Oppenheimer Was Pretty Good
Note: When talking about the character J. Robert Oppenheimer, I refer to him as Oppy. When talking about the movie itself, I refer to it as Oppenheimer.
I’ll just say this off the bat; I really don’t like Christopher Nolan movies. Yes, a lot of the nuts and bolts of his movies are undeniable, especially in his post-Dark Knight movies. There’s a grandiosity to Dunkirk, Inception, and Interstellar that can be very satisfying for audiences looking to just be overwhelmed by the scope of whatever it is they’re watching.
These lofty ambitions, however, have often led to some major shortcomings in basic storytelling. Nolan has a reputation for being so meticulous and obsessed with details, but that tends to only be the case for the filmic elements like clever sound effects, crisply edited action sequences, and a dedication to natural, unsaturated lighting that is just very good. While there is value to each of these skills Nolan possesses, it’s not enough to make me feel invested in the characters he’s created or the conflict they’re facing. A lot of that just feels phoned-in. Whether it’s Batman surviving both a stabbing and an atomic bomb, or love being the all-powerful force, these are all surprisingly hack plot beats in movies that both critics and fans alike fawned over a little too much.
Also, gotta say it, a lot of these movies are just not fun. He made what was effectively a heist movie and turned it into the most self-serious bullshit you’ll ever see in your life. Same for comic book movies. It took DC Studios over a decade to truly dig itself out of the dark and gritty grave Nolan made for them with his Dark Knight franchise. People compare him to Hitchcock, but I’m sorry, even in The Birds, Alfred knew how to have some good lighthearted pitter-patter. Semi-relatedly, every woman in a Nolan movie is either just a cardboard cutout of a person or an object of lust for the main character.
So, yeah, I wasn’t exactly dying to see Oppenheimer. I saw the subject matter, I saw the runtime and it seemed like it was going to be the most Nolan Nolan movie that he made in some time. Did I want to see a 3-hour movie with (I guessed) musings on life, death, and whatever else from a man who lacks any semblance of poetry or levity in his heart? Not really!
But I saw it, and I was pleasantly surprised by liking many different aspects of the movie. The runtime, the subject matter, the budget; all of this had me thinking I’d be getting these big full shots and heavy Zimmer-esque bwongs over compelling speeches and airstrikes. Instead, Nolan went micro. The camera being right in the characters' faces, the quick cuts, and Nolan shifting from natural color to dusty black-and-white gave the movie a sense of place that felt much more contemporary than the usual WW2 era period piece gives you. This was what I appreciated most about Dunkirk and it’s one of the things I like best about Oppenheimer. Instead of trying to mimic aesthetics from this time period, Nolan tries to make it seem like what he’s depicting in the past is actually happening now.
Perhaps what I liked most was how the movie was as much — or arguably more — interested in the political implications of its subject matter, the atomic bomb, than its existential ones. Though there were inelegant missteps in a few places here and there, I did appreciate the coherent way in which the Red Scare and McCarthyism were presented.
Nolan’s depictions of Communists are akin to the way Oppy himself viewed them. It’s clear he doesn’t agree with their way of thinking, but as someone who’s intellectually curious, it’s something he’ll engage with and entertain. This isn’t a huge win, but considering how many movies there are with a tinge of political commentary where the progressive/far-left characters “go too far,” I’m glad that there wasn’t much of that.
Oppy even has a love affair with a commie, played by Florence Pugh, who may go down as the most enjoyable woman character Nolan ever wrote. That she was also in what might be the most nauseating scene he ever wrote — where she and Oppy sat naked in respective leather chairs, just talking to one another — speaks to how low of a bar that was to clear. I kind of wish I was there when Nolan was writing that scene. I need to know how much of a genius he thought he was while typing that shit out. And that nobody he knew was brave enough to beg him to cut the scene out makes me feel like he doesn’t have anyone in his life who truly loves him enough to be honest with him.
Needless to say, the commie girlfriend dies pretty early on. But Oppenheimer gives the viewer a choice on how to process her death. Did she commit suicide brought on by a broken heart — something that would have betrayed a lot about what we knew about her up to that point — or was something more sinister at play? As we see Pugh lower her head into a full bathtub, for a brief second, there’s a pair of hands with black gloves on pushing her head down. Though Nolan only gives us a glimpse in a glitch-like fashion, it encourages us to doubt what they’re telling us.
