Review of Oppenheimer

First part of Barbenheimer

So I saw Oppenheimer, about J. Robert Oppenheimer (a brilliant Cillian Murphy) and his leadership of the Manhattan Project. It almost begs comparison to “The Imitation Game,” another movie about a tortured genius who used very complicated math to take on an extremely difficult technical problem during World War II that had a profound impact both on the course of the war and on modern society itself after the war. In the latter movie, Alan Turing cracked the codes Germans sent via the Enigma machine, and in the process effectively invented computers. 

There are key differences. The Manhattan Project involved several thousand people, cost $2 billion, and its effects were literally highly visible when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Turing, on the other hand, led a team of about 6 people, at a cost of probably a few thousand dollars, and the results were classified until long after the war. 

Both movies jump around in time, from the war itself, to before and after. But where The Imitation Game focuses almost exclusively on what happened at Bletchley Park, and mostly sticks to one main story line, Oppenheimer tells four different stories: first, the story of Oppenheimer’s leadership of the Manhattan Project. Second, the story of Oppenheimer’s postwar scandal; third, the story of how scientists, including Oppenheimer, debated whether or not the bombs should actually be used, and how they should be controlled and regulated; and fourth, how the development of the hydrogen bomb, a far more powerful weapon than the atomic bomb, was part of this process. 

Christopher Nolan, the director, is known for taking on movies with this kind of scale and multidimensional plotlines; Inception comes to mind. He pulls it off, but barely. It works for me, but it almost didn’t. I may very well appreciate how well the pieces come together if I see it a second time, but that’s also a big if - it’s three hours long, and I’m not sure I’m going to make that commitment again. 

Making a movie this ambitious runs the risk of confusing some of the audience at least some of the time. Unless you already know much of the story, it will probably be difficult to follow the importance of each famous early 20th physicist and their role, let alone more obscure historical figures like Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who hired Oppenheimer at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. 

Turing and Oppenheimer were both somewhat socially awkward - the stereotype of the nerdy scientist seems to apply to both. In The Imitation Game, that story is an essential part of Turing’s struggle. To develop the tools he needs - analytical as well as physical - he has to learn how to work with people. Oppenheimer seems better suited to the challenge presented to him, but I would have liked to have seen more explanation of how he went from a theoretical physicist to a leader of thousands. Leslie Grove, (Matt Damon) the Army officer who chose Oppenheimer and ran the physical aspects of the Manhattan Project, has a nice scene where he interviews Oppenheimer. But I’m still not sure why he was chosen, or how he learned the necessary management/leadership skills. 

Part of the reason we don’t learn as much about Oppenheimer’s professional development  is that the movie isn’t so much about the struggles within one man as it is about the struggles between men (and the occasional woman). It’s about power. Not just political power; literal power, the power of the atom, unleashed like nothing before. The creation of this previously unthinkable amount of power, the power to kill ten of thousands of people in an instant, also unleashes another kind of power - the power to control it. This is what Oppenheimer is about - when we unleash this much power, how do we control it? Oppenheimer himself, a rational scientist, believed that the use of atomic weapons should be subject to international controls. The politician who used it, Truman, and those who controlled it, like Eisenhower, had a more  jaundiced, or more realistic, view of what would happen. They had fought Hitler, a madman who tried to take over the world via a land war in Europe. Part of the rationale to spend so much money on the Manhattan Project so quickly was to beat the Germans to the bomb. If the Germans had made a bomb, the war would have looked very different, catastrophically so. London survived bombing by V2 rockets with conventional bombs. It would not have survived a V2 rocket loaded with an atomic bomb. Once the Soviet Union got the bomb, after the war, the US and its allies faced, again, the prospect of a madman - Stalin - potentially trying to take over the world via a land war in Europe. They knew Hitler could not have been subject to international controls if the Third Reich had developed a bomb. The same logic applied to Stalin. To people like Truman and Eisenhower, Oppenheimer’s faith in international institutions looked like hopeless naivete. People whose job is to defend countries cannot afford illusions of peaceful cooperation when the stakes are total annihilation. They knew that they would have to be able to match the USSR bomb for bomb, missile for missile, submarine for submarine, to be able to counter the threat with equally deadly threat.

One of the people involved in this debate is a man largely forgotten today, Lewis Strauss. As I was watching it, I wasn’t sure why there was so much emphasis on Strauss, who was apparently deeply involved in stripping Turing of his national security clearance, which denied him the ability to work for the government. This part of the movie felt a bit like a soap opera, people motivated by grudges and personality clashes. But Strauss was apparently something of a power player in Washington, and it’s through him that we see how power works at an individual level. It’s also through him that one of the themes of the movie becomes clear: people who use power at a high level don’t always understand how it works, and it can easily be used against them. It’s a small step from watching power games among people go wrong to thinking about how using the power of the atom could go wrong as well. 

This question - this issue - this dilemma - of how to control the most deadly weapons ever created has bedeviled humanity ever since August 6, 1945, when the rest of the world awoke to discover what had been created in the desert of New Mexico. Nolan takes the debate from the realms of politics and policy, where the issues are weighty and profound, to the intimate - sometimes literally - and personal, from the halls of Congress and the pages of newspapers to debates between individuals. Brilliant and passionate scientists argue with tough and decisive soldiers and cynical and even more decisive politicians. They have one thing in common: they’re all terrified of what comes next. Oppenheimer himself captured this better than anyone with his reaction to the first test of an atomic bomb, at Trinity in New Mexico. He quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

The Manhattan Project was extraordinarily ambitious in scope; even almost 80 years later, it’s difficult to comprehend what was at stake and what was achieved. It’s perhaps appropriate then that a movie about it would be ambitious as well. And just like the bomb and how to use it, opinions will be divided. This movie is almost a lock to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, given its scope and the seriousness of its material. Whether or not it will win is much less certain. What is almost certain is that Cillian Murphy will be nominated for Best Actor. Unless there is another surprising performance by a male lead this year, I expect the debate about his performance to be less divisive; his performance is so good, it almost feels like he is a lock to win.