SPOILER WARNING: If you have not seen Oppenheimer (2023) yet, this post is not for you. This is by no means an in-depth review, but it is fully focussed on my reactions to my first viewing of the film.

1. Propagation

I have not been very active on social media for the last several months. This was lessoned further by the removal of API access of both Twitter and Reddit earlier this year. This makes me a little less connected to the rest of the world, but that comes with the advantage of avoiding media related hype-trains and spoilers. I remember hearing about Oppenheimer when it was announced. As a fan of Christopher Nolan’s work, particularly Interstellar and Dunkirk, it was on my radar of, “Yeah, I’ll want to see that sometime.” Months passed. I really did not hear or see anything other than announcements of start studded cast of the film, which I admittedly pay little mind to as I am never able to remember half of the names or faces on the silver screen. The Barbenheimer spectacle grabbed my attention. My girlfriend saw Barbie the night before, a film which failed to pique my interest at any point in its marketing campaign. I made the knee-jerk decision to purchase tickets for us to see it in IMAX for a Friday matinée in our home town 90 minutes away.

As a scholar of history, I have little interest in the study of war. The narrative given to me in secondary school of American history was the classic war-peacetime dichotomy. While I fully acknowledge the awesome power (in the classical sense) that war wields to influence politics, societies, and economics, I simply became atrophied from engaging directly and indirectly with the military-industrial complex via textbooks, books, mini-series, and especially films. There is so much other history to engage with and preserve outside of human kind at its worst. The history of war is not going anywhere without me.

And sure, Saving Private Ryan (1998) was ground-breaking for cinema in so many ways, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) was innovative in its use of narrative and practical effects, and my favorite film remains War Horse (2011) for its ability
to tell the stories of so many common people in a succinct and beautiful package. I won’t even begin to talk about The Band of Brothers series (2001), Salisbury’s The 900 Days (1969), or the Medal of Honor game series (1999-2020). But there is just so much war and war-related content that the entertainment market is over-saturated with the same stories, but with a different uniform or theatre or era. With this over-saturation comes a loss of quality and, worse yet, an ideological cesspool leaving people mired in war-mongering nationalism muck, such as The Patriot (2000) or Gods and
Generals (2003).

One film which did break down my defenses was Dunkirk (2017). Nolan’s direction and writing with Zimmerman’s scoring generated a foundation and support structure for a masterclass piece. With the setting of a massive military blunder and A-class acting throughout, a film formed which I considered gritty yet approachable, obscure in storytelling yet rewarding for the viewer, and, most importantly for me, successful in telling the story of normal people in an extraordinary situation. The film pushes us to cheer for the survival of the main characters and the “good guys” without us feeling the need to see the extermination of the lives of the enemy. The story is messy, about messy humans, in a messy event. I loved that. I saw it three times in theaters, hyping it up to all of my friends that it was more than worth their time to experience in a theater, as well as worth the added cost of an IMAX viewing. I cannot recommend this film enough, despite its shortcomings.

I have mentioned IMAX twice already and there is a purpose for this. Christopher Nolan is a very proud filmmaker. He has neuroses and methodologies to his craft which creates issues for the average film-viewer. Nolan makes films for the latest and greatest technologies in the industry. He uses 70mm IMAX film. He takes advantage of all 128 channels offered in this format. The films he makes are designed from start to end with the IMAX experience in mind: total aural and visual engagement. Any mastering for other formats of his films, from standard digital theater releases, to blue-ray, to streaming, all are treated as second class citizens. This gets further compounded if you do not have a screen capable of HDR image quality or lack a well tuned audio system. Nolan is not alone in his standards of production, but with the success he has with the Batman series (2005-2012), the splashes made by Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014), and
now the buzz around Oppenheimer, it is important to understand this reality prior to viewing. I am not trying to suggest that seeing Oppenheimer in anything other than IMAX will be a waste of your time. However, if you have the ability to see it in this format, you will receive a large number of cinematic benefits.

2. Singularity

On a hot and balmy Friday afternoon, my girlfriend, her family, and I walked into our hometown theater. We retrieved our tickets acquired nearly a week in advance, placing us in the true center of the theater. The seats themselves left something to be desired. Padding, if I were to be more blunt. However, in a way the lack of ultra-luxurious seating ensured that I was not going to find myself nodding off part-way into this three hour and nine minute film, plus
fifteen minutes of obligatory trailers (I cannot wait for Killers of the Flower Moon later this year). Without getting into the details of what prompted this, a word of caution: do not bring your baby to see Oppenheimer, especially if you did not bring ear protection for them. This movie is loud. This movie has flashing lights. This movie can easily overpower the senses of an adult, let alone a baby. With a small Sprite in hand, I was ready to begin this biographical journey while rationing my wares.

The movie is told in at least two, if not three (perhaps two and a half), disjointed and concurrent parts. One is the historic telling
of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life starting at his time as a student at Cambridge, under none other than J.J. Thompson. The second is filmed in black and white and is set in the Senate confirmation hearing of appointed Secretary of Commerce Lewis Strauss in 1959. The third was the main narrative engine of the film wherein Oppenheimer is being grilled through a month-long hearing in 1953 by the Atomic Energy Commission’s Security Board over concerns of his security clearance. In typical Nolan fashion, we bounce between each of these settings without much warning, although we see the most continuous developments in the first of the two (three, two and a half?) storylines.

Instantly, the film is visually stunning. I am a sucker for the look of film and the way it plays with light. This is curiously noteworthy as in at least two scenes, the lights used either from the set or from the production lights glare into frame and leave blaring artifacts that one would not normally expect to see in a blockbuster film. And yet, these imperfections feel natural. These unplanned and organic occurrences that are initially distracting blemishes which quickly transition into what I term as meta-realism effects. By this, I am referring to choices in film, or other media production for that matter, which invoke or preserve certain elements of the real world in the media which only become obvious due to the nature of the very much non-dynamic media being viewed. Unlike the high frame rate digital “soap opera effect” which makes the media feel uncannily real, these artifacts keep us grounded in reality, showing us that the laws of physics still apply in the story we are watching, which is perhaps more important in this film than many others, and, more importantly in my opinion, that the people we are watching were real, in real relationships, really talking in these imperfectly lit places which from some perspectives could generate such a glare. I am probably overthinking this, but what else is new.

The soundscape is unmatched. It is simply second to none compared to what I have experienced in recent times. The flutter of the trance-like background music, the percussive power of explosions, and the layering of voice and effects all culminate in an engaging and fulfilling experience. As mentioned above, Nolan makes use of each and every sound channel available to him. This is especially important for clarity of spoken voice.

The last three Nolan movies have had dialogue which was somehow obfuscated in some way, be it an off-screen voice or a mask primarily, with Tenet (2020) being the worst offender. Oppenheimer is guilty of this as well, especially with the combination of the very loud highs of explosions which would fully overpower their entrances even more so if brought up any more in the final mix to aid the vocals of the actors. This is a common shortcoming of Nolan’s productions, as well as his contemporaries. While I feel this has a good deal of merit, I do just want to posit an appeal to meta-realism once more.

It seems to be a reasonable expectation that the lines being delivered to the audience are able to be parsed and understood the vast majority of the time. But what if this is a formality formed more because we have this expectation as audience goers when watching a movie or a stage play and not because it is the best for the art direction. I ask you to consider perhaps we don’t need to know every word said on or off screen. What if part of the transitive power wielded by Nolan, or any director and sound mixer, is to replicate the experience of our world in front of us more closely to our own? In our everyday lives, we miss plenty of phrases and statements. Why then must the movies provide the ideal type wherein everyone everywhere is perfectly understood? Now, you may retort within reason that in our dynamic world, we have the ability to say, “I’m sorry, come again.” The production before us in the theater is unchanging relative to itself; we cannot deify ourselves in such a way to request better diction of the performers for we are but observers. Still, I would argue that the lack of concern on the part of the direction and sound mixing to isolate every line and standardize it to perfect human understandability is either intentional or implicit to the final product. Nolan and the post-production team are expressing the vision of the project through these films and we ought not fail to consider how far the intentionality of its design may go or what artifacts of this form of story telling may carry. If you want perfection, we have books to know every single word and action at all times without fail, assuming the continuity of the paper and ink which makes up the book or the server hosting the digital content. (If you can’t tell, I am not like many of my peers whom utilize captioning for streamed content. I do not intend to suggest anyone who does this is “doing it wrong,” rather that we as consumers of this art ought to consider the logistic and artistic choices made in each aspect of each show or film.)

My face lit up with excitement every time a new character was introduced. While I am no scholar of the making of the atomic bomb or Oppenheimer, I am very comfortable with the quantum world and the scholars which pushed for its development and adoption. Part of my physical chemistry courses, yes plural, was exploring the history of quantum chemistry and the faces behind it. Thompson, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, and many more were all names I knew well for their contributions to understanding the quantum world, including Oppenheimer. A passage about one of these (almost unanimously male) scientists began each of the chapters in our textbook. As a class we had story time as a break from the mind bending world of probabilistic quantum states we were meant to learn about. Even with the backdrop of war, destruction, and fascism, there was something delightful about seeing all of these important people together working with, past, and against one another. I am reminded of how we talk about composers of the Classical and early-Romance periods as individuals but often overlook the interactions that Beethoven, Haydn, and Schubert had with one another both directly and indirectly.

While I, a scholar which utilizes the quantum model in ways its earliest adopters would find questionable at best, would have loved to have seen more explicit moments of periodic, chemical, and physical discussion, I was nonetheless satisfied with the small references made throughout the film to ground the on screen action and motivation of the characters to the quantum world. From Oppenheimer’s classroom, with a rather diverse class roster, to meetings held in Los Alamos, to the single piece of paper showing calculations which would suggest the sudden destruction of the atmosphere, I was pleased with the amount of science present throughout the runtime.

I enjoyed the almost vignette style of storytelling present in the recounting of Oppenheimer’s personal life. The sex, friends, and the Communism are all purposefully shown in such a way to demystify Oppenheimer and humanize this Prometheus of a man. I did not know anything about his personal life going into the movie. I was aware of his support of the anti-Franco effort in Spain and his lukewarm attitudes towards socialism and communism. This story is no glowing review of the man behind the bomb, rather it is a detailed look at the world through his eyes, the good, the bad, and the awful.

The film takes us from labs and classrooms to the wilderness of the southwest. We see the actors existing and moving in these spaces. They build and destroy within these spaces. They terraform and explode the grounds which they occupy. The spaces being occupied are acted upon and not actors themselves. Towns built, bombs constructed, camps set, trails walked, football fields repurposed, Appalachian ores mined and marbles placed in glasses in responce one thousand miles away. Birth and deaths of humans happen in these spaces. Great joy and suffering are experienced in these places. Politics, science, and war all take place with the environment in the background. The notable exception is in the lead up to the Trinity site detention. The bomb was constructed, the iron structure which housed it was constructed, the date was set with the Potsdam Conference was approaching. And then the rains came. But this way just a delay. Oppenheimer is shown with the arrogance to feel he knows when the storm will pass and the bomb’s detonation will take place. And he was right. Disappointingly, the force of man is seen as in control for much of the narrative, even in the midst of the atomic uncertainty at the heart of main event.

The lead up to the detonation at the Trinity site was extremely satisfying. The music, jump cuts between the multiple observation sites, and the commentary of each actor all pointed to the grand climax of the world forever changing. I especially love the interaction between two characters wherein one, sitting on a lawn-chair with welder glasses offers the other, seated in a car, sunblock lotion. The second declines the offer, stating that, “The glass will stop the UVs.” The first quickly retorts with, “What stops the glass?” I may have laughed an embarrassingly long amount of time in response to this quip.

After the success of the detonation came what the film, I feel, saw as the true climatic scene: Oppenheimer’s “success” speech. The stomping of feet in a makeshift auditorium was featured throughout earlier parts of the film, either visually or only audibly. Cleverly, the ruckus of the stomping of the crowd’s feet mimic the bombastic roar of an explosion. The main scene sways away and toward the cheering crowd in duel with the isolated voice of Oppenheimer. His speech is short and choppy. He is transfixed on his fear driven hallucinations of the nature of what he knows is to come. Peeling skin, ashen bodies, white blinding lights. He plays the crowd, even in this state, with a line akin to, ‘The Japanese [which I do wonder if he really would have used that term in this setting] won’t know what hit ‘um.’ He adds directly after his disappointment, real or not, that the team was unable to complete the bomb before the surrender of the Germans. His disorienting state makes it hard to parse reality and his perceptions. As Oppenheimer is leaving, there are two people below the stands crying and a man outside vomits. Are these reactions real and authentic, or are they the result of Oppenheimer’s post-nuclear detonation fever-dream? Do they fear what is to come and so they cry in worry, or are they imagined to cry due to the fictitious event of a nuclear bomb detonating over their location. Does the man vomit out of fear of what the nuclear war age may bring, or does he vomit from “radiation poisoning?” We can’t know. Even if Nolan were to state definitively what was reality and what was imagined, there is a superposition of perception in existence. Both are true until we interact. We can not observe all possibilities at one time.

The visual direction of Strauss hearing’s shows more contrast than the simple choice of two-tone film in an otherwise vibrant color palate feature. The pacing feels more like a Perry Mason episode. Every thirty seconds or so in this timeline we are given new information which drastically changes our whole perspective of the events we have been witness to. We see stereotypical Washington politics play out before us, fulled by subterfuge and hurt feelings. Anyone who says science is free from politics is fooling themselves; more so, it is all the more interesting to see how politics can be influenced by scientists, if not just by the science itself. This assemblage of people, the Senate hearing room, Strauss’s office, and the seemingly short yet endless timescale all combine into a leviathan. All these essences are working in concert to deliver the American democratic system in miniature. Control of the meta-being shifts from Strauss, to the Senators, to his assistant in this beautiful dance. Even if you knew about the actions of Strauss in destroying the future career of Oppenheimer or Strauss’s political loss before the Senate, thanks in part to some Massachusetts senator trying to make a name for himself, it is impossible to not feel shock as the curtain reveals everything before the viewer.

