“Oppenheimer”: The Atomic Bomb’s Journey to Hollywood
Humanity, cinema, and the looming prospect of nuclear war
Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, Oppenheimer, is one of his greatest to date. It expertly explores the life of Robert Oppenheimer and the implications of his most impactful achievement: the invention of the atomic bomb. In many regards, it’s a film that’s long overdue.
There has been no shortage of movies and documentaries that depict World War II, but few modern films have portrayed the atomic bombs that ended it. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been largely spared from cinematic representation. And for those going into Oppenheimer hoping for a harrowing dive into those mushroom clouds that nearly brought the world to its knees, they’ll likely be disappointed.
The movie takes a measured approach and doesn’t attempt to glorify the bombs. It delves into the philosophical implications of atomic weaponry, but none of the physical. The impact craters and legions of horribly wounded civilians are never even shown.
The action CGI effects that so many have grown to expect of Hollywood films, and even of Nolan’s previous projects, are notably absent from Oppenheimer. In fact, the film features no CGI effects at all, relying instead on practical effects to achieve more visually impressive scenes.
Oppenheimer gives the atomic bomb all of the weight and import that it deserves. The film doesn’t attempt to make a spectacle out of it. It elicits sympathy toward Oppenheimer from the viewer but pulls no punches in its exploration of his moral accountability for all of those lives lost. The approach taken by Nolan could hardly have been more honest and restrained, and the first deployment of atomic weaponry against civilians is a subject that calls for it.
While before I wondered why that part of World War II hadn’t been explored in film as prolifically as so many other historical events, it’s beginning to grow clearer. Humanity continues teetering closer to the next nuclear war. To in any way bring to life that most heinous chapter of history could have branching implications for our present. Even in the sober approach that Nolan takes in Oppenheimer, I can’t help but fear for those who see in this cautionary tale a call to nuclear arms.
Nolan’s message about atomic weaponry could hardly be clearer. These weapons can level cities and competitively stockpiling them is one of the greatest threats to humanity. It’s in Oppenheimer’s depiction of the gravity of nuclear warfare, though, that I fear it could appeal to the very worst among us. For those who find in horrified news reports about shootings reasons to buy AR-15s themselves, I worry about what they might see in Oppenheimer.
Maybe my paranoia here is unfounded, but I can’t help but see in this movie’s astonishingly wide reach a slight cause for concern. It’s not all of us who have access to nuclear weaponry, of course, but neither is it the best-kept secret that those who seek power rarely do it for earnest reasons. And with weapons of mass destruction, it only takes one craven leader with one missile to launch our species into a spiral toward nuclear oblivion.
Unfortunately, planet Earth has a growing number of insane leaders, and nuclear capabilities only seem to be more and more easily attained as time goes on.
The ripple effects that a movie like Oppenheimer could leave might be grand. Cinema can stick with us, and the subtle ways that these sorts of movies could seep into our subconscious minds might be a real worry.
From A Clockwork Orange to The Catcher in the Rye to Fight Club, there a lot of movies and books that have inspired real-life imitators. Even Nolan’s own The Dark Knight Rises experienced a similar phenomenon when a midnight screening was shot up by someone allegedly inspired by the series antagonist, “The Joker.”
It’s always important to remember just how quickly the world can change and paradigms can shift. When atomic bombs were once considered impossible, so were the internet, cell phones, and semi-automatic weapons. If WMDs ever find a way into pockets, though, it doesn’t take a nuclear physicist to see our doom written in plain letters.
As it stands now, there are roughly 12,000 nuclear weapons on earth and it would only take a fraction of them to transform life on earth irreversibly. Since 1947, an uncoincidental two years after the dropping of the first atomic bombs, The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences has maintained a Doomsday Clock. On it, our species’ chances of reaching global catastrophe are represented by numbers on a clock. The closer we are to midnight, the closer we are to facing our demise. As of 2023, we’re only 90 seconds from midnight, the very closest that we’ve ever come.
As the battle between Russia and Ukraine rages on, and more and more countries are quietly building up their weapon capabilities, a nuclear war could lie just beyond the horizon. That we’ve managed to avoid it for this long was no given. The tension that’s been building behind the scenes since those first bombs fell could give way once again.
If ever another nuclear bomb should fall, I don’t think it will be at the hands of Christopher Nolan. If Oppenheimer hadn’t fathered the atomic bomb, there’s only another brilliant mind who would have. Similarly, if Nolan hadn’t made this movie, there’s only another director who would have attempted it.
And there’s every chance that they wouldn’t have given the subject the grim magnitude that it deserves. Maybe one of history’s darkest chapters would have been simply reduced to another Michael Bay movie, or a CGI-superhero extravaganza.
With the stakes of atomic warfare as impossibly high as they are, it’s a subject that demands we tread lightly. The weapon that ended World War II in one fell swoop isn’t anything to be glamourized or glorified, and Nolan embodies that understanding. It’s a weapon to be understood, but not one that should ever be experienced.
Since the very first wars, humans have tried to come up with weapons so advanced that they would eliminate the need for war entirely. The Gatling gun was hoped to bring an end to the brutality of war by shoving it directly into people’s faces. It was loftily hoped by Richard Gatling that the utter savagery of the weapon he’d created would make future wars less likely. Similar thinking went into the invention of dynamite. Its inventor, Alfred Nobel, still has peace awards given out in his name today.
But while neither invention brought an end to the likes of war, the arrival of the atomic bomb offered a glimpse into a weapon so terrible that the world nearly stopped turning. It was a line beyond which we’ve never gone since. It’s a line beyond which there’s little further to go. And though it’s a line we’ve flirted with for awhile, once we’ve crossed it there may never be any turning back.