Pugh’s passion for the cause is then juxtaposed with the woman who Oppy inevitably settles for after getting her pregnant: a former commie turned apolitical drunk. Emily Blunt does her best to bring something out of this character but she’s pretty one-note. She’s either tipsy or drunk in just about every scene and is ultimately the Mary Todd to Oppy’s Lincoln. Just one side note on Blunt’s character: I watched Oppenheimer directly after Barbie, so one unintentionally funny moment was how Blunt enthusiastically asked Oppy to “explain physics” to her, which would have worked perfectly in one of Barbie’s montages where the Barbies distract the Kens by asking them to explain something like The Godfather, Pavement, and so on. Though Oppy never loved Blunt as much as he did Pugh, Blunt made more practical sense when considering who he was and what his ambitions were.
Just how ambitious and status-motivated Oppy was is something Nolan allows the audience to decide on their own. He provided enough evidence for both sides of this argument, so it’s up to us to make the final decision. Though Cillian Murphy’s portrayal of Oppy depicts him as a sincere intellect, it’s hard to debate that many of the decisions he made weren’t done out of self-interest.
As a moderate, Oppy often reaped the benefits of buddying up with both sides of the political spectrum. Since so many people in academia were commies, he had to cozy up with them or else he’d be alienated, out of the loop in these circles. Though he benefited both personally and professionally through these associations, he made sure never to officially affiliate himself with them. Perhaps this was due to his ideological differences, or more pragmatically, he knew that the people with the real power and money would never work with a registered Communist.
Once it became clear he had to shed that baggage, Oppy did so dutifully, albeit with some occasional grumblings. Early on, he believed this would be worth it, as many moderates do when siding with conservatives, all for what they believe is ‘the greater good’. Surprisingly, they never wind up achieving the greater good, only greater harm. Oppy turned his back on his lover, his friends, and his colleagues to do all this. He even did a bit of union busting for good measure. He compromised so much of himself and what he stood for to arm the United States with the atomic bomb. The rest of his life was saddled with regret over that decision.
So why did he do it? Oppy’s a smart guy, shouldn’t he have known that the US was going to use his bomb as the coming attraction to the Cold War while they built up the war machine even further? He read every volume of Marx and didn’t absorb a single page? What was going on up there in that big old head of his?
The way he saw it, the bomb was the only way the Allies would ever be able to defeat the Nazis. As a Jew, Oppy felt personally obligated to put an end to such an exceptional case of evil. He also believed that for the world to truly understand how dangerous this bomb is, they needed to see it in action. Only then would they choose to never use it again. The Nazi hate is understandable, admirable, awesome to see, etc., but the second part of his argument is deeply flawed. And to Nolan’s credit, he presses and interrogates Oppy thoroughly on it. It’s a true testament to Murphy’s performance that it feels nearly impossible at times to doubt these motives. In so many of the movie’s defining moments, Oppy comes off as a man so incapable of harm that you often forget that he’s had multiple affairs, (allegedly) tried poisoning someone, and oh yeah, was the father of the atomic bomb.
Oppy’s ostensible harmlessness also draws attention to the detached nature of modern warfare, specifically among the people who are making the most consequential decisions about the war itself. Oppy and his team were thousands of miles away from Hiroshima and Nagasaki when their creations were dropped on the respective towns. So was President Truman when he ordered the attacks. The audience never sees the bomb dropping on Japan, nor do we see its aftermath. Even when Oppy himself was shown the pictures, the camera focused solely on his reaction to what he was seeing. The person I was with told me it reminded them of a photo of Nazis looking at the conditions Jewish prisoners were subject to in concentration camps. While it’s possible that this was what Nolan was going for, it wasn’t worth vaguely alluding to the Holocaust in such a roundabout way. Yes, it does add to the motif of detachment, but it also felt like a cowardly cop-out. Christopher Nolan is a coward.
Some aspects of this detached approach work. It shows that those who’ve created unspeakable destruction really have to deal with the ramifications afterward. If we’re supposed to think that some pseudo-trial in a cramped office was proper justice for what the bombs caused, then I don’t know what to say to you.
And it’s understandable why Nolan shied away from such a scene. Showing the effects of the atomic bomb in an unflinching way could easily become gratuitous in ways that a filmmaker from the West probably has no right to do. So finding a tasteful, more satisfying alternative is difficult. But shouldn’t Oppenheimer have tried? The explosion we did see was controlled, simulated; it didn’t harm a soul.
