The reviews in media of the film Oppenheimer have been largely positiveâand perceptive and thoughtful. With a few exceptions, most reviewers âgotâ the message of the film.
Oppenheimer is not a film in the mold of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the 1964 movie by Stanley Kubrick, an in-your-face cinematic presentation of the madness of nuclear war. It is not as direct as On the Beach, the 1959 Stanley Kramer film based on the Nevil Shute novel about World War IIIâs nuclear Armageddon, in which a US submarine crew and residents of Melbourne, Australia, await creeping death from radioactive fallout. Nor is it as straightforward as The Day After, the 1983 ABC-TV film that showed an estimated 100 million people the very personal results of nuclear war.
âTo embrace the bombâ
The film is about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the US physicist who helped develop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Manohla Dargis writes in her New York Times review (7/19/23), Christopher Nolan, who both directed and wrote Oppenheimer, âdoesnât restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes.â Rather, the horrific consequences of nuclear conflict are transmitted through the story of Oppenheimer himself, who was âtransformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.â
Citing French director François Truffaut, who once wrote that âwar films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive,â Dargis contends that this
gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls.
You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: âNow I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.â
âAs Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb,â Dargis writes. âNow we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.â
âUncomfortably timelyâ
The filmâs focus not just on a bloody decision made the better part of a century ago, but on the threat of annihilation facing humanity today, is made clear at its outset. A caption spread across the screen with an observation from Greek mythology: âPrometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.â
Ann Hornaday in her Washington Post review (7/19/23) relates:
As a filmmaker at the height of his powers, Nolan has used those prodigious skills not simply to amaze or spectacularize, but to plunge the audience into a chapter of history that might feel ancient, as he reminds us, but happened just yesterday. By making that story so beautiful, so elegantly crafted and compulsively watchable, he has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end.
Oppenheimer boldly posits that those arguments are still worth having, in a film of magnitude, profundity and dazzling artistry.
âOppenheimer Is an Uncomfortably Timely Tale of Destruction,â was the headline of the review by David Klion in the New Republic (7/21/23). He declares:
Oppenheimer turns out to be uncomfortably timely. At no point since the end of the Cold War has nuclear war felt more plausible, as the daily clashes between a nuclear-armed Russia and a NATO-backed Ukraine remind us. Beyond literal nuclear warfare, we are faced with a range of existential dangersâpandemics, climate change and perhaps artificial intelligenceâthat will be managed, or mismanaged, by small teams of scientific experts working in secret with little democratic accountability. The ideologies, affiliations and personalities of those experts are likely to leave their stamp on history, and not in ways they themselves would necessarily wish. Oppenheimerâs dark prophecy may yet be fulfilled.
A plug for nuclear power?
Now, there were several inexplicable reviews of Oppenheimer.
In his review in New Scientist (8/9/23), a London-based publication with an international circulation of 125,000, Simon Ings writes that Oppenheimer âwill help us embraceâ nuclear power, which, he claims, âby any objective measureâŠis safe and getting safer.â Ing somehow believes the film âisnât so much about J. Robert Oppenheimerâs development of the atomic bombâŠas it is about the paranoid turn history took [about nuclear power] in the wake of his triumph.â How he deduced this from Oppenheimer is indecipherable.
Then there was the review by Richard Brody in the New Yorker (7/26/23) that begins:
Leaving the theater after seeing Oppenheimer, I was tempted to call it a movie-length Wikipedia article. But after a look online, I realized I was giving Wikipedia too little creditâor Christopher Nolan, the movieâs writer and director, too much.
The New Yorker gave his piece the headline âOppenheimer Is Ultimately a History Channel Movie with Fancy Editing.â Considering the many highly emotional, engrossing scenesâincluding many personal ones involving Oppenheimerâthis makes no sense. It is far from a movie version of a Wikipedia posting or a History Channel docudrama.
Brody almost seems to scold Nolan for hoping to provoke discussion:
Rather than illuminating him or his times, the scenes seem pitched to spark post-screening debate, to seek an importance beyond the experiences and ideas of the characters.
âThe bombâs lingering residueâ
Justin Changâs review in the Los Angeles Times (7/19/23) would no doubt have irritated Brody by engaging in âpost-screening debate.â Nolan, Chang writes, is
less interested in reenacting scenes of mass death and devastation, none of which are depicted here, than in sifting through the bombâs lingering geopolitical and psychic residue.
Chang observes:
The real Oppenheimer may have never expressed remorse over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the movie never lets its Oppenheimer forget them, especially in one shuddering, blood-chilling sequence that transforms a public moment of triumph into an indictment.
Nor can Oppenheimer forget the still greater destruction that may yet be unleashed, a prospect that his typically naive and high-minded insistence on âinternational cooperationâ will do nothing to dispel. Nolan conveys that warning with somber gravity, if not, finally, the cathartic force that our current headlines, full of war and nuclear portent, would seem to demand. Not for the first time, the demonstrative cleverness of his storytelling can seem too precise, too hermetically sealed and engineered, for a sense of raw collective devastation to fully take hold.
Even Rupert Murdochâs arch-conservative New York Post (7/19/23) had a rave review. Critic Johnny Oleksinski declares:
What keeps all three hours of the film so breathlessly tense is the title physicistâs internal tug of war: Can the valiant quest for scientific advancementâhis great passionâlead to the total destruction of the planet?
A highly perilous time.â
To what extent did media either take advantage of or drop the ball on the opportunity the movie gave them to examine the pressing issue of nuclear war? My review of the reviews would conclude that most media didnât drop the ball, only a few didâand that to me is quite a surprise.
We are at a highly perilous time in regard to nuclear war. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1/24/23) moved its âDoomsday Clock,â which it says represents the risk of ânuclear annihilation,â forward to 90 seconds to midnightâthe closest itâs been since it was set up in 1947.
Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach and The Day After all came out decades ago.
Oppenheimer can provideâespecially with the (astonishing for me, long a media critic) widely positive media reactionâthe opening of a window that can help new generations of people learn about nuclear weapons, and move for an abolition that can prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
Source: Mltoday.com