Despite the fact that Christopher Nolan is known for making high-concept blockbusters that combine action and science fiction, his most recent movie is solidly founded on actual historical events. A dramatization of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and career, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the man usually recognized as the inventor of the atomic bomb. It’s time to analyze Oppenheimer’s ending and how it portrays one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century.
Oppenheimer is the story of one of the most high-profile cases of project management in world history. The film follows J. Robert Oppenheimer as he leads the Manhattan Project and the development of the world’s first nuclear weapons. a number of other real-life scientists, including Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Edward Teller, and Richard Feynman, as well as military and government figures, including Leslie Groves and Harry S. Truman, are also portrayed in the movie.
Oppenheimer focuses extensively on two crucial postwar periods
The Manhattan Project was ultimately successful, as everyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of world history knows. Two bombs were built at the highly classified Los Alamos facility. In August 1945, the bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing a quick conclusion to a conflict that many believed would result in a costly, brutal invasion of mainland Japan. The film makes no attempt to answer if it was the best outcome for humanity. Dr. Oppenheimer evidently had conflicting opinions about the matter.
Oppenheimer, however, does not stop there. The film is equally concerned with its protagonist’s existence before and after the Manhattan Project, and the after is something on which the film lingers long after the bombs are handed over to the US military.
Oppenheimer focuses extensively on two crucial postwar periods. Dr. Oppenheimer testifies before a committee charged with choosing whether or not to renew his security clearance in 1954. Dr. Oppenheimer can no longer serve on the Atomic Energy Commission or influence government nuclear policy without such clearance. Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr., faces an uphill battle to be confirmed as the Eisenhower administration’s Secretary of Commerce in 1959. It rapidly becomes evident that his previous affiliation with Dr. Oppenheimer is a significant impediment to his confirmation.
Both of these plots are famous for their use of color, or, more accurately, their absence of color. The scenes from 1954 are shown in a harsh, washed-out palette, but the scenes from 1959 are entirely black and white. Nolan made this choice with great thought. Colour is used to distinguish between sections of the film that are given from Oppenheimer’s subjective point of view and those that are presented in a more objective, impersonal manner.
“I wrote the script in the first person, which I’d never done before. I don’t know if anyone has ever done that, or if that’s a thing people do or not,” Nolan told Total Film. “The film is objective and subjective. The color scenes are subjective; the black-and-white scenes are objective. I wrote the color scenes in the first person. So for an actor reading that, in some ways, I think it’d be quite daunting.”
The connection between the 1954 and 1959 subplots
Only at the end of the film does it become clear how the 1954 and 1959 subplots are linked. We find that Strauss was the one who set up the committee to assess Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Despite appearing to be a staunch supporter and friend of Dr. Oppenheimer, Strauss had a long-held animosity against him. The film focuses on two precipitating events. One is the alleged day when Dr. Oppenheimer pits Tom Conti’s Albert Einstein against Strauss. The other occurs during a meeting of the General Advisory Committee of atomic physicists, during which Strauss is humiliated in front of his peers.
In 1954, Strauss gets his comeuppance. Despite testimony from his own friends and colleagues, including Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) and Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), Oppenheimer is unable to persuade the committee to renew his clearance. Even still, information about Dr Oppenheimer’s extramarital affairs and connections to the Communist Party is undoubtedly detrimental.
Dr. Oppenheimer returns to that crucial exchange with Einstein as he closes his book
Strauss finally gets his retribution in 1954. Oppenheimer is unable to persuade the committee to renew his clearance, despite testimony from his own friends and colleagues (including Matt Damon’s Leslie Groves and Benny Safdie’s Edward Teller). Revelations concerning Dr. Oppenheimer’s extramarital affairs and Communist Party connections surely don’t help.
However, Strauss’ strategy backfires on him in 1959. Though he appears to be on course for Senate confirmation, Strauss is brought down by testimony of his personal vengeance against Dr. Oppenheimer. He is the first cabinet nominee to be denied confirmation since 1925, a blot on an otherwise stellar career in the public and commercial sectors. Even now, Strauss is widely seen as a villain in American history, but Dr. Oppenheimer is admired for his contributions to atomic science and quantum physics.
