Even though the movie is full of complicated physics calculations, Nolan doesn’t get stuck on them. His method emphasizes that the bomb will be made scientifically, regardless of moral or philosophical discussions about what’s best for humanity. Matt Damon plays the rude Army General Leslie Groves, who asked Berkeley scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project after he said he wasn’t a communist. The weapons he contributed to creating were what brought about the end of World War II.
Who Oppenheimer was as a person
In “Oppenheimer,” which came out this year, “Interstellar” and “Inception” director Christopher Nolan tackles a childhood fear that wasn’t science fiction but was very real: the threat of a thermonuclear war and the end of humanity. The film is about the brilliant and charismatic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. Cillian Murphy plays him, and it shows his battle between morality and scientific progress.
Oppenheimer grew up in New York City as a member of the Ethical Culture Society, a branch of American Reform Judaism that focused on social justice and liberal humanism. In 1921, he was the best student in his high school class. However, he got dysentery and couldn’t go to Harvard. Instead, he had to go to New Mexico for a month to get better. After riding his horse through the Sangre de Christo and Jemez mountain ranges, he fell in love with the place.
Oppenheimer was the best person to lead the Manhattan Project because he was a natural manager and strategist. He was a careful man who always had a backup plan and could see everything that could go wrong.
The Government
When politics come into Nolan’s science-based stories, as they do here, it’s a scary warning that science isn’t just about finding things out; it also has a moral duty. When he was making the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer had to deal with a lot of moral problems that could have made him a hero or sent him to hell.
Oppenheimer was the son of German Jews, and during World War II, he was in charge of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. There, he worked with scientists like Isidor Isaac Rabi and Edward Teller to make nuclear bombs. He knew that the Nazis might get the bomb before the U.S. if the U.S. didn’t make it quickly.
Even after he makes the Little Boy and Fat Man gadgets, Oppenheimer has trouble figuring out what might happen because of them. Even though he has doubts, he can persuade President Truman to drop the bomb on Japan and save millions of lives. In the end, Oppenheimer became America’s conscience after the war. This is one of Downey’s best roles in years because he plays the part with ferocity and passion.
The Facts
Oppenheimer showed he was a good leader at Los Alamos. He was good at leading big groups, and the success of the Manhattan Project depended on his ability to explain complicated science in simple terms.
But he wasn’t the only one in the lab who found important things. Scientists like Niels Bohr and P.A.M. Dirac also helped figure out how nuclear fission works.
The atomic bomb was one of the best things that people ever did, but it was also one of the most risky things that people ever did. After World War II, the United States kept working hard to stop this strong new military technology from getting into the wrong hands.
The Stanford Report talked to Scott Sagan, a professor of political science at the University of California, about what he thought Nolan did well in the movie about the scientists’ desperate race to make the first nuclear bomb before Germany did. (There may be spoilers in this talk.)
The cost to people
One of the most interesting things about the movie is seeing how the Manhattan Project affected the experts’ private lives. Katherine (Kitty) Puening Harrison, who worked as a lab tech in Los Alamos and was Oppenheimer’s wife, and he had a confusing relationship. She didn’t like how hard the bomb project was and how much it took over their lives.
She also said that his political views and opinions were too far to the left. In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission took away his security clearance as part of a plan to stop communists from getting government jobs.
He was at odds with Matt Damon’s portrayal of General Leslie Groves, who oversaw the Manhattan Project, due to the removal of his clearance. He thought that it was important for scientists from different parts of the project to talk to each other at weekly meetings called colloquies. Oppenheimer didn’t win that battle. Here, he’s shown as a broken man. Years later, in a famous TV interview, he said, “I’ve become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Kitty, Florence Pugh gives a multi-layered performance that captures this feeling of loss and sorrow.
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