Oppenheimer Is Peak Cinema
.jpg)
There exists in the world about 13,000 known nuclear warheads, divided among the world’s nine nuclear powers of China, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Israel, Pakistan, France, and North Korea. There are likely more, as this is simply the count from publicly available data, but it’s 13,000 more bombs than humanity needs. Many of these are hydrogen bombs, which are, by order of magnitude, significantly more powerful than the Atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If nuclear war ever breaks out, humanity will not survive.
Also read:
Barbie Is the Most Important Film of 2023
The Story of How J. Robert Oppenheimer Poisoned His Tutor's Apple
J. Robert Oppenheimer knew this. The theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged as the “father of the atomic bomb,” knew that by winning the race against the Nazis to build a bomb more powerful than any the world had ever seen, he would be opening a Pandora’s Box from which there was no turning back. We live in a world today that sits on the precipice of oblivion, with weapons of mass destruction poised to wipe all human life from the face of the earth many times over. It is a world shaped by Oppenheimer, and Christopher Nolan considers him the most important person who ever lived for precisely this reason.
Oppenheimer is a sobering reminder of our mortality and how complicated (or how simple and petty) humanity can be.
In 1965, during an interview with NBC, Oppenheimer reflected on the historic detonation of the first atomic bomb, known as the Trinity Test, "We knew the world would not be the same,” he said slowly, with eyes that stared blankly and reflected nothing.
“A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita,” Oppenheimer drones, wiping away a lone tear that wells from his right eye, “Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”
“I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”
Oppenheimer was a polymath who spoke multiple languages and had an interest in Sanskrit, reading the Bhagavad Gita in its original form. In a memorable scene that’s likely less biographical than it is artistic license, Oppenheimer’s lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) dismounts from him and extracts from his bookshelf the 700-verse Hindu scripture and demands him to read the passage. It’s an electrifying, arguably blasphemous mid-coital foreplay, that encapsulates Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) character in a nutshell: he was a brilliant man with very human desires.
Nolan’s Oppenheimer reminds us that we’re hurtling into certain destruction in much the same way stars consume themselves and that some things in life are more important than others.
It might be reductive to say Oppenheimer loved sex. He certainly loved women, pursuing even the wives of his colleagues, such as Katherine "Kitty" Puening (Emily Blunt), who was married to physician Richard Harrison when he got her pregnant. He was a notorious womanizer, but his prodigious intellect excused his many indiscretions. J. Robert Oppenheimer was put on earth for things far too great to be concerned with societal expectations of propriety; after all, when you change the course of history, people probably don’t care much where you put your dick.
Nolan’s Oppenheimer puts things in perspective, reminding us that we’re hurtling into certain destruction in much the same way stars consume themselves and that some things in life are more important than others. Inspired by Oppenheimer’s biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Nolan opens with the story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, which condemns him to an eternity of torment. It’s a perfect metaphor for the man who gave us the keys to our own destruction and who spent the remainder of his life haunted by his conscience and his failure to control the use of his own research.
Nolan threads two stories to drive home the more relevant point about how it’s man’s pettiness that guarantees mutually assured destruction. One narrative, told in color, is Oppenheimer’s life and perspective, the dogged pursuit of science and the quest to balance knowledge against power; the other, mostly as a kindness to the viewer, is in black and white, the story of what happened to Oppenheimer after the Manhattan Project. Like many who have outlived their usefulness to those in power, Oppenheimer was discarded, humiliated, and his influence diminished to the point where he could no longer affect legislative change.
It’s what happens when Prometheus pisses off the gods. Or the men who think themselves as gods, anyway. At the very least, the gods of Olympus were as petty as the most petty of men, which was precisely their point. President Harry S. Truman, two months after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, receives Oppenheimer at the White House and excitedly tells him America’s plans to pursue Hydrogen bombs. Horrified, Oppenheimer tells Truman, “I have blood on my hands,” which angers the warmongering former soldier, who calls him a “crybaby.”
It’s three hours of riveting narrative, Nolan at his storytelling finest. Oppenheimer is the reason why IMAX exists, one of the few films that demand to be seen on a screen the size of a small building. It means little to say this is one of Nolan’s best, as all his work are merely varying degrees of genius, but it might be appropriate to say that Oppenheimer is his most important reflection to date. Nolan continues to push the boundaries of the cinematic experience, and Oppenheimer delivers with each frame. When the Trinity Test bomb explodes, there is a moment where the theater is awash with light and silence, and it’s pure cinematic wonder. It is the culmination of cinema.
Oppenheimer is the reason why IMAX exists, one of the few films that demand to be seen on a screen the size of a small building.
In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev commissioned the creation of the Tsar Bomba, a thermonuclear device designed to be over 3,000 times more destructive than the Fat Man and Little Boy that were dropped over Japan. A gimped version of the bomb was tested in October that year, marking the first and so far last time a device with unparalleled destructive power was detonated in our atmosphere. Its blast wave circled the earth three times, destroying buildings 55 km away, essentially a proof of concept for annihilation. Oppenheimer opened the door for the Tsar Bomba and the over 13,000 nuclear bombs that followed. Oppenheimer is a sobering reminder of our mortality and how complicated (or how simple and petty) humanity can be; and that, in our hubris, we have become the architects of our own extinction.
