I stared at the screen slack-jawed as the credits rolled. The Prestige (2006) had tricked me in the most horrible way. I had fallen for the most obvious of answers. I sighed in resignation, and then, I did something I had never done before: I restarted the movie.

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Christopher Nolan’s movies have had a profound impact on me ever since I first watched The Dark Knight (2008) and Inception (2010) in middle school. As a result, I became enamored with complicated and thought-provoking films, dealing with themes such as existentialism, time, and morality. I started to appreciate the subjective nature of such things I previously thought to be linear—reality and memory. I had never seen someone approach science fiction as Nolan did. Interstellar (2014) is mathematically convoluted, but its core is fastened by the most human thing of all—love. 

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When I heard that Nolan would be directing a biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, I was very excited. I immediately started a countdown on my phone, waiting for the 600 days to tick by. It seems excessive, but for a few years by then, I had researched extensively about the Manhattan Project. I had always known it was a story that needed telling.

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And Nolan did it again! I watched Oppenheimer for the first time in 35-mm film. Despite my expectation of Nolan’s nonlinear storytelling, I was blown away. This was his most character-driven piece yet. There was something almost experimental about the film—cutting back and forth between fragments of light and Oppenheimer’s blue-eyed stares. The delve into Oppenheimer’s psyche was very special, and I can’t recall a film where I felt so immersed in a protagonist. Essentially, it’s exactly what you should expect from the film’s name. However, despite my pre-existing knowledge of the Manhattan Project and my having read the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which served as the source material for the film, I found myself unable to form a cohesive recap of the whole story in my mind. When my friend, who was supposed to go with me to the preview but suddenly caught COVID, asked me about it, I couldn’t really say much. So, I had to watch it a second time.

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My second impression of Oppenheimer, this time in its rightful format (70-mm film on an enormous 60 by 80-foot IMAX screen), was drastically more formative. Moreover, I think I figured out why Nolan decided on nonlinear storytelling. Nolan used it to explore the complexity of human emotions, to engage the audience by forcing them to think, and to leave imprints on their memory by tricking them into retaining the most impactful scenes that he purposefully created. Despite its veering away from telling the story of the overall scientific triumph, Oppenheimer succeeds in casting a shadow over its protagonist, highlighting his moral dilemma and psychological struggle associated with the atomic bombs that he helped produce. 

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Somewhere amidst the rather dizzy impressionistic scenes lies a green apple, the one that Oppenheimer injected with lab chemicals and placed on the desk for his demanding head tutor at Cambridge. Nolan highlighted this poisoned apple as a symbol of Oppenheimer’s ethical struggle in his earlier years, only to foreshadow the whole film that is soaked in the same theme.  

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The Trinity Test, the successful detonation of the first nuclear bomb which brought on the Atomic Age, was phenomenally recreated. One could almost feel the heat of the burning mushroom clouds in IMAX, followed by the deafening explosion and the gust of the sandstorm. All throughout, bars from the beautiful violin-based score by Ludwig Göransson could be heard. I had the feeling the scene could be close to being real. In a recent phone interview I conducted with surviving Manhattan Project scientist, Dr. Dieter Gruen, he said, “The special effects towards the end were interesting. I think he caught the excitement of people waiting for the explosion and seeing it happen. The impact that it had on the people that actually observed that was great.”

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However, Dr. Gruen found the film lacking in conveying Oppenheimer’s scientific contributions. “The movie focused a lot on his personality, his character, his social associations, but didn’t dwell at all on his technical contributions,” he said. “I think that people can come away from that movie with a particular view of Oppenheimer that may not be a well-rounded view.”

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In considering Dr. Gruen’s words, I spent a lot of time thinking about Nolan’s vision for the film and the criticisms mounted against it. From the very beginning, people wondered why he did not show the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, on a lesser and more specialized scale, Oppenheimer was critiqued on its lack of science. One of the most challenging scientific undertakings of the Manhattan Project was the production of enough Uranium-235. Dr. Gruen worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee amongst thousands of others in enriching uranium for the bomb. Oak Ridge, however, was not shown at all in Nolan’s film. 

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“People didn’t understand that the test that they were witnessing was the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki. The bomb used on Hiroshima was a uranium bomb. These may be details that nobody cares about. The accomplishment of that particular project—if you can call it an accomplishment—was the wide range of science that had been deployed in order to create this kind of weapon, that didn’t really come out [in the film].” Instead, the only glimpse we get into this tremendous effort is through two semi-metaphoric fish bowls filled with marbles denoting the amount of isotope they produced. 

