![]() Atomic Energy Commission and later a Cabinet appointee as Secretary of Commerce in the Eisenhower administration.Īlthough they are two key players here, Nolan has made a very dense film with a very large and starry cast - three recent Best Actor Oscar winners have small supporting roles, if that gives you an idea - the kind we used to see in ambitious Hollywood films by great directors but not so much lately, at least on this intellectual scale. Oppenheimer’s story is told in non-linear style, shuffling back and forth to different periods in time, his own tale shot in color and told in first person, the later trials explaining how it all happened from various points of view shot in striking 65MM black-and-white film - particularly Robert Downey Jr.’s cagey Lewis Strauss, who was the founding commissioner of the U.S. This ultimately is not an action spectacle or bomb-dropping war movie but a very human one in which its title character faces a moral dilemma shared by few in history, if anyone. Instead we see it played out through Oppenheimer’s haunted eyes, a far more effective and chilling approach, achieved with some superior special effects married to music (Ludwig Goransson did the pulsating score) and superb, ear-rattling sound design. It is not a spoiler to reveal that Nolan ultimately chose not to show the horrific results of what happened the first time the Americans dropped that A-bomb over Japan. How many times lately have we heard Putin try to make its use in Ukraine a possibility, even pointing out the Americans have been the only ones to ever use it - so far? Nolan’s movie is set right at the start but serves as a fascinating glimpse into those who had it in them to pull off this remarkable feat but also had to live with its consequences, something we all have to live with today in a shaky time where the nuclear threat has sadly not gone away but only brought the doomsday clock closer to midnight than ever. Sherwin - a moral conundrum gathering in his head as he begins to envision the dangers beyond a short-term use of a weapon that could - and did - spark an arms race and a new world order that changed us forever. ![]() ![]() Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Oppenheimer, a man with leftist politics even accused of being a communist, knew he could bring all the elements together but also - as we see his story played out in an unusual first-person approach in Nolan’s stunning screenplay based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy in his sixth collaboration with Nolan but first as the lead), a complicated but brilliant physicist tasked with leading the Manhattan Project, the secret effort to create the nuclear bomb, a weapon so powerful it could be used to end war forever - in the right hands. With Oppenheimer, his interest is in the complex mind of J. Nolan is simply an exceptional filmmaker whose cinematic sensibility is steeped in the classics but merged with modern sensibilities and tools to make one-of-a-kind visual experiences with real ideas about the world around us. RELATED: ‘Barbie’ Review: Greta Gerwig Strikes The Balance Between Comedy, Commentary & Camp The result for humanity there was devastating, but it turned out it was just the beginning. This is no mere science fiction, and neither was getting “the bomb,” which did the thing for which it was built and had the effect of ending World War II (but after Germany surrendered) when it was dropped twice on Japan in August 1945, first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. So I was thinking about the current discussions of AI - its potential for good and life-changing breakthroughs but also, as scientists and its Silicon Valley creators have been warning recently, a new gadget (as the A-bomb initially was nicknamed) whose use could careen out of control and destroy us all. ![]()
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