What kind of movie is Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer? Ostensibly, it is a about the real J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the man who led the Manhattan Project during World War Two and who many see as the “father” of the first atomic bomb. Released last week, critics have mostly lauded it—Wendy Ide called it a “volatile biopic” and a “towering achievement” in The Guardian, while Anthony Lane (writing for the New Yorker) is more reserved, calling the film “challenging” because of its “glut of political paranoia.”
Meanwhile, on social media, some have worried that the film would fall back on “great man” tropes to lionize the titular character of the physicist Oppenheimer, while others complained the opposite, with Open AI CEO Sam Altman stating the film didn’t do enough to “inspire a generation of kids to be physicists” in the way that “The Social Network managed to do… for startup founders.” What “kids” would be doing watching Oppenheimer (rated R) is just the first of several curiosities peaked by Altman’s complaint, but let’s set this aside for a moment.
You don’t order a hamburger at a hotdog stand. Nolan’s film is not a documentary, it is not a work of history, and it is not a recruitment video. Yet it would be equally a mistake to call this, as many have, a “biopic,” and then expect it to accurately represent the ins and outs of the life of the real J. Robert Oppenheimer. Those looking for a documentary have missed the thread.
Nolan makes films that tend toward the dark and the fantastic.These films play with unusual pacing and matters of perspective, such as Memento (2000). They use speculative devices to drive the plot, as with a cloning machine made by a fictionalized Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006), dream penetration in Inception (2010), a wormhole in Interstellar (2014), time travel in Tenet (2020), and so on. We see, in these films, the destruction wrought by the creation of new technologies, by the scientific shortcuts that seem to offer great potential, but instead become avenues of unforeseen and often terrible ends. Nolan is famously ambivalent towards technology, an adherent of analog film processes in an era dominated by digital imaging. (Much of Oppenheimer was shot on 70 millimeter IMAX film stock produced by Kodak, and to shoot scenes in monochrome, Nolan had custom 70mm black-and-white film manufactured.) And in his Batman trilogy (Batman Begins, 2005, The Dark Knight, 2008, The Dark Knight Rises, 2012) all the gadgets in the world cannot clear up the conundrum that the vigilante hero and the villain are almost indistinguishable. Of all of the films that Nolan has both written and directed, only one, Dunkirk (2017), is historically themed, but even then, there’s a suspense of watching an elaborate magic trick: How did the British Army get away from the Nazis after the failure of the Battle of France in 1940? I am not particularly fond of Nolan’s films, in part because they are all heavy-handed, they all impose a deeply gloomy world view, and for all their supposed focus on ambiguity, they seem all too definitive about nihilism. One thing is undeniable, however: Nolan doesn’t much care for filmic norms.
As for Oppenheimer? Nolan’s filmdeploys some of the tropes of the “biopic” form, yet despite these presumed ties to a real life, this is science fiction. Nolan builds, in part, on a biography of the real J. Robert Oppenheimer—more on this in a moment—but he is also building on older stories, namely the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. The Prometheus metaphor is twisted throughout the film, starting with the opening epigram, which states:
Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man.
For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.
This is influenced, in part, by the title of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pullitzer winning 2005 biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a book that served as one of Nolan’s chief sources. (The end credits name-call the book early and prominently.) Nolan’s script, in turn, has its characters directly mention the mythic Prometheus more than once.
The Prometheus framing is a bit overwrought. As the film progresses, we see how, after the Second World War is over, Oppenheimer loses his security clearance, his job, and much of his reputation during the 1950s “red scare” years. This is a meaningful injury to Oppenheimer (both the real physicist and the fictional version played by Cillian Murphy). It is, however, hardly the fate of the original, immortal Prometheus, who tradition tells us was chained to a rock in Caucasus Mountains, where eagles pecked at his torso, and ate his internal organs, over and over and over again, presumably forever. (According to at least one legend, however, the demigod Heracles later freed him.)
But whether Oppenheimer deserves to be regarded alongside Prometheus is beside the point. This is filmmaking, and more than that, epic filmmaking. Nolan’s Oppenheimer is not the real Oppenheimer, he is a mythic figure, no more bound by the actual events of the past than is Prometheus himself.
