I have been taking phone calls for a credit card company for more than 20 years. One consequence of my career is that people spend more money, pay more interest to my employer, and go deeper into debt. It would be naïve and childish to pretend that this isn’t partially my responsibility.
“Oppenheimer” is a movie about personal responsibility and guilt concerning a man who knew more about it than most. Cilian Murphy plays Robert Oppenheimer: a scientist of extraordinary genius, ego, and bad judgment.
As a student, he felt like he had to study in Europe because there were no theoretical physics professors in the United States. In an early example of his unique genius, we see young Oppenheimer teaching a class in Dutch – a language that he learned in six weeks just to give himself a challenge.
He returned to America to become the leading professor in the field of theoretical physics. His arrogance was not enough to keep the Army from enlisting Dr. Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer soured on war and became a vocal opponent of building the Hydrogen bomb. In 1954, a kangaroo court defamed him, revoked his Security Clearance, and effectively silenced him forever.
There’s something hugely important missing from “Oppenheimer.” Science!
Writer/director Christopher Nolan either thinks we are too dumb to understand scientific ideas or that we aren’t interested. So he leaves them out, quite conspicuously.
There is a scene early on where Oppenheimer meets Nils Bohr. We see the young student attend Bohr’s lecture. The next day, Bohr recognizes Oppenheimer. “You were at my lecture. You asked the only smart question.” Ahem! What was the smart question?!
The film reduces Robert Oppenheimer to a bomb-maker and occasional leftist womanizer. But he was more than that.
There isn’t a single mention of his world-changing Quantum Mechanics work with Max Born in the late 1920s. At the time no one had seen an atom or really proved their existence. But Oppenheimer was already exploring the relationship between the nucleus and electrons. I don’t fully understand it. It sure would have been neat if the film had taken a few minutes to explain it to us.
There is a moment of nerdy triumph in 1944 when our hero learns that Werner Heisenberg is planning on using heavy water instead of graphite for Germany’s atomic bomb. “He’s on the wrong track!” Oppenheimer exclaims.
Wow. Exciting! Would you mind telling us more details? How does graphite make the A-bomb work? That’s when it dawned on me: “Oppenheimer” doesn’t bother to explain how the atomic bomb was assembled or detonated.
Sigh. “Oppenheimer” has 45 minutes to spend on the Senate Confirmation Hearing of Lewis Strauss (who cares?) but almost no time to explore Dr. Oppenheimer’s scientific breakthroughs.
The only time the film has any focus is when it sticks to the topic of Oppenheimer’s crushing guilt after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He had been working on building the atomic bomb for four years. One consequence of his career was the sudden death of a hundred thousand people and the slow, hideous death of thousands more. It would have been naïve and childish to pretend that this was not partly his responsibility.
I have done a lot of drinking over the years to try to manage the guilt I feel about my job. “Oppenheimer” gives us a taste of the unrelenting torment that poor Robert Oppenheimer felt.