Hedwig GIUSTO

Senior Research Fellow and Editor in Chief of the Progressive Post

Oppenheimer
Christopher Nolan, 2023

Even three viewings might not be enough to grasp the astonishing complexity of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. I watched it twice, but probably missed many essential details of this sumptuous movie. The complexity, far from being a flaw, is the film’s strength. The viewer is challenged to keep up with a vortex of sophisticated dialogues that move from the personal to the scientific and political levels in three different timeframes. The elaborate screenplay gives the film a thriller-like pace that provides no time for distraction or moments of boredom. 

Three hours disappear fast while the audience is drawn into the massive Manhattan Project, under the pervasive surveillance of the US army; into the rise and fall of the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, and into the historical and political events that, triggered by the nuclear option, led to the end of the second world war, the descent of the iron curtain and McCarthyism’s witch hunt. 

The protagonist is surrounded by an abundance of characters, primarily scientists and politicians, interpreted by an exceptional cast, including an extraordinary Robert Downing Jr in the role of the ‘villain’, and an obnoxious Gary Oldman. The latter appears on screen only for a few minutes to play an extremely cynical President Truman who, in a brief but key exchange with Oppenheimer, exposes how even the most authoritative scientist of that era was only a small pawn in a much larger and destructive game. 

These characters act as a chorus and exalt Oppenheimer’s ambiguity, who is initially consumed by the ambition of being the first to build the atomic bomb in a military and scientific competition against the Nazis and the advanced German physics community; and then by the fear that his invention might unleash an atomic race with America’s new enemy, the USSR, against which he finds himself powerless. Oppenheimer’s deeper motives, though, remain hidden behind the character’s vanity, hypocrisy and unfathomable face. 

Less hidden are the Americans’ motives. The film subscribes to the (largely accepted) view that the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to end the war but as a warning to the Soviets. The characters in the movie act with the understanding that the choices they make are existential and that the bomb represents a turning point in human history. But eventually they give in to the awareness that the folly of ‘mutual assured destruction’ is a horrifying concrete possibility in the hands of a few unscrupulous politicians, both yesterday and today.