After covering Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer in multiple breakdown videos and hearing what
other viewers have had to say about the film, it's clear that the director has made a movie
that respectfully honours the source material.
Having read the American Prometheus book myself though and watching the film multiple times
too, there are a few differences to make note of, and ones which were made for this adaptation's
focus surrounding the point of view of the main character.
So in this video, I'm going to be looking at some of the biggest
differences between the Oppenheimer movie and Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's book,
giving you guys a greater understanding of why Nolan made the changes that he did.
There is much to discuss and this analysis will contain spoilers,
so if you do happen to be someone who hasn't seen the film yet, then I would recommend
watching this video after you've seen it.
Before I get into it though, if you want to keep
up to date on any of my future content for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, then don't
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But without further a do, lets dive straight into some of the biggest differences between
the Oppenheimer movie and book.
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography, American
Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is one that astonishingly
captures much of the 600 pages onto big screen IMAX
photography.
But there are small sections in the book that do differ from the way Nolan has captured
them, and on top this, the approach from the director in terms of filmmaking, does
present this story in a unique way.
Minus a few transitions to a later trial, the American Prometheus book is mostly told
in chronological order.
Whereas with the film, we jump between multiple timelines which include two different hearings,
one in colour and one in black and white, and then intercut with Oppenheimer's
perspective of key events in colour.
A main difference is that we also frequently cut to imagery that goes on within Oppenheimer's
mind, and getting into the head of the central character and trying understand what he may
have been feeling later on.
The film has a unique structure to help the audience emotionally and intellectually take
in the breadth of this story that's also on the page.
It's a different medium and if it was told from beginning to end like it is in the book,
I think the reaction wouldn't have been as strong as it was.
Especially when we think about the effectiveness surrounding all the reveals like with Strauss,
the manipulations of the trial, the conversation with Einstein or the general big
questions that the film leaves you with.
So structure is the film's main difference from the source material.
And the next changes that I'm about to go into mostly concern the actual
content itself and particularly some of the things that Nolan altered or portrayed differently,
for good reasons.
One of them is the start and the very end of the book which focusses on Oppenheimer's
life as a Child and then his eventual exile towards the end.
At the start of American Prometheus, the book details Oppenheimer's
early years in New York with his parents Julius and Ella.
His father, Julius, had fled Europe and the jewish persecutions that he faced, and
with Anti-Semitism not being as bad as it was in Europe, New York seemed like a better
destination.
On the flip side, Oppenheimer's mother, Ella, while also Jewish, already had family
connections in New York.
She married Julius in 1903, and J. Robert Oppenheimer was born just a year later, followed
by their second son, Frank.
And as is hinted in the film Robert remains very close to his brother all of his
life.
While not in the film, the book further dives into his earlier life of privilege and how
he seemed destined for science.
On a family trip to Germany, Robert's grandfather gave
him a set of minerals which he became heavily taken by, and a few years later, that inspiration
translated into him producing his first scientific paper.
To develop the skills that he clearly had, his parents sent him to the School for Ethical
Culture in New york, where he learnt science, Greek, literature, and moral
law.
This was until the end of high school and by the time he graduated, Robert could speak
many different languages and began a lifelong passion for art, literature, and philosophy.
But while Oppenheimer was a great student, as seen right towards the beginning of the
film, socially, he wasn't as successful.
He was so focussed on his studies and was certain of his
own brilliance that he struggled to make any friends.
He was seen as arrogant, even distant by some, and he famously told his English teacher,
"I'm the loneliest man in the world."
Eventually he did leave New York after graduating and began a new journey, one that we see at
the very beginning of the Oppenheimer film.
So the movie does cut out a lot from his early years, but the first 20 minutes or so does
touch on some of the issues that he did face, and stresses just how troubled he was.
As mentioned previously, the other part that isn't seen in the film is right at the end
of the American prometheus book and it includes the last few years of Oppenheimer's life.
While it's known in the film that Oppenheimer publicly
grappled with the consequences of his creation, what isn't known by many is that the political
problems that destroyed his life, resulted in him spending a lot of time on the tiny
island of St John in the US Virgin Islands with Kitty and his two children.
