Oppenheimer is one of the All-Time Greats
A second viewing reveals how profound and beautifully made this movie is
I’ve been a movie buff my whole life. I made films in college and initiated the first film studies classes ever taught at Swarthmore. I’ve watched many of the greatest movies several times. Having seen Oppenheimer for the second time (in IMAX) over the weekend, I’ll just say it: This is one of the all-time greats. Although, like all great but not perfect movies, it has a major flaw. But it also has direct lessons for one of the biggest problems facing us today.
This is too complex a movie to grasp after one viewing, when we’re trying to follow the intricacies of several stories (Oppenheimer’s life through the Manhattan Project and afterward; the hearing to deny him a security clearance and Straus’s confirmation hearing—at first not obvious why it matters—for a Cabinet post in the Eisenhower administration) and getting first impressions of what it all means. A second viewing reveals a lot more and I’m sure more viewings will peel off more layers still.
This is a profound meditation on some of the deepest moral and existential issues we as a country and species face— how to handle the power to literally destroy ourselves, which our brightest minds unleashed upon us with what seemed at the time the best of intentions. And its central character is a deeply flawed (aren’t we all?) person, riven by contradiction, with a grandiose view of himself (perhaps deserved) and a self-destructive streak. As such, he is in the tradition of morally compromised protagonists of great films like Michael Mann’s The Insider, Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Not coincidentally, those movies, like this one, were based on the lives of real people.
Director Christopher Nolan has a reputation as a cold filmmaker. Not here, though: At the end of my second viewing, I found myself deeply moved by the fate of this man and the world he left behind for us. The three hours went by as quickly the second time as it did the first. Nolan’s script, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning biography American Prometheus, is surprisingly faithful to the history, and skillfully interweaves the main narratives to paint a picture of a character who remains at heart as conflicted as T.E. Lawrence and as much of an enigma as Charles Foster Kane. Cillian Murphy’s incandescent performance captures that mystery and a lot more. Nolan coaxes superb performances from a stellar supporting cast, most notably Matt Damon cast against type as General Leslie Groves and Robert Downey Jr. in a career-defining role as Lewis Strauss.
The film-making was, in a word, dazzling, especially in the 70mm IMAX format. Seconds-quick shots of stars and galaxies illustrate the abstract concepts in physics the characters discover as we watch, and imbue them with awe and wonder. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who was Nolan’s Director of Photography for Dunkirk and Interstellar, blends color and black and white using a special film stock developed by Kodak for IMAX. Jennifer Lame’s editing was a tour de force, weaving together the disparate imagery and story lines, especially using sound, and the edgy, hypnotic score by Ludwig Göransson, to move from one scene and narrative to another. The climactic test of the bomb at Los Alamos filled the screen with fire and made the theater shake.
The big flaw I mentioned earlier was the way the film treated the suffering of the Japanese people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—as many as 200,000 dead and tens of thousands more wounded and maimed for life. The characters in the film all discussed and debated this, even described some of the horrors, but Nolan didn’t show them. I know there are big problems showing the worst atrocities in commercial movies (even some documentaries hold back); Steven Spielberg spared us the worst of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List, too. But I think Nolan should have showed more, even at the risk of making the audience cringe; it’s a vital part of the story. Oppenheimer has still not been shown in Japan. The Japanese can be forgiven for not being too concerned about the moral qualms and existential angst of the man who helped unleash nuclear terror on their country.
Finally—and this post is getting as long as the movie—Oppenheimer offers direct lessons for a critical problem we face today: the rise of generative artificial intelligence.
Back in the 1940s physicists had a pretty good idea what a nuclear chain reaction could produce; their big challenge was making a bomb that could actually do it. But no one had much doubt that the world would be fundamentally changed by their invention. Still, they pushed ahead because they were terrified Adolf Hitler would get the bomb first. Development proceeded even after Nazi Germany’s defeat because, well, that’s how science/technology/the military work: the proverbial genie can’t be put back in the bottle.
There’s no unanimity about the potential effects of generative AI, though some of the people most closely involved in its development—the equivalent of Oppenheimer and the scientists in the Manhattan Project—are warning about its existential threat to our species. We can’t tell if they’re right, of course, but there’s no Hitler out there forcing anybody’s hand. The only motivating force for this breakneck development is the race for profits and a higher share price for the “winner.” Given the potential catastrophic consequences of even a long-tail chance of AI going haywire, Oppenheimer teaches us that the time to ask questions and put the brakes on is right now, while scientists and the companies behind them and governments still have the power to exert some control.
Any movie that prompts us to ask questions like this is great, almost by definition. See it if you haven’t and see it again if you have.