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The film was not a narrative of this historical event nor of Oppenheimer’s triumph as a scientific leader. Instead, it was a glimpse into Oppenheimer’s mind as we experienced the destruction of his actions in the same way he did—detached and horrified. The lack of ‘eyewitness’ footage, or the Japanese perspective, was a conscientious choice. I found myself in agreement with Nolan on this front. That was not really Nolan’s story to tell. As for the lack of technical science, it was left out because we all know it is directly linked to the subsequent application of the bombs and the destruction of the Japanese cities. The conflict of triumph and tragedy could only be embodied in the man who helped to harness the “basic power of the universe” with its capacity for immense destruction—the American Prometheus, the tragic martyr. This is the crux of the film. The movie was created partially for the purpose of disseminating a bigger message to a broader audience. For a younger generation, it is not the science that will stick, instead, it is the godlike power placed into the hands of mere mortals.

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Not long before the Trinity Test, it was believed that Japan was close to surrender. The film brings up this dilemma with Leo Szilard’s appearance. The inventor of the nuclear chain reaction tells Oppenheimer that they cannot drop the bombs on an already defeated enemy just before Oppenheimer is about to help decide the bombing targets, otherwise, “History will judge us.” After the bombing, in a scene with President Truman, a tormented Oppenheimer tells him, “I feel that I have blood on my hands”, to which Truman calls him a “crybaby”. 

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There are conflicting opinions on this matter. In an interview with me in 2018, Martin J. Sherwin (1937-2021), Pulitzer-winning co-author of American Prometheus, stated, “Oppenheimer’s triumph was his successful leadership bringing the bomb project to completion in time to be used during the war. That was also his tragedy as he came to realize the bombings were not necessary to end the war in August.”

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 However, many people, including Manhattan Project veterans, believed that millions of lives around the world had been saved by the dropping of the atomic bombs. In an interview I conducted with Manhattan Project scientist Dr. Benjamin Bederson (1921-2023) in 2018, he said, “I knew it was necessary. We simply saved a lot of lives—a lot of American lives. A lot of Americans would have been killed if we hadn’t, so I didn’t have any second thoughts about dropping the atomic bomb. I thought it was the right thing to do.” 

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The movie suggests that the only thing Oppenheimer regretted was the loss of civilian life, which caused him tremendous angst in the aftermath. In the bleachers scene, in which Oppenheimer imagines his applauding audience decimated by nuclear force, we fully understand the depth of his struggle. In the later security hearing scenes, though, he calls the bombing a “technical success” and endorses their role in helping end the war. Despite the opinions of many other scientists, Oppenheimer always maintained that the bombs served their purpose—one that should never be demonstrated again. 

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Not only did Nolan tell the Oppenheimer story without the facet of scientific achievement, but he also told it from a most unusual perspective. Written in the first person, it was surely a shock to most who opened the script, including myself. The environment of the film was aptly created, aided by Göransson’s score, largely from the point of view of Oppenheimer— the man of “sonnets and scientific synthesis” (Templeton).

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For Dr. Gruen, at least one character in the film deserved more exposure. He mentioned, “The way the hearings are presented, where Oppenheimer was essentially denied clearance by the very government that he helped to achieve world power and influence, was pointed out by just one of the three judges, a man by the name of Ward Vinton Evans, who is shown briefly as an elderly gentleman in the movie. It turns out, I knew Evans very well. He was my physical chemistry professor at Northwestern University before I went to work on the Manhattan Project.  He was the only one of the three judges who voted not to take the security clearance away from Oppenheimer. And he wrote a very strong, very strong message saying that ‘if you do this, it will be a blot on the reputation of the United States forever’. These are the things that are important to me having been one of the few survivors.”

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The first-person perspective perhaps also explains the few nude scenes in the film, which many of my friends found “uncomfortable” or “unnecessary”. I was expecting to see Oppenheimer famously quoting the Bhagavad Gita, but didn’t expect to see it presented in a rather private bedroom scene. In real life, Oppenheimer was featured recalling this line during a 1965 NBC TV interview as he reflected on his response to the success of the Trinity Test: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Witnessing the historical detonation of Trinity, Oppenheimer realized that he had helped to bring to fruition the weapon of death that could stop the war and save human lives. “Oppenheimer’s quoting it was definitely a recognition that the world would never be the same,” stated Martin J. Sherwin. 

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Nolan certainly made a clear statement of his purpose with the film’s impactful final scene. In a flashback of the fictionalized Oppenheimer-Einstein conversation, Oppenheimer says, “We were worried that we’d start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world…” Einstein responds, “What of it?” Then, Oppenheimer says this chilling 4-word sentence in his tone of solemnity and quiet trepidation—“I believe we did.”  The last scene closes in on Oppenheimer’s staring eyes as he visualizes “THE EXPANDING NUCLEAR ARSENALS OF THE WORLD…FASTER, AND FASTER—” Finally, an abrupt cut to black.