It details how they fell in love with the island and how
Oppenheimer became more connected to the natural world through being here.
No one was going to harrass him or his family, and that was still during a time where the
FBI still tried to keep him under surveillance post the security
hearing.
So here, being anonymous, the were able to sail, have parties and spend time away.
However, despite distancing himself, Robert couldn't escape his past and as the book describes,
there's moments on the Island where both him and Kitty have issues.
There's problems with some neighbours and there's a moment where
Robert apparently begged for a captured turtle not to be cooked as it reminded him of what
happened to the creatures at the trinity test in new mexico.
He was essentially never same and as we learn he eventually died of throat cancer
in 1967 at the age of 62.
Kitty dropped his ashes into the water near the island and when she died 5 years later,
her ashes were scattered at the same spot.
In the book there's also some tragic things that are detailed in the epilogue and it revolves
mostly around Oppenheimer's daughter, Toni, who as we know
isn't in the film all that much.
While she liked the island, she suffered from severe depression and in 1977, she took her
own life in the beach house that her father had built.
When it comes to Robert's son Peter, after his father's
death, he moved to northern New Mexico to live at the Perro Caliente ranch, a residence
his father had purchased and spent time at, as
detailed in the early pages of the book.
His son apparently still lives in New Mexico working as a carpenter.
So when it comes to the very beginning and the very end of the book, that's
what the film basically misses out.
And when you think about the structure and the main things the film does show, you can
understand why Nolan wanted to keep it focussed on the meat of
Oppenheimer's story with all the problems and questions it raises.
He still shows the problems that Oppenheimer dealt with early on and he still addresses
the guilt that he would face towards the end.
Having read the book I would have loved to have seen some of the stuff on the island
of St John too, but having seen Nolan's adaptation, it does make sense why
he choose to focus on what he did over the course of the 3 hours.
So while they were the two big changes to the adapted content, there were also some
smaller interesting details throughout the film that are also slightly different to that
of the book.
The first one is what I talked about a bit before surrounding the visual presentation
of Oppenheimer's mind.
Of course, we get loads of stuff earlier on in the film, but one scene which
dramatically changes from the pages of American Prometheus is that victory speech scene, where
Oppenheimer visualises the horrors that had been unleashed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the American Prometheus Book, Kai Bird and
Martin Sherwin detail the speech that Oppenheimer gives.
It's the same as what is seen in the movie from a short and triumphant perspective.
However, it doesn't say that he was seeing these horrible visions in this particular
moment and it's only in the pages around this that we understand the guilt he must have
been feeling during that timeframe.
A few pages before, Oppenheimer is quoted by saying "those poor little people", and
it further references the sadness that some others felt at Los Alamos too.
But again, this was all communicated outside of
that hall he gave that speech in.
So what Nolan did here is use this moment to visually symbolise a change in his mindset
and communicate the horrors that he must have been grappling with
internally before we started seeing his changing actions and pushes against the hydrogen bomb
externally.
It's a genius move on the part of the director to visualise what wasn't detailed
in the book and that was his internal state.
And the director does so in other moments too like with the AEC meeting, where Oppenheimer
visualises targets on a map with that visual of dropping rainwater that he was looking
at in the film's opening scene.
The book barely gives any extensive thoughts or an extreme
understanding of what was going on in his mind, so the director clearly decided to get
us closer to his perspective.
And I think it really helped in making us try to understand how he
might have been feeling after those bombs were dropped and what his change of mindset
might have been.
Another difference from the book that was clear to me after watching the film was to
do with the scene where Oppenheimer suggests giving away his son to his best friend Chevalier.
Now this was based on a conversation, but things
were quite different in the book, and it actually involved Oppenheimer's daughter Toni instead.
Toni was left with Kitty's friend Pat Sherr, and Robert would visit numerous
times a week to make sure she was ok.
