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63. [Movie Review] Oppenheimer (2023): 'Now I Am Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.'

[Spoilers of course... if you're interested in watching the film]

My brother and I watched Oppenheimer (2023) together and we were driving to the theater and chatting and joking about the memes about the movie. We left with such a heavy heart- that was so intense.

I'm very glad that I got to see it on the big screen. To be honest, this is a movie that needed to be scene at the cinema. If I were at home watching this on the couch, it wouldn't have the same amount of impact and experience. Oppenheimer is a testament to Christopher Nolan's immense directing talent. He made a three hour movie mostly composed of dialogue with some science in it, and managed to make it super compelling throughout.

Cast

This movie was about Oppenheimer's story of his ego and quest for recognition of his brilliance leads him to becoming the father of the atomic bomb and to the unfolding of unimaginable horrors to which there are no true end. He is a Jewish man in the 1940s, under the impression that Nazi Germany is close to making a nuclear bomb. When the Manhattan project began, their whole research was all about making the bomb before the Germans did. Nazi Germany was committing genocide against Jewish people at an unprecedented and industrialized rate. The thought of a nuclear bomb in the hands of Nazis is terrifying, it's not hard to see why the Manhattan project would be appealing to a Jewish scientist, especially one with a large ego. Ego played a part, but the film really didn't touch hard on the fact that Oppenheimer was a Jewish scientist who had experienced antisemitism in his career at a time when Jews were being massacred in Europe (and elsewhere). They mentioned it a couple times, but I felt like main thing was truly the motivation that drove him to join this project and that he was so pressed hard on this.

In my personal perspective, I was a little worried how the film would handle the decision of what to do with the bomb. This is a very contentious topic from both American and Japanese point of views- but I thought that the film did okay with showing the different sides of this controversy, especially with the scene with Albert Einstein and Oppenheimer having an intense discussion about this. I guess, just taking a step back from the movie, there are some things that I do not necessarily agree with in WWII history. For example, the internment camps in the US was an American decision during time of war (there are many great stories archived by the Densho Digital Repository). On the other side, Japanese school curriculum largely glosses over the occupations of Taiwan, China, Korea and various Russian islands before the attack on Pearl Harbor; it essentially doesn’t teach the details of the previous war atrocities in the East Asia, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia, until Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

These are historical events that should be spoken about so that next generation can have an understanding about what history has led to and why we did these things and that we can learn from it. Unfortunately, some of this information is not really discussed and it makes me a little sad.

Back to the movie-

Oppenheimer was cinematically intense and pretty dense. This is an incredibly heavy concept to depict in an entertaining and sensitive way. If you strip it down, most of the movie was basically a bunch of guys talking in a room and it's very tense. Nolan uses a lot of loud and extreme approaches towards the sound in the film, like it's kind of a running engine or a ticking clock. There was an engine-like quality throughout the film. The only moment of silence was when they were testing the bomb. That countdown was the most intense sequence of that entire film- and it was very quiet. I held my breath throughout that whole ordeal because I knew the sound would be so scary. I could not have imagined what happened 1945, that was insane.

According to my short and sweet Letterboxd review, I was super tuned in to the science part, but not necessarily the political part. I was in over my head. I think I was too small-brained to understand why the were angry and talking around the table. I liked the bit where they were studying and having seminar at the universities, but when they were getting interrogated, I was a little confused throughout. I'd have to examine those scenes again.

My favorite scene was the end scene of Oppenheimer and Einstein realizing their worst fears about a bomb chain reaction destroying the world have come true is so chilling and terrifying.

~ the bomb.com,

<3 K

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