Central to the plot is “the gadget,” as the scientists euphemistically call the bomb, and a fateful question that each wrestles with: is it inevitable? Early in the film, Oppenheimer says that “we have no choice” but to build a bomb, noting that while he had doubts about whether the Americans could be trusted with it, he was sure the Nazis could not be. If Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project had not made it, would Werner Heisenberg have done so for the Nazis? Or someone else, just later? In science and technology, where does responsibility lie? Later in the film, shortly before the now famous test explosion called Trinity, Oppenheimer asks his team “Is there anything else that might stop us?” It’s not clear who the “us” actually is.
As the film is titled Oppenheimer, it focuses mostly on the perspective of this single figure, and that implies a personal response to such questions. What is it like to become involved in the terror of things larger than yourself? Who controls action, or does anyone? Is there anything an individual can do other than become swept along with events, to join in? Cillian Murphy deserves a lot of credit here, for Oppenheimer’s obsession with such questions is made visible less through dialogue than through a simmering anguish that the actor wears on his face in nearly every shot. (For a supposedly dialogue heavy film there’s a hell of a lot of simmering, silent glances—did Murphy learn from the Mark Rylance school of acting?) Late in the film, after the war, Oppenheimer goes to see President Truman. Rhyming with one of the real Truman’s famous aphorisms, Gary Oldman’s take on the president essentially tells Oppenheimer that “the buck stops here,” noting that history will judge the person who ordered dropping the bomb, not who built it. In the process, though, this fictional Truman misses the point: Oppenheimer isn’t interested in where the blame should go, but in how the decision was ever made, in whether or not the creation of the gadget was not truly his “miracle” (as the character at one point describes it), but merely an inevitable chain reaction.
Such chain reactions that lay at the heart of the film. At one point, the filmic Edward Teller hands around a set of calculations that suggest that one possibility is that the ignition of an atomic fission bomb would create an unstoppable chain reaction, one that would eventually grow to ignite the atmosphere and end all life on the planet. Disturbed, Oppenheimer took the calculations to Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) to have them checked, and then again to Hans Bethe (Gustaf Skarsgård), one of the project team. Bethe concludes the odds were “near zero”, but not unprovable using math alone. In the film, General Leslie Grove (Matt Damon), the Manhattan Project’s military head, does not learn this until just hours before a practical test of “the gadget” in the New Mexico desert.
Grove is apoplectic. Oppenheimer asks Grove what he wants, and Grove responds “zero would be nice!” The project proceeds. The test is successful, and Oppenheimer watches his creations carted off in crates, bound for use over Japan, where the American government will use them to kill hundreds of thousands in a grim calculus that somehow, brutal and indiscriminate slaughter now will save lives in the after. If the Prometheus allegory holds, then here we are seeing what humanity has since done with divine fire.
The power Oppenheimer and his team unleashes at Trinity is the moment that the Anthropocene became unstoppable. Historical films are never historical. They are always a product of contemporary culture, and no matter how authentic the costumes and sets and research, they are about the now. Oppenheimer’s story is about the birth of the atomic bomb, but its message is about us. It is about fossil fuels and climate change, rack-rent digital “enshittification” and radical income inequality, predictive language models (“AI”) and the future of work. It is about what obsession with technological “progress” can bring us: death, destruction, tragedy.
And this is what makes Oppenheimer science fiction. As the late great Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote, science fiction isn’t about the future, it’s about the narrative potential of a world of possibilities, worlds where
what we do see is the stuff inside our heads. Our thoughts and our dreams, the good ones and the bad ones…. when science fiction is really doing its job that’s exactly what it’s dealing with.
Ursula K. LeGuin, “Science Fiction and the Future,” 1985.
The bomb at the heart of Oppenheimer, then, isn’t the “gadget” that was blown up in a stretch of New Mexico desert at 5:29 a.m. MWT on July 16, 1945, nor the two bombs deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor is it the “bigature” version of the Trinity test that Nolan’s crews constructed from propane and gasoline and magnesium and aluminum. The real bomb is the one inside the human mind, inside of our minds. It is the “bad dreams” that LeGuin says science fiction can show us.
Is it any wonder that Sam Altman (or Twitter dictator Elon Musk) doesn’t like this film?
Harbour Fordyce 