With “Oppenheimer” still holding strong as the No. 2 movie across theaters worldwide, I thought I should check it out.
Now, to preface this, I didn’t know the film was based on the 2005 biographical-book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
But, it’s an overall intense film and gives a sort of behind-the-scenes look at how America got its hands on the first atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer is an epic biographical thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan.
The film chronicles the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist who was pivotal in developing the first nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project, and thereby ushering in the Atomic Age.
Cillian Murphy stars as Oppenheimer, with Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a senior member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
The ensemble supporting cast includes Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Benny Safdie, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, James D’Arcy, David Krumholtz, Matthias Schweighofer, Danny Deferrari, Tom Conti, and Kenneth Branagh.
The movie is rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language and clocks in at 180 minutes long.
In 1926, a 22-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer (Murphy) suffers from homesickness and anxiety while studying under Patrick Blackett (D’Arcy) at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.
After Blackett forces him to miss part of a lecture, Oppenheimer injects an apple left for him with cyanide.
He has a change of heart the next day, however, and narrowly prevents visiting scientist and guest lecturer Niels Bohr (Branagh) from eating it.
Oppenheimer completed his PhD in physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he met Werner Heisenberg (Schweighofer).
He returns to the United States, hoping to expand quantum physics research there, and begins teaching at the University of California, Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.
He meets his future wife, Katherine Puening (Blunt), a biologist and ex-communist.
At the same time, he has an intermittent affair with Jean Tatlock (Pugh), a member of the Communist Party USA, until her suicide.
In 1942, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves (Damon) recruits Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb after Oppenheimer assures Groves that he has no communist sympathies.
Oppenheimer, who is Jewish, is particularly driven by the possibility of the Nazis completing their nuclear weapons program under Heisenberg’s supervision.
Oppenheimer assembles a scientific team including Edward Teller (Safdie) and Isidor Isaac Rabi (Krumholtz) in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to secretly create the bomb.
He coordinates with other sites, such as the Met Lab in Chicago, where he meets with Enrico Fermi (Deferrari) and David L. Hill (Malek).
He also visits Albert Einstein (Conti) to discuss how an atomic bomb could trigger an unstoppable chain reaction that could destroy the world.
When Germany surrenders in World War II, some project scientists doubt the bomb’s continued importance, but Oppenheimer assures them that the bomb is still necessary to end the war with Japan.
The bomb is completed and the Trinity test is successfully conducted just before the Potsdam Conference on July 16, 1945.
From there, Oppenheimer sees that Einstein was right – his atomic bomb had set the world on fire, but not in the way they initially theorized.
I think the film could have benefitted from placeholders explaining what year the sequences were being filmed in – but, if you’re a fan of history or Murphy’s then this is a film worth seeing on the big screen.
