Movie Review: “Oppenheimer,” a brilliant, deep look into a complex man in complex times

It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it. – Robert E. Lee

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This quote appears time and again in movies such as “Patton.” Although it does not appear in Christopher Nolan’s new “Oppenheimer” movie, it could. War is terrible, and nuclear war is terrible as well. That’s the subtext of this movie, which chronicles Robert Oppenheimer’s life from his early graduate studies in quantum physics at European universities, through his founding of a quantum physics curriculum at the University of California at Berkeley, to his selection as the head of bomb development for the Manhattan Project, and on through his eventual professional destruction in the 1950s. Nolan manages to pack all of that in the 3-hour run of his movie, which gripped me from beginning to end.

Oppenheimer was clearly a genius. When he needed to speak to a gathering of physicists in the Netherlands about molecules, he taught himself to speak passable Dutch so that he could deliver the presentation in the native language. He learned Sanskrit so that he could read the “Bhagavad Gita” in its native language. He did the same for political treatises such as Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” in German. And, along the way, he mastered quantum physics well enough to teach it. Nolan’s movie portrays Oppenheimer the man in all of these aspects as a character-building exercise. It’s a part of the story, but not the main theme.

When General Leslie Groves comes to Berkeley to recruit Oppenheimer to be the director of the Manhattan Project’s bomb-development program, he tosses out many adjectives to describe Oppenheimer’s personality, all negative. Oppenheimer asks if “brilliant” shouldn’t be one of those adjectives. Groves replies that “brilliant” was a given. Without “brilliant,” they wouldn’t even be talking.

The middle part of the movie chronicles the work at Los Alamos to develop a working plutonium bomb. The movie’s not clear about this, but Los Alamos actually developed two different types of atomic bomb: a plutonium bomb and a uranium bomb. The plutonium bomb was far more complicated, but it was easier to refine plutonium than it was to separate enough uranium 235 from ore to have enough for a bomb. On the other hand, the uranium bomb was so simple in design that it wasn’t even tested before it was used. The movie simply chooses to focus on the plutonium bomb, which was tested in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Three weeks later, the United States dropped the 15-kiloton uranium bomb called Little Boy on Japan’s Hiroshima followed three days later with the dropping of the 21-kiloton plutonium bomb called Fat Man on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered the next day, by order of the Emperor.

At this point, two thirds into the movie, the focus shifts to Oppenheimer’s post-war life. Initially, he does quite well. He leaves Los Alamos to become the head of the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), adjacent to Princeton University. That’s where Einstein and many other leading scientists and mathematicians spent their time thinking great thoughts and exploring the theoretical reaches of the universe. Lewis Strauss invited Oppenheimer to become head of IAS. Strauss grew to dislike Oppenheimer, for many of those negative qualities cited by Leslie Groves, and became a permanent thorn in Oppenheimer’s side.

Here, the movie parts somewhat from the book that served as its main information text: “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. In the book, it’s clear that Strauss gradually decides to destroy Oppenheimer, for a variety of personal, petty, and policy differences. However, while the book provides circumstantial evidence to pin Oppenheimer’s fall on Strauss, the movie makes the connection explicitly and dramatically. By the time this happens, however, the movie has left no doubt in the audience’s mind, so the explicit connection merely reinforces the movie’s position.

In all, this is a very ambitious movie. It’s a psychological profile of Oppenheimer in myriad complexity. It’s a history of the development of the atomic bomb. It’s clearly got an anti-war bent, but that’s not hard to do when discussing nuclear war. The only outcome possible with nuclear war is significant destruction of human life, bordering on extinction.

Much will be made about the scientists at Los Alamos who objected to dropping the atomic bombs on the Japanese. After all, it was the Germans that the project was trying to beat to a weapon. The Germans surrendered before the bombs were ready, but the Japanese fought on. The loss of life at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrendous. War is horrendous, as stated in the Robert E Lee quote at the beginning of this review. The Bureau of Atomic Scientists estimates that between 110,000 and 210,000 people died from those two bombs. The movie makes it clear that Oppenheimer was haunted by these deaths for the rest of his life.

Three days of allied bombing in February 1945 killed approximately 25,000 people and nearly destroyed the entire town of Dresden, according to a German study. A month later, in a 2-night raid, allied firebombing of Tokyo killed 90,000 to 100,000 people, set large swaths of the city ablaze, and left more than one million people homeless. War is indeed terrible, and you don’t need atomic weapons to do that.

Consequently, there’s a subtext in this movie, one of many. Several scientists working on the Manhattan Project felt that they were the best people to decide how to use the atomic bomb because they had developed it and they understood the awesome power of atomic explosions better than everyone else. Their understanding of the power was indeed probably better. Their grasp of the wartime situation, their understanding of Japan’s preparedness to surrender, and their knowledge of the costs in terms of millions killed during a full-scale invasion of Japan was probably not nearly as good. In the movie, Oppenheimer states this. Scientists may develop a weapon, but they don’t control its use.

After the war, Oppenheimer tried to leverage the fearsome power of the atomic bomb to encourage peace talks. He wanted to see nuclear weapons cleared from the world’s weapons inventory. Instead, we got mutually assured destruction (MAD) and Oppenheimer lost his security clearance, nullifying the man’s influence in the atomic community and eliminating his official roadblocks to H-bomb development.

Oppenheimer failed in his quest to eliminate nuclear weapons and people like Lewis Strauss made it their mission to see him fail. The movie makes it clear that Strauss had plenty of help, especially from people like the physicist Edward Teller, who wanted to create thermonuclear weapons (H bombs) even before the atomic bomb had been developed. Christopher Nolan’s movie makes it clear that Teller stuck one of the many knives in Oppenheimer’s back and ensured his fall from grace. Teller’s reputation in the scientific community never recovered from this.

The US Secretary of Energy in the Biden administration nullified the 1954 decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance on December 16, 2022. This recognition of Oppenheimer’s loyalty and significant contributions to the security of the United States occurred more than half a century after Oppenheimer passed away, but at least it cleared his record from the vicious, toxic weeds planted by Strauss and his conspirators.

After three hours, Nolan’s movie finally ends. Some audience members have reported being so stunned that they needed a few minutes to gather themselves together before they left. I didn’t have that experience, but I do think the movie is a brilliant look at this period of history and of an extraordinary man.

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