“Oppenheimer,” the movie that tells the complicated story of the physicist who led the team that developed the world’s first atomic bombs, is a marvelous film. It’s three hours long but the subject matter makes it well worth the extra length — and it also is worth seeing in a movie theater if you can get past the higher prices for a ticket and some popcorn.
It was written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who uses to great effect his strategy from prior films of jumping around in time, in this case from the mid-1920s to 1959. Interestingly, even though J. Robert Oppenheimer’s most significant achievement was leading the world into the atomic age, the film has far more story to tell after the test bomb successfully explodes in the New Mexico desert.
Oppenheimer’s backstory, in fact, rivals his scientific achievements. In the 1930s he flirted with membership in the Communist Party, which in the years before World War II appealed to many idealistic American intellectuals. The FBI had been following Oppenheimer over loyalty concerns before the war started — yet Gen. Leslie Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Project, hired Oppenheimer because of his brilliance.
After the war, consumed with guilt for unleashing this new weapon on the world, and correctly foreseeing a nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, Oppenheimer advocated putting all material used to make atomic bombs under an international authority that would use it for peaceful energy production. The Soviets, who tested their own bomb in 1949 and were unwilling to concede an American nuclear monopoly, refused.
It is impossible to watch “Oppenheimer” without wondering this: How many people who see it know much about the years leading up to the deployment of the bombs that ended World War II? Or about the Cold War tensions that came afterward? Without a modest awareness of these events, it’s difficult to digest a lot of the movie because Nolan moves the story at along such a hectic pace.
To a degree that’s understandable. You must travel rapidly to get into the details of four decades. This is not a 600-page biography that can be read leisurely. Nolan had only 180 minutes to tell the story, and he clearly was betting that the audience would stick with it.
After three weekends, the box office returns of $400 million have rewarded Nolan’s faith — and indicate that he’s made a profitable movie to boot. Released at the same time as “Barbie,” this doubleheader of films has enticed more people back into theaters after three years of covid-related and streaming-related business declines.
Oppenheimer worried, with good reason, that governments or militaries would again choose to use nuclear weapons one day, and that his work would be responsible for any carnage that followed. So far, nearly 80 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the weapons have been held in check.
The viewers of “Oppenheimer” obviously know that. But the film provides a valuable history lesson of what it took to win World War II — including the decisions that had to be made, such as recognizing that using the bombs would kill many Japanese civilians but save the lives of even more American soldiers.
Many Americans take this for granted — what it has taken to get where we are. Hopefully “Oppenheimer” is a reminder that the world rarely has been an easy place in which to live, but the United States, through wisdom and sound judgment, usually has come out ahead.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
