I finally got around to watching this movie. This won’t be a full review because I don’t think I can be completely fair to the movie. Christopher Nolan has been a big-time director for a good long while. His Batman trilogy earned gazillions of dollars and was actually very good. Now this movie is a very different animal. I don’t think it is supposed to be entertainment in the same way. It’s a biopic and a historical recreation of a very important event, the Manhattan Project; the invention of the atomic bomb.
As the story of the Manhattan Project, it is fascinating and compelling. The biopic is a combination of experiences. Oppenheimer himself is very odd duck. From his own admission he was not a great physicist like Fermi, Einstein or Bohr. He was a dilettante who found himself surrounded by the generation that invented quantum mechanics and became their interpreter and project manager in shepherding all the pieces needed to allow the US military to get the a-bomb in 1945.
And we hear his history as a retrospective because the movie is really the story of how Oppenheimer; this critical individual in the ushering in of the nuclear era, loses his US government security clearance due to his former association with communists and other less reputable individuals in his circle of friends. We are also led through the less than honorable path of his love life. And we see how his concerns about the dangers of nuclear weapons seem somewhat inconsistent depending upon where his role in producing the bomb stands. While ensconced in the project he seems not at all conflicted. But once he and his colleagues have handed over the bombs to the Army and the spotlight is no longer on him, his qualms grow exponentially. As a viewer of the story, this seems clear.
The movie is populated with famous names and faces, some of them very hard to recognize. Robert Downey Jr. is Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s implacable foe who hounds him out of the government circle of influence. Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer, his wife. Matt Damon is Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. Josh Hartnett is Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel-winning nuclear physicist. Kenneth Branagh is the brilliant physicist Niels Bohr. Tom Conti is Albert Einstein and weirdest of all Gary Oldman is Harry S. Truman.
And there’s all kinds of good acting. I especially enjoyed the “physicists seemingly engrossed in the endless details of making a weapon out of their incomprehensible mathematical equations. There is a critical scene where Edward Teller, the father of the H-Bomb stops the project when his calculations seem to indicate that there is a very high probability that setting off a fission bomb could ignite the whole atmosphere of Earth and end all life on the planet. That is a pivotal scene where eventually even Einstein is consulted.
And the climactic Trinity test scene in the desert is very effective.
But it’s a three-hour movie and that means we see quite a bit of J. Robert Oppenheimer and I have to admit I didn’t find him the most sympathetic character to follow for that three-hours. It’s a good movie. But I ended it wishing it had been more about Matt Damon’s character and that’s an odd feeling for me.