However, we learn a little bit later on that Robert asks Kitty's friend if she'll adopt
his daughter and he says to her that he "can’t
love her”, with Kitty's friend telling the author that he felt he couldn't give her the
life she deserved.
Of course in the film it's quite different as before the Manhattan Project
begins, Robert suggests giving his son to Chevalier.
So I guess that Nolan wanted to keep that emotional beat in the film but have it at
a different point in the story as the Manhattan Project itself includes a lot of plot details
already.
I understand this change from a structural perspective and I guess that it was
done to keep the momentum during everything happening at Los Alamos.
Coming to the final differences, the biggest tend to lie with both the Lewis Strauss reveal
and the hearing which takes place in his black and white sequences.
The film creates this mystery surrounding who provided WW2 veteran
William Borden with Oppenheimer’s security file.
And while the 3rd act of the film reveals that it was Lewis Strauss, in the American
Prometheus book, this is revealed a lot closer to the beginning.
Of course the multi-structure approach that I talked about at the start of this video
is a big factor that supports the approach to make this a huge reveal and it
again puts you in the shoes of Oppenheimer in facing all of the allegations.
Also in the book, it's made clearer that Edward Teller played a
bigger role in putting Borden against Oppenheimer, both in reminding him about the delays to
the Hydrogen bomb program and of the communist that Kitty was married to.
But yes when it comes to Strauss being the culprit, the things
we do see in the film like the moment where he provides information to Borden and gets
him to do the dirty work, that is used as more of
a twist for the movie.
Whereas in the book, you know about that much earlier on.
And when it comes to Strauss and Oppenheimer's actual feud, on top of the reasons we've already
talked about like Oppenheimer's humiliation of Strauss
on exporting radioisotopes, there's things in American Prometheus which deepen their
hatred.
For example, Oppenheimer prevented Strauss from buying a house near the institute for
Advanced Study, which was purchased by the institute.
Also, while the film does compress the disagreements between them on the Hydrogen bomb,
there's a lot more surrounding their clashes on that.
Strauss had convinced himself that Oppenheimer was trying to destroy the hydrogen project
and like we see in the film, both with Einstein and the hearing at the end, he was
paronoid surrounding the thought that Oppenheimer had turned the scientific community against
him.
So when it comes to their feud on the Hydrogen Bomb, this is condensed a bit for
the film, and the reveal that Strauss was the person behind Oppenheimer's fall, was
used as more of a narrative twist at the very end, thanks
to the structure of the different timelines and hearings.
The last thing that comes to my mind surrounding the diffences was also that main hearing for
Strauss that continues throughout the black and white segments of Nolan's movie.
In the book, Strauss's confirmation hearing is detailed
in the space of just a few lines, whereas for the film, Nolan has took that important
moment and used it both as a point of contrast and
as a chain reaction to what happens in Oppenheimer's hearing.
Yes it’s true that Rami Malek's David Hill did testify about Lewis’s obsession with
destroying Oppie, but there were other witnesses too and Strauss's feud with a senator
at the hearing led to some intense charges against him.
So while scientists did speak up against Lewis Strauss and details like that of
John F. Kennedy voting against him was also true, in the book this was just a few sentences.
Instead of just showing Strauss humiliate Oppenheimer at his hearing, we see how that
narrative caused a chain reaction, one that lead to Strauss's own hearing, and we saw
that came back to bite him.
The book barely goes into that and seeing how Nolan made this change
and added a lot more of it to essentially show the importance of consequences, highlights
why it was done.
And the same can be said about most of the changes made from book to the big
screen.
It's to keep narrative focus with the main beats of Oppenheimer's story and when it comes
to pacing, Nolan was still able to fit much of the book into the films 3 hour runtime.
Having read all 600 pages I can't believe how he was able to do so, yet again, make
it his own and put you inside the head of the main character.
But that was my video discussing some of the main differences between Christopher Nolan's
Oppenheimer and the American Prometheus book.
What do you think of the changes that Nolan made
with his adaptation and what are some of the other differences that you picked out?
Let me know your thoughts down below in the comments section alongside your overall reaction
to the film.
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