Thoughts on Oppenheimer & the absolute brilliance of Christopher Nolan

It was sometime that I had seen a good movie in theatres, and I write to report that Oppenheimer broke that stint. With the trend of production budgets  getting diverted to OTT platforms, the movie going experience in itself was soon becoming a thing of the past. But the Christopher Nolans of the cinematic world with their sheer audacity and belief in the big screens coupled with artistic brilliance can bend time backwards to help us enjoy pure cinematic art.

Oppenheimer the movie is an ode to Nolan’s genius as much as for the man himself. How does a film maker present the multitudes of a genius scientist to the everyday audience and hold their attention for close to 3 hours of run time? How do you showcase a genius of a human battling mental dichotomy, toying with uncertainty and fear?

Nolan explores this conflict by taking the hard but engaging route, instead of the easy & predictable one. He tells the story of the atomic bomb & its creator’s mental dilemma without ever showing the footage of its wreckage in Hiroshima & Nagasaki.  Cillian (pronounced Kill-ee-un) Murphy is so darn good as Oppenheimer that the audience can see the impact of his horrendous invention in his dialogues and the body language. One scene which particularly hits you is when Oppenheimer goes in to see President Truman (played by Gary Oldman) after he is declared a hero, featured on the cover of TIME magazine and credited for ending the war with his invention. President Truman is in a congratulatory mood while Oppenheimer avoids eye contact throughout the scene. He is visibly shaken and his demeanor apologetic. He says, “I feel like I have blood on my hands”. President Truman scoffs, - “Do you think people in Hiroshima & Nagasaki fucking care about who invented the bomb? They care about who dropped it”

Nolan holds himself and the audience to high standards throughout the movie. He showcases the inner life of physicists, especially theorists beautifully. Not just in the individual central character of Oppenheimer but with the group of scientists and the dynamics at play. The Manhattan project of course was a group project headed by Oppenheimer but the individual characters of Ernest Lawrence, Neils Bohr, Isidor Rabi, Hans Bethe all brilliant scientists in their own right, are shown artfully well. The inner working group discussions of whether the bomb itself is needed and how they cannot control the outcome of their own creation are brilliantly adapted into cinema sowing the questions on the righteousness of science in viewers minds.

Credit: Universal Pictures

 

Can or should science solve for war?

This question took a monstrous form during the 2^nd world war when science had advanced enough to give the world precision bombing capabilities. Inflicting death and destruction had reduced to game theory of who will blink first. Technological might mattered more than military might for the first time in world history. With the advancement of Quantum mechanics, it was evident that a vast amount of energy could be generated by splitting the atom. Nuclear explosion would have been discovered one way or the other. The only question was who would get to the finish line first- Hitler or the Allies? That Hitler considered Quantum mechanics as Jewish science made him lose out on the race. It would have been a very different world today if religious hatred did not blind Hitler’s views on science.

Oppenheimer’s moral turpitude was considering the burden that future wars would place on science. Are scientists’ going to be mere pawns or conduits in a nation’s ability to inflict damage on the enemy? In his trial post the war he succinctly summarized his thoughts- “We believe that the safety of this nation — as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power – cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.”

The moral dilemma against the bomb is as significant as the bomb itself. Oppenheimer’s early infatuation with Communism and his further disenchantment with having to prove himself to his country makes his life intriguing to an outsider and hence provides a perfect backdrop for a wonderful biography. Pulitzer winning  biography American Prometheus: The triumph & tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer written by Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin provided the perfect base for Nolan to depict the complexities of the man.

Prometheus in Greek mythology is chained & tortured for stealing fire from heaven and giving it to humankind. Oppenheimer truly is the Prometheus of the modern world. He not only had to face the torment of the post war American polity but also of his own internal contradictions.

When a human rises to become death & the destroyer of worlds, he goes through an intense turpitude of self-scrutiny and is forever chained and questioned by those on whom he inflicted his wrath. Christopher Nolan does an exceptional job in depicting this cinematically.