Oppenheimer
It is said that history is written by the winners but in war there are no winners, only degrees of losing, the final tolls of death and destruction estimated rather than counted, the lingering impact impossible to calculate when entire nations have been disrupted, generations brutalised and culled, the resources which were once squabbled over prompting the conflict diverted from the needs of the people towards the military industrial complex.
The one area in which war does prompt progress is in the development of new technologies, new ways of killing: the machine gun, the tank, the submarine, the rocket and finally the nuclear bomb, developed by the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in New Mexico under the guidance of Julius Robert Oppenheimer and first test detonated at Trinity on July 16th,1945, then dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only weeks later on 6th and 9th of August, prompting the surrender of that country days later.
Principally based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, Oppenheimer is written and directed by Tenet’s Christopher Nolan, an examination of one of the foremost scientific geniuses of the 20th century, a polymath whose work in theoretical physics, in tandem with the abilities of the astonishing array of talent he assembled around him like electrons orbiting a nucleus, literally changed the face of the Earth and the future of the planet, the ultimate result of his actions still unknown.
Compressing almost forty years into three intense hours, Oppenheimer is told through three interwoven strands, the story of Oppenheimer’s journey through physics to the complex process of developing of the bomb and its deployment, the closed hearings of 1954 when Oppenheimer’s security status was reviewed and revoked, and, in monochrome, perhaps as these are the only events conducted in public session where the facts can be taken as black and white, the 1959 confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss to the post of Secretary of Commerce.
Played by Sunshine’s Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer is a driven intellectual who is occasionally an awful man, compartmentalising his life in the same way the operations of the Manhattan Project are held in different silos to minimise the risk of security breaches, seeing his work as entirely separate from his earlier endorsement of trade unions and associations with known Communists which taint him in the eyes of the establishment and provide ammunition for his enemies, and his separate but ongoing relationships with the complex and troubled Jean Tatlock (Don’t Worry Darling‘s Florence Pugh) and Katherine Puening (A Quiet Place‘s Emily Blunt), later his wife.
A man as paradoxical as the quantum mechanics he investigates, Oppenheimer cannot have been unaware of the ultimate use to which his work would be applied nor could he have been so optimistically naïve as to believe that it would be held in abeyance as a deterrent; perhaps he realised that development of the bomb was inevitable and felt it was best that America had it first and that had he argued for the bomb to be used as a demonstration to prompt capitulation he would have been removed from his position of authority pre-emptively, reducing his ability to influence later policy, but that is unknowable.
His position to argue that research into hydrogen bombs be curtailed to prevent an escalating arms war, it was a battle which he ultimately could not win, standing against Avengers: Endgame’s Robert Downey Jr who is almost unrecognisable as Strauss, a former associate who came to resent the shadow into which he was cast by Oppenheimer’s achievement which ended the Pacific War as much as the contributions of Alan Turing curtailed the fighting in Europe, his left hand using the systems of government to undermine and discredit his opponent while his right still embraced his friend.
The story of a man dedicated to the obsessive pursuit of answers who inspired loyalty from many and alienated others, who created unimaginable power in impossible circumstances because the alternative was unthinkably worse, like the play Copenhagen there is a question of how much of Oppenheimer can be regarded as a filtered version of the truth and how much is speculation, however well informed, but like Der Untergang it stands as a profound reminder of how war destroys everything and leaves no one untouched, that the only way to win is not to fight in the first place, an option which requires the sometimes apparently equally unfeasible outcome of both sides finding mutually agreeable solutions of cooperation.
Oppenheimer is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX
