Oppenheimer
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by Christopher Nolan
Based on American Prometheus by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin
Produced by Emma Thomas, Charles Roven & Christopher Nolan
Cast
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist and director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Emily Blunt as Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer’s wife and a former Communist Party USA member.
Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves, a USACE officer and director of the Manhattan Project.[10]
Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a high-ranking member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist, Communist Party USA member, and Robert Oppenheimer’s romantic interest.
Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel-winning nuclear physicist who worked with Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley.
Casey Affleck as Boris Pash, a U.S. Army military intelligence officer and commander of the Alsos Mission.
Rami Malek as David L. Hill, a nuclear physicist at the Met Lab, who helped to create the Chicago Pile.
Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, a Nobel-winning physicist, philosopher and Oppenheimer’s personal idol.[15]
Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, a Hungarian theoretical physicist known for being the “father of the hydrogen bomb”.
Jason Clarke as Roger Robb, an attorney and future U.S. circuit judge who served as special counsel to the AEC at Oppenheimer’s security hearing.
Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer, Robert’s younger brother and a particle physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Will Roberts as George C. Marshall, a United States general who served as a key figure in the country’s atomic weapons program.
Pat Skipper as James F. Byrnes, U.S. Secretary of State.
Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States who made the decision to drop the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Hap Lawrence as Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36th President of the United States.
Cinematography Hoyte van Hoytema
Edited by Jennifer Lame
Music by Ludwig Göransson
Production companies: Syncopy Inc., Atlas Entertainment
Distributed by Universal Pictures
I’ll never understand why the movies Oppenheimer and Barbie got conflated in the public consciousness. They have nothing in common aside from the fact that the eponymous characters both lack vaginas. Now, if you had asked me to guess which of the two movies was more likely to have been directed by Christophen Nolan, I might have gone with Barbie and been dead wrong, so what do I know?
OK, they’re both much better than average movies. Both have been nominated for Golden Globes and both made for engaging viewing.
It’s Nolan’s first foray into “serious” film making (i.e., no mecha or superheroes) in quite a while, and it’s a timely reminder that yes, he is a talented director.
Oppenheimer is the story of the physicist who played a key role in the atomic bomb project in 1945. He was effectively the head at Los Alamos, where the first test bomb was detonated.
In real life, J. Robert Oppenheimer was something of a horndog and had an abrasive personality, not a combination unknown amongst prominent scientists. He also had to deal with the antisemitism that was rife at the time, and was eventually brought down by the reactionary paranoia of the McCarthy era. America punished him for being Jewish during the rise of Hitler, and for having communist affiliations while America was allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler. Oppenheimer’s flaws were insignificant. America’s however, were not, and the man suffered for it.
The movie, based on American Prometheus by Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin, is something of a hagiography, but only mildly so. The essence of the man (played brilliantly by Cillian Murphy), and the gigantic role he played in the genesis of the nuclear age shines through.
Nolan has done an excellent job with a complex subject, and subject matter that would challenge most college students. He deftly maneuvers through the political, scientific and logistical currents of a story that one Pentagon flack once described as “so complex only six men in the world understand it*” and created a movie that is engaging and engrossing.
*1947, when a general assured Congress that the A-bomb was so complicated there was no hope the Russians would have it before the 21st century.