Perhaps people need something that forces them to reckon with what we did to these towns, and how Oppy’s creation gave us the formula to keep doing this to other countries over the years. As we know now, these places have never fully recovered from the bombs being dropped on them. Some might argue that it goes without saying how devastating these bombs are, this movie itself says the opposite.
Also, many Americans remain quite proud of those bombings. So proud that President Obama was once chastised for showing even the slightest sympathy toward Japan on this matter. The common arguments for being so unapologetic are that all is fair in warfare and that Japan was never going to surrender otherwise. While the first is more of a philosophical argument, the second is a historical one that has been debated for decades now. There’s enough evidence to, at the very least, make a convincing argument that the US didn't need to drop either bomb on Japan to ensure their surrender. However, it was necessary for them to ensure the surrender that the US wanted.
Knowing that they’d be pivoting to war against Communism shortly after WW2 was over, the US needed to prevent the USSR from seizing significant geopolitical power. If the USSR orchestrated Japan’s surrender, then this would have made the US seem less powerful to the world, and it would have given them less authority in how post-war Japan was run (which proved to be very beneficial to US interests).
Yeah, Nolan didn’t really bother exploring any of that. What we get instead is some very poor lip service noting the frustrations that scientists on Oppy’s team had after the Nazis surrendered. Many of them only signed up for this project because of the 1-of-1 evil that the Nazis stood for. To them, Nazis were the only targets worthy of such a weapon. So when Germany surrenders, there’s a scene where the scientists get together to discuss ceasing production of the bomb. But hey, Sgt. Matt Damon still needs to get his nut-nut, which means up to Oppy to deliver a galvanizing speech that inspires these commie eggheads to continue forging their legacy as the Velvet Underground of the Military Industrial Complex. The speech given is something slightly above the level of “come on, guys,” and it somehow works. Spectacular. Matt Damon had it on good authority that Japan was never gonna surrender, so, of course, you gotta believe him, so yeah, we’re gonna bomb Japan now, no further questions asked, go fuck yourself.
This is perhaps the one thing in this bloated 3-hour movie that feels rushed. Did it really take that little for everyone to get on board? Shouldn’t Nolan have at least made this immediate pivot seem more absurd, more objectionable than he did? Before this moment, the bomb was seen as a necessary evil that the US needed to use in order to stop Nazi Germany, big bad #1. By switching these plans over to Japan so readily, the US gave up the moral high ground it would have retained had Germany been the target.
In the wars (or whatever the hell you want to call them) that followed WW2, the morality of US behavior overseas became less and less questioned internally. Poisoning entire countries with nuclear warfare was just a thing we did now. The decision to bomb Japan paved the way for us to see our enemies as interchangeable, and see their inevitable deaths as something that’s barely a blip on their newsfeed.
It’s without a doubt my own fault for being disappointed in this aspect of the film. After all, it’s called Oppenheimer, not The Atomic Bomb. And while the movie goes to great lengths to show how inextricably linked the bomb and the man are, the final hour severs this tie, and makes it all about Oppy. His ego, his public perception, and the weight he did or did not carry in political circles. If the first two hours tried to answer the big geopolitical questions of this era, the final one felt more like listening to a Politico podcast about what some of the lamest people in Washington DC considered to be juicy gossip.
Gotta say; big fucking mistake, Chris. The last hour sucked. Excruciating to watch. Really didn’t care a goddamn lick about Robert Downey Jr., who was playing some guy nobody will ever care about awaiting a cabinet appointment. I had no investment in his Dr. Doolittle ass, barely knew who he was, and couldn’t care less if he lived or died.
His appointment hearing, along with the interrogation he orchestrated for Oppy were the devices used to trigger each flashback, so in that way, he was foundational to the script’s formatting. But again, I had absolutely zero investment in what happened to him. But after the bomb went off, we were then had to care a lot about this guy all of a sudden, with Nolan retroactively creating a rivalry between him and Oppy that wasn’t really there for the first 2+ hours of the movie. It was forced, it was bad, and it wasn’t what anybody was watching for.
Even with those flaws, I must give credit to Nolan for making one of the more well-paced 3-hour movies you’ll ever see. Even if the last hour was bad, it was crisp and felt like a fun political thriller, albeit a tacked-on one. You’ll get some decent criticisms of McCarthyism and the American war machine overall, but don’t expect anything groundbreaking. And considering Oppy fucked more than half of the women characters that appeared on screen, it’s not exactly a departure from Nolan’s usual work of Serious Men Talking and Being Serious. My bar was low for this man’s stale oeuvre, so I’ll take this movie clearing it as a pleasant surprise.