Oppenheimer concludes by returning to the key meeting between Dr. Oppenheimer and Einstein. We learn that the two were discussing Dr. Oppenheimer’s anxieties about the technology he’s unleashed on the world, rather than Strauss. Though it is evident that the bomb would not ignite the planet’s atmospheric hydrogen and destroy all life, as was feared during the weapon’s construction, Dr. Oppenheimer remains concerned that he has given mankind the ability to harm itself. There is no way to undo the bomb.
The historical truth of Oppenheimer is broken down in great detail
Nolan told The Telegraph that Tenet’s fundamental question “was ‘What if you could un-invent an awful technology? What if the toothpaste could be put back in the tube?’ I suppose every time-travel film is about the fantasy of righting some of the wrongs of the past. But in the real world, it’s a one-way street.”
Oppenheimer has no post credit scenes. Given that this is a historical drama rather than an action-packed blockbuster, this is hardly surprising. Not to mention that, even when directing the Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan’s style did not include post-credits scenes. With a running time of three hours, Oppenheimer has plenty of time to tell its story.
In contrast to his other films, Oppenheimer is unique in that it is a biography with historical foundations rather than a high-concept superhero or science fiction tale. The 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is particularly cited in the movie.
The historical truth of Oppenheimer is broken down in great detail. The main point is that the movie stays remarkably true to actual events. Much of the conversation in the 1954 and 1959 scenes was taken directly from the transcripts of the relevant hearings. That brings up Nolan’s remarks regarding the use of color and subjective versus objective perspective in the movie. The 1954 and 1959 scenes are firmly grounded in actual events, although the rest of the movie gives Dr. Oppenheimer’s point of view (at least as Nolan sees it) greater room to be explored.
According to Kaplan, most of what we see in the film is largely accurate. Even the scenario in which a youthful Oppenheimer attempts to poison his physics professor is true. The film also portrays Strauss as a guy with a profound personal vendetta against Dr. Oppenheimer, albeit that hate was founded on more than simply the two triggering occurrences depicted in the film. Dr. Oppenheimer appears to have a lengthy history of antagonizing Strauss, a guy noted for his propensity to keep a grudge.
Kaplan writes, “One of Strauss’ colleagues later said, ‘If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.’”
The film also takes significant liberties with how it presents Oppenheimer’s mental state after the war. While the dramatic confrontation between Dr. Oppenheimer and Gary Oldman’s President Truman did occur, and the former did admit to having blood on his hands, Kaplan contends that Oppenheimer’s objections to the atomic bomb were typically based on practical considerations rather than pure nuclear dread. One of the reasons he opposed the H-bomb, for example, was that its vast blast radius rendered major cities the only realistic targets.
Kaplan writes, “He remained unenthusiastic, worrying that the H-bomb would divert money from Hiroshima-type A-bombs, which he thought the Army should continue building as weapons to be used on the battlefield if the Soviets invaded Western Europe. He argued that H-bombs were too powerful for battlefield targets—they could destroy only big cities—and, if the Russians built them, as they would if we did, a war would devastate American cities, too. He did eventually come to the view, as portrayed in the film, that this mutual vulnerability might deter both sides from using the weapons or even from going to war at all. But he was not opposed to nuclear weapons in general.”
Last but not least, it should be highlighted that Oppenheimer frequently overlooks the contributions made by the numerous other men and women who worked on the Manhattan Project. Even though the movie includes a lot of well-known scientists, it only fully explores their work in a select few instances (such as with Teller’s H-bomb study). Oppenheimer barely makes a passing reference to one of the other major obstacles the Manhattan Project had to overcome—the pressing necessity to refine enough uranium and plutonium to enable the bombs in the first place. There is only so much room to tell the story of such a huge project in a three-hour movie.
