Oppenheimer

Synopsis:  Scientist begins the age of nuclear war.

Behold the Anthropocene.  Mid-20th Century, humans had enough of Nature calling the shots. Homo Sapiens would harness their brain power to create more stuff, consequences be damned. Thanks to fossil fuels, factories could produce lots of power for manufacturing and energy for zippy transportation vehicles like cars and jets. But burning fossil fuels heats up the planet. Oops.

Throughout the 1900’s humans also used their big brains to develop ever more devastating munitions to use against each other in order to guard and conquer territories. During World War II (1939- 1945), the Allied Powers (US, UK & USSR) and the Axis Powers (Germany, Italy & Japan) kept bombing each other back into the Stone Age with no clear victor. Both sides were racing to build a bomb that would provide a win.

Enter Robert Oppenheimer, dubbed the Father of the Atomic Bomb. Oppy can’t take all of the credit or blame; hundreds of scientists and engineers based in the United States were in a race to beat the Axis Powers. The operation to create an atomic bomb before the Nazis was called the Manhattan Project. Doesn’t that sound like a harmless project to get financing for a musical?

The head of the project was American physicist, Robert Oppenheimer. Director Christopher Nolan has based Oppenheimer on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus.

Now, if you will, consider Irish actor, Cillian Murphy. He of the icy blue eyes and piercing stare. He used his peepers to good scary effect as Scarecrow in Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy and as a maniac in Red Eye who terrorizes Rachel McAdams’ forthright character.

Cillian is riveting as Oppy. He has a lot to shoulder, playing the scientist from grad student to Los Alamos and beyond. Reportedly, he shunned cast dinners during production because he needed to concentrate on his performance. He probably spent a lot of time staring into a mirror asking himself if his character was amoral.

When we meet Oppy as a student at Cambridge he has a fevered look, as though mathematical formulae and visions of atoms are always jetting around his head. He has a professor who tutors him because he doesn’t like lab work. Oppy wants to be a theoretical physicist which seems to mean that he wants to be going at a blackboard all day with pieces of chalk, graffiti-ing numbers incessantly in order to solve the universe’s mysteries.

You’ve got to wonder what kind of person could take on the enormous task of guiding scientists to harnessing the power of the atom to make a bomb of almost unimaginably destructive power. Surely, he was a bright star even among uber eggheads. But what about his temperament, his character?

So, that snide prof of Oppy’s… One day, he goes all Wicked Queen in Snow White. He injects an apple on the professor’s desk with poison. The next day, he thinks better of attempted murder and chucks the apple in the bin. If history reveals that the man later died by having his heart cut out, we’ll know who contracted for that.

By 1936, armed with a PhD in Physics, Oppenheimer settled in California where he began teaching in a nascent filed, quantum physics. Btw, his thesis, Zur Quantentheorie kontinuierlicher Spektren was written while he studied in Germany. Prof. Brainiac probably learned the language in about two weeks.

Re. What the Heck is Physics…There’s this series called Quantum Leap about a smart guy who fiddles with atoms and all this really small stuff, which, when reconfigured, can send a person backwards through time and transfer their existential experience to another person.  This informs my basic understanding of the field of physics. O! Also, in one of the Star Trek movies somebody–maybe Spock– proposes that the Enterprise spaceship slingshot around the sun to go back in time and change the future. Mr. Nolan goes in a different direction. An atom bomb-making direction.

I wish that there had been a narrator explaining to us non-physics people what was happening, but we have to make do with Cillian making his eyes really big and staring into the void/camera while the screen fills with visions of circular blobs of matter bumping into each other.

Oppy is a real zealot when he is lecturing his students at UC Berkeley. But he finds time for tomcatting about as well. That is an old-timey term that means being on the lookout for recreational sex opportunities. Oppy has no problem finding women to consort with, as they seem to launch themselves into his orbit. Both his Communist lover, Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist; and the woman he ends up marrying, Katherine Puening, a biologist, practically pounce on him at faculty parties while he waves about a ciggie, pontificating on Science. I guess it’s not just the students getting up to sexual antics.

Chrsitopher Nolan is no pro at shaping women characters. I don’t know that he improves his record here, but he at least gives women more screen time in Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh’s Jean is a complicated and fiery woman. Like a good anti-bourgeois woman, she disdains dating conventions. Whenever, Oppy visits her (whether he’s married or not), bringing flowers, she promptly tosses them out. Then it’s off to bed. One night, Miss Flo gets off on straddling her lover while she directs him to read from the Bhagavad Gita –in Sanskrit, no less  –“Now I am Become Death, the Destroyer of worlds.” Gulp. Not your standard aphrodisiac.