The juxtaposition of these two independent yet equal stories makes this story of Oppenheimer further evolve away from the singularity of one scientist and instead form into a beautifully imperfect vessel of humanity, quantum science, destruction, entropy, and equilibrium. The ending interaction between Oppenheimer and Einstein captures the grave concern which I feel all involved in the production of this film agree would be Oppenheimer’s greatest concern: the world was changed due to the work that he and his co-workers conducted and there is no way to go back. Everything has changed forever. This expands well beyond cabinet positions, the scientific discovery, or human existence. The threat of nuclear power is real and present. The film ends with the clear impression that we have the obligation to do all we can to avoid annihilation of us and the world around us or face a fiery end.

3. Empirical Analysis

Oppenheimer, while many things, is ultimately a biography of the titular man. He is shown as an overly cautious moderate but with multiple caveats which would make him an inconsistent fictional character yet a true human in our world. Oppenheimer will not join the Communist Party, but he does use party rhetoric to stir up the desire of faculty unionization. He, in an almost cartoonish way, states that he and his co-scientist are not responsible for how the atomic bomb is used, but is wrapped in fear, guilt, and motivated to halt any escalation shortly after the end of the war. He is unable to commit to a single partner. He is impersonal, crude, and self-destructive.

The post-modern perspective would suggest he is a complicated man wrapped up in the changing time and the circumstances he finds himself in. His indecision gets the better of him. His infidelity and boyish tactics result in his life being impacted by so many external persons that he had no hope in successfully leaving our mortal existence as a pure or unproblematic human.

Furthermore, the threat of total nuclear destruction remains an ever present danger wherein we are reliant of the actions of individuals to move in collaboration with the rest of humanity to lower the chance of this destruction from ever occurring. The feat is not impossible, but it feels improbable. Our anxiety will collectively ebb and flow until one of the two possible asymptotes: destruction of atomic warfare or destruction from
atomic warfare.

The post-humanist perspective sees Oppenheimer as a network of wealth and prestige, isolated and protected in such a way to be able to hold his opinions and act on a whim. He knows that his friends will bail him out again when needed. While he can do wrong, and he does, it seems the waves acting on him from his surroundings are never able to fully dislodge him. He has sex with another woman and gets her pregnant, so he leaves his previous partner behind and starts a new atomic family. When he finally cuts all ties with his previous partner, she kills herself and yet Oppenheimer comes out relatively unaffected. We do not see that forces stirred up from her death re-orient his trajectory any more that putting a frog in his throat when he is trying to distance himself from loud and proud communists in a McCarthy-era America. Even with his wife not forgiving him for seeing this first woman, she remains his defender, albeit with the backdrop of a 1950s America where her life is depended on his status. The exception to this is the kangaroo court hearing which stripped him of his Q level security status. Even the people who
teach about the quantum are unable to escape its impacts in the world around them. While this is a massive blow, the revelation (or preprepared knowledge) of the origin of this hearing undermines the true nature of the assemblage found within the Atomic Energy Commission and Oppenheimer’s role in it.

Furthermore, the post-human must consider the agency of nuclear weapons themselves. Be they fusion or fission, conventional, ICBM,
or cluster, this specter cast a shadow over all vessels here on our planet, knowing or unbeknownst. They hold the power to destroy on their terms: total and unceasing. Man may control the keys to these objects, but we are reliant on their stability to not malfunction. We are reliant on the fail-safe mechanisms to prevent accidental deployment. We are at the mercy of decaying isotopes and stray electrons that we do not exist here at once and somewhere else the next.

So, how then is the ending message to be understood? Perhaps is is a further statement of our powerlessness. After all, while it is nearly impossible for a natural atomic explosion on Earth, it is still non-zero. The forces of essences both human and non-human simply boosted the statistics by several magnitudes. We do not control the atom. We work with
the atom as a part of our assemblage. This is true of the nuclear engineer at a power plant in France, the commander-in-chief of a nuclear warhead arsenal in Washington, or a crew member aboard a B-52 which was directed by a crazed general to attack a Russian target, cut radio communication, select a backup target, and drop a nuclear payload with your CO riding the ordinate with a cowboy hat before setting off the Doomsday Machine and yet again changing all that exists on this globe forever.