so the movie goer can make an association. When Ernest Laurence first makes an entrance in the film, the screenplay just conveys he is already a respected experimental physicist at Berkley and briefly mentions his work in building cyclotrons that were used to expand understanding of atomic structure. Normally, a movie making some effort to be educational might have figured out a way to gently hint to the viewer that Ernest Laurence is the Laurence in two different national laboratories, Laurence Berkeley National Laboratory and Laurence Livermore National Laboratory, that are still advancing physics to this day.
In the movie, Ernest Laurence was less critical to the key plot but the character of Edward Teller who was crucial to Oppenheimer’s eventual fate was given a similar non-introduction. In real life, Teller became known as the father of the H-bomb and drove most of the theoretical work leading to its working form in 1952 (though the idea of a fusion bomb triggering a fission bomb was first suggested to Teller by Enrico Fermi…). Teller joined the Manhattan project in 1942 and his time was split between distractions on his idea of a fusion bomb and assistance with “metallurgical” science being done at both Los Alamos and University of Chicago. Later, he became a major player in the effort to discredit Oppenheimer in the public but none of this is hinted at when he first appears on screen.
The net effect of these rushed character introductions not only makes the flow of the film clunky, it prevents the film from making the key point about Oppenheimer himself that made his reputational assassination so tragic. The movie implies that many around Oppenheimer understood he had unique skills of visualization and synthesis but leaves it at that. Without understanding the brilliance of those around him, it is impossible to appreciate how perfectly suited he was for that problem at that moment in terms of his scientific expertise and communication skills.
Overall, as I sat through this three hour movie – I mentioned it’s three hours, right? – it occurred to me that I wasn’t experiencing the desired suspension of disbelief where a movie transports a viewer into the perspective of one of the characters, a separate narrator or just a fly on the wall objectively watching the events unfold. Instead, I felt like I was watching the movie through the director’s viewfinder with a copy of the screenplay opened on a tray next to the camera. Or maybe stuck in a darkened editing room with a giant mixing board and digital equivalent of a Moviola, watching the director and editor make every decision about every cut and every sound effect insertion – and feeling manipulated by all of those trite techniques. The movie wasn’t an action movie. It wasn’t an epic cross-country adventure. It wasn’t a space fantasy. It wasn’t a cops and robbers car chase extravaganza. It should have been a movie centered on dialogue, political conflict, morality and human ambition. None of which require action movie cinematography and soundtracks.
What COULD Oppenheimer Have Achieved?
The movie does end with one effective point about the fickleness of society in alternately creating heroes, destroying them and occasionally rebuilding them, all to suit the motives of hidden players and their schemes. That’s an effective takeaway for a period piece about a controversial deadly weapon created by a controversial figure during a time when America was swinging from one enemy (the Axis powers) to the next (Russia and communism in general). By focusing on the mechanics of a career battle without spending more time on the discussions that went into the technical challenges of the time and potential consequences, the movie Oppenheimer fails to tie this history to current events. Is Artificial Intelligence the next atomic bomb technology whose adoption is outstripping our ability to comprehend and thwart its possible dire consequences?
The movie hinted at but did not emphasize how quickly the next round of paranoia about Russia and communism began constraining America’s perspective and that of the West in general. Indeed, the bulk of the movie involves an administrative hearing rigged to retract Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954 based upon his personal relationships in the 1930s and his work leading the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Council starting in 1947. It never actually explained any trigger behind the 1954 hearing or how a key nemesis reached a point of power to initiate that hearing as a form of revenge. The lack of context and erratic editing of the movie convey nothing to modern viewers about how the Red Scare fear mongering of that time led to such persecution. By failing to explain the context of that time, the movie fails to raise any parallels to modern struggles over orthodoxy.
The movie does provide insight into concerns project members including Oppenheimer had during the design work and after first use about the morality of such a weapon of mass destruction. However, little time is spent addressing the project’s other long-term health impacts. There is about thirty seconds of dialogue in the movie as a team discusses one female member’s risk to future children as a result of working around the uranium and plutonium. Throughout the movie, director Nolan includes segments where Oppenheimer experiences an inner “fast forward” to horrific images of victims (accompanied by annoying loud sound effects) as he begins to understand more of a bomb’s destructive potential. Some of that screen time could have been used to include references to workers sickened by radiation exposure at lab and enrichment facilities, military personnel subjected to radiation during bomb testing in the decades that followed or average citizens still exposed to waste from Manhattan Project work all over the country.
In reality, the Manhattan Project taught America how to become a national security state. It taught faceless bureaucrats that it was possible to cloak pet projects behind national security concerns and obtain unaccountable billions from taxpayers for unexplained goals and never be accountable for costs or outcomes – behaviors that are corrosive to democracy. With just a minute or two here and there, the film could have tied Manhattan Project era work to programs still in place today to show the lasting scientific and political impacts (good and bad). A viewer without any knowledge of the Manhattan Project would be left with the impression it spent a lot of money eighty years ago, yielded a hero who was subsequently tarred and feathered during the McCarthy era then vanished without a trace.
As an aside, if you ARE interested in the scientific aspects of the entire Manhattan Project, there is no better book on the subject than The Making of the Atomic Bomb, written by Richard Rhodes in 1986.
WTH