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In this finale, we see Oppenheimer reckoning with the deathly nature of the bomb he helped create, and the changing of society as we knew it. His fear is well-founded, displayed in the film through the government’s strong push for the subsequent hydrogen bomb Oppenheimer so adamantly opposed. The additional information Nolan envisioned helped me grasp his goal for the film. It was made not only to educate about a time in history but to raise awareness of this terrible thing still looming over our contemporary society.   

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Nolan called Oppenheimer the most important man who ever lived, and he is right on many accounts. In initial calculations, scientists discovered a minute chance that the atomic bomb would destroy the entire world. Oppenheimer was the man who brought that unfathomable, and potentially world-ending, power to life. So, as Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer stares ahead, pondering the “expanding nuclear arsenals of the world”, we as an audience are prompted to do the same. With over 12,500 nuclear warheads in the world, we have come a long way from the two detonated in 1945. When you consider the scale of death—over 200,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it is a terrifying thing to wonder what nuclear warfare could look like today. For this reason, it was imperative that Nolan make this film, and make it in such a way so as to explore nuclear weapons’ profound impact on humanity. 

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I’ve been wary of this in my ways. Since completing my National History Day project on the Manhattan Project five years ago, I’ve thought a lot about the place of nuclear weapons in our society. In addition to a research paper, I’ve developed an informative speech (“The Bomb Identity”). I also created an infographic (“Nuclear Power”) for the school’s news magazine and was invited to exhibit it at a local art museum after winning a Scholastic Art Gold Key. I was further inspired to explore the impacts of other life-changing sciences such as the Metaverse and artificial intelligence—which is now having its “Oppenheimer Moment”—through art and writing. I can see a similar goal in Nolan, especially in creating Oppenheimer. 

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By the end of my recent half-hour interview with Dr. Gruen, I felt that he did see and approve of the value of the film. He said, “I think the chief accomplishment of [Oppenheimer] was to get people to think about those days and what they mean in the present situation that the world finds itself in. To the extent that people become aware, they must pay attention to a world filled with nuclear weapons. Do something about it, avert a nuclear holocaust. That, I think, is the value that I see in this movie.”

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And the film did just that. One of the most unique aspects of Oppenheimer’s release was its association with Barbie and its subsequent internet memeification. At first, while finding it funny, the prospect of “Barbenheimer” scared me; I feared that a younger generation wouldn’t be going into the theaters with the right frame of mind. Even after watching the movie myself, I feared that it would not resonate with most of my peers due to its dialogue-heavy nature. I was glad to be proven wrong. People, many of whom I wouldn’t have expected, left the theater deeply affected.

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For a film of such gravitas, it’s remarkable how well it did at the box office, making $950 million worldwide. For many filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, this was a sign of victory, a flicker of hope for a dwindling theater industry. In an age where we are still facing wars, and the prospect of nuclear catastrophe never seems too far out of reach, the story of Oppenheimer is one of incredible importance. 

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When I was in China shortly before Oppenheimer’s release, I heard people excitedly anticipating the film. This left a mark on me, showing me that the art of film is still able to connect these two diverging cultures and economies. While I knew that superhero blockbusters and Fast & Furious were watched in both countries, I was more excited to hear that a film like Oppenheimer had broken into the Chinese box office. 

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Now that I’ve watched Oppenheimer twice, I’m rethinking that fully immersive experience of being sucked into the multiverse constructed by switching back and forth between Murphy’s blue-eyed stares and the fires of Trinity. I suddenly realized Nolan has adapted his cinematic art for the new generations—people who have relocated to the multiverse of the reality that we live in, regardless of age.  Even when I wrote this paper, I was interrupted countless times, by my mom yelling for me to pick up clothes off the floor, by tennis-playing with my dad, by a boy in India whom I met in Beijing during a summer internship showing me his self-made NGO on CommonApp, by my working on my recent screenplay Dr. Mind and debating if the “Oppenheimer of AI” role should live or not, by checking on the recent TikTok posts of some lipstick influencer, and by all these things in between my eyes-on-the-screen writing moments—back and forth. 

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Rising above the fragmented world of nonlinear time and swapped space is the Trinity Test, in an audio environment created from majestic music, then the deadly explosion, followed by silence—the most sobering moment. The silence of death speaks of the strongest emotion of Oppenheimer’s conflicted psyche. 

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From all perspectives, the film looked and felt like real life, which is the highest compliment I can give. Wait, is my newborn niece FaceTiming me? 
 

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Works Cited

Templeton, Patty. Plutonium and Poetry: Where Trinity and Oppenheimer’s Reading Habits Met. 14 July 2021, discover.lanl.gov/news/0714-oppenheimer-literature.