With Christopher Nolan's new movie being about the development of the atomic bomb and more
specifically the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer, I thought it would be interesting
to briefly recap Oppenheimer's real-life story and discuss how Nolan could potentially adapt
him. It links to themes that Nolan has covered in numerous films and I think it
is a perfect fit for the auteur blockbuster director. But before I get into it, if you
want to see more updates and videos on the work of directors like Christopher Nolan,
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which is all linked in the description below. But without further ado, let's dive into Christopher
Nolan's Oppenheimer movie and the real story behind it.
“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” This
is the line by Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight that absolutely fits the story of J. Robert
Oppenheimer, and it's the quote that gives us a very good idea of what Christopher Nolan's
new film is going to be about and how he is going to approach it. And in his other projects,
we see an essence of this as well. The World War 2 survival tale, Dunkirk, highlights the
heroism of the common soldier and the British evacuation of France, showing
the complications of that conflict and Memento deals with the grief of Leonard Shelby, who
deals with short term memory loss including the death of his wife. Now his next movie,
also set during WWII, is about an extraordinary man, who never forgave himself for building
the weapon that ended the war. J. Robert Oppenheimer completely fits within the mould of Nolan's
filmmaking ideas and he is someone who can bring a new telling to the filmmaker's filmography.
“I have become death, the destroyer of worlds”. The real Oppenheimer once said these words,
quoting from The Bhagavat Ghita in an interview about creating the atom bomb and
Nolan’s film will focus on the genius scientist’s role in its development. So what is the real
story of the famous man with those impactful words? Well, as a young man, J.
Robert Oppenheimer was identified as a student under J. J. Thomson, who had been awarded
the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting the electron. After the start of World War
2, Oppenheimer was invited by the Office of Scientific Research and Development to take
over the work on neutron calculations at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also
known as Berkeley Lab, which was struggling against the clock to develop an atomic bomb.
As the war and development progressed, this is where the story of Oppenheimer really began
and it was learnt that the scientists needed more space to work. President Roosevelt authorized
the formation of the Manhattan Project on December the 28th, 1942. Also known as Project
Y, the Manhattan Project was formally established on January 1st, 1943.
Oppenheimer was appointed scientific director and he directed the construction of the laboratories
at Los Alamos and brought together the best minds in physics to solve theoretical and
mechanical issues. Over 3,000 people worked on the project, including Albert Einstein,
who first presented the military potential of an uncontrolled fission
chain reaction to Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 and it all led to the first nuclear
explosion being executed at a site on the Alamogordo air base, 120 miles south of
Albuquerque, New Mexico, on July the 16th, 1945. Oppenheimer named the explosion “Trinity,”
and it had the explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT. One month later, the bomb was used
twice on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan with those nuclear explosions ending the war, but
leaving Oppenheimer with mixed feelings. But there is, after all, a physics laboratory
named after him at the where Oppenheimer enrolled in September of 1911, and the society concentrated
on social justice, civic responsibility, and secular humanism.
After the war, Oppenheimer lobbied for international arms control as an advisor of the Atomic Energy
Commission and of course, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb in 1949,
leading to Oppenheimer strongly being opposed to working on developing the hydrogen bomb.
It was after though that we learnt the FBI had files on Oppenheimer, including a report
of a 1943 meeting where he heard about colleagues who were solicited for nuclear secrets by
a shell oil employee on behalf of the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer failed to report it until
August and the FBI furnished Oppenheimer’s files to his enemies. In 1953, the FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover received a letter from the former executive director of Congress’
Joint Atomic Energy Committee, accusing Oppenheimer of being “an agent of the Soviet
Union”. This was based on “11 years of minute surveillance" and the theoretical physicist’s
phones were tapped, his office and home were bugged, and his mail was opened.
Oppenheimer’s security clearance was denied 32 hours before it was set to end in June
of 1954. Edward Teller, who is known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” brang up old
Communist sympathies in testimony to the Oppenheimer Security Hearing in Washington. The Army Counterintelligence
knew about Oppenheimer’s associations with Communist Party USA
members, including his own wife, when he was made director of the Los Alamos Laboratory
in 1942, and when he became chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic
Energy Committee in 1947. The official cancellation stripped the scientist of political power
and made him a feared person during the height of the Red Scare. In the fallout of his public
exile from American government life, Oppenheimer established the World Academy of Art and Science
in 1960, and the scientific community never forgave the government for its treatment of
Oppenheimer, and much of the findings of the committee were shot down under later scrutiny.
The government aimed to right these wrongs not long after, giving
him awards and condemning what happened. J. Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in
1967.
So with the story of Oppenheimer layed out, you clearly see that just through the main
and specific details, that this is a story that can be adapted in a very compelling way.
This is essentially lining up to be Nolan's impactful drama film and one which can really
get into the psychological feelings of the man himself. But what we know from previous
films is that Nolan likes to surprise us. He is an extremely talented director who has
never stopped taking risks, even after achieving mainstream success. A Christopher Nolan film
is like a brand, where Nolan is an auteur, writing and controlling every aspect of his
films, even if he is a good team player that gets everyone's perspective on the
production. With films like Memento, Inception and Interstellar, he has never stopped challenging
audiences, nor has he ever pandered to them and he is one of the few directors with the
guts to make a bomb at the box office and of course, that hasn't happened yet. The filmmaker
is one of the best on a large scale at telling human stories with strong characters who are
troubled by epic challenges and moral situations. Oppenheimer challenged and second-guessed
his greatest achievements until the day he died, and seems like a
natural choice to lend himself to Nolan’s recurring series of troubled protagonists.
They all deal with grief in his films and Oppenheimer is no exception. Just like Dunkirk
and Interstellar prooved, Christopher Nolan researches
everything he can to tell the most real and human film for the story it's based on. And
I'm sure with Oppenheimer, whether that's the official title or not, will be a film
that he gets as much information as possible for. This upcoming biopic has the power to
set things right, and redefine how history paints the necessary uncertainty of scientists
at war. Oppenheimer was called “the father of the Atom bomb”, but he should have been
known as the founding father of the American school of theoretical physics. This
is exactly the point that I think Christopher Nolan is going to stress on in his movie.
I think he will show how Oppenheimer felt all the guilt that we know of, but that the
even sadder thing is that he was mostly remembered for the development of the atomic bomb and
in his words, the destroyer of worlds. It's set to be an emotional and interesting
dive into the mind of that man and how the world looked at him. We'll have to see and
knowing Nolan he will most likely surprise us,
but just based on the story alone, this is set to be something really fascinating for
film fans, fans of history and those who love the work of Christopher Nolan.
But that was a brief rundown on the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and a few points
on how Christopher Nolan might adapt his story in his new movie. I personally love the direction
Nolan is going in and a film about Oppenheimer in World War 2 is exactly the kind of drama
that I wanted to see Nolan do, giving us room for thrilling performances, top tier filmmaking
and overall intrigue into Oppenheimer himself. I'm interested to hear what you guys have
to say on all of this recent news and your thoughts on how Nolan could adapt
it, so let me know down below in the comments section.
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been Cortex and as always make some noise.