Many viewers will be most interested in Oppenheimer’s time at Los Alamos, the New Mexico location where he marshalled forward the making of the atomic bomb. In the movie, Oppenheimer is well-established as a genius among geniuses. He’s first approached by a U.S. government representative to lead the Manhattan Project, to design an atomic bomb when he’s at Princeton University visiting Einstein. This time around, history’s most famous scientist is played by Tom Conti with the requisite flyaway snowy hair.

Oppenheimer accepts the position since he is convinced that the Nazis are working on developing nuclear weapons. The only problem is that the weapon that could end the war could also end life on Earth. And once it’s known how to make atom bombs the danger to all life will continue. This fact is best expressed by pop singer Christina Aguilera in “Genie in a Bottle” wherein she frantically croons that, “Baby, there’s a price to pay.” So true, Xtina.

Oppenheimer is chockful of stars. Matt Damon is Gen. Leslie Groves, Oppy’s Army handler. How I wish Jesse Plemons (The Power of the Dog) was cast instead. Robert Downey Junior has a significant supporting role. At first I was like, ugh, you’ve burned up goodwill with all of your Tony Stark screentime. But he delivers a sly turn as Lewis Strauss, member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commisssion. Kenneth Brannagh –lover of Accent Roles– is Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Gary Oldman is a miss in a weird take on U.S. President Truman. Olivia Thirlby is in a tiny role as Los Alamos chemist Lilli Hornig who advocated for the dropping of the bomb on a human-uninhabited island as a devastating exhibit of its power to Japan. Emily Blunt acquits herself nicely in an unsympathetic role as Oppy’s wife, Kitty.

While most accounts depict Oppenheimer as universally admired by personnel at Los Alamos, his wife seems kind of hateful. She’s like the anti-Mary Poppins, neglecting her crying kids whom she calls brats. And prowling cocktail parties with a flask at the ready to top off her mixed drinks. But later, she puts her intellect on display pushing back at government men who try to destroy Oppy’s career.

No spoilers here, the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos did build an atom bomb and detonated it in the Trinity test in New Mexico. It’s ironic that the New Mexico wilderness that Oppenheimer loved would occur to him as a place for the massive explosion: Let’s destroy this beautiful land!  Radiation fallout would carry downwind and ultimately cause death from cancers among Native Americans and other New Mexicans.

Atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. U.S. government reports estimated that an invasion of Japan would result in at least 400,000 American dead and 5 million Japanese dead. In Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945 approximately 150,000 people perished, nearly half of the city’s population of 350,000. An estimated 75,000 people died in Nagasaki on August 9th.

In Oppenheimer, we don’t see any footage or photos of the bombings in Japan. But in a pivotal scene, Oppenheimer watches reel footage of the aftermath for a moment, then looks away. Masterful acting by Cillian Murphy.

Nolan explains the absence of any scenes of misery in Japan by maintaining that the movie is from Oppenheimer’s point of view. But, in the film, we see the scientist imagine charred bodies and people turning to ash among him in New Mexico. Isn’t it likely that he pictured the actual victims as well? The film loses some of its significance from shunning depiction of the people who were actually nuked.

After World War II, Oppenheimer worked to contain the expansion of nuclear armament and the development of the hydrogen bomb. And, because of this, the “loyal patriot” was smeared as a commie-leaning peacenik. This part of the movie is shot in black and white, while the parts that are from Oppy’s POV are in full color. You’ll have to keep different timelines straight in your mind, but if you are familiar with Nolan’s work, you already know that.

Don’t forget about Interstellar wherein climate change has made life rough for Matthew McConaughey/Cooper and his contemporaries. For an inadvertently sillier take on our demise, check out AI bringing us down in I, Robot. (I prefer to watch the Isaac Asimov-inspired story in Spanish, mostly for its title: Yo, Robot.)

Sigh… it’s mind-bending to think of the meta that is a work reflecting on our species seeming goal to wipe out ourselves and life on Earth. Better to contemplate a world where another, more gentle animal won the dominant species lottery. A world run by butterflies? Now that sounds promising!

Movie Loon’s Review Shortcut:

Grade:  A-

Cut to the Chase:  An important film that is not pretentious. Brilliant lead performance by Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer.

Humor Highlight:  Emily Blunt/Kitty and het cocktail party shenanigans.