The dark clouds over ‘Oppenheimer’
Director Christopher Nolan is making a film about the father of the atomic bomb. It’s uncomfortably timely, says Boris Starling
‘INolan is pretty much singlehandedly flying the flag for films that are both intelligent and commercial
am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” That line, from the epic Hindu poem Bhagavad Gita, was what came to J Robert Oppenheimer’s mind as he watched the first ever successful test of an atomic bomb. It was April 1945 in the high desert of New Mexico, and Oppenheimer – director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs as part of the Manhattan Project – knew instinctively that the world would be changed for ever.
That his story is currently being filmed by Christopher Nolan is testament to our enduring fascination with nuclear warfare. That this is happening while Europe faces the prospect of nuclear weapons being deployed in anger for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki adds layers of relevance, piquancy and fear which Nolan could surely not have anticipated when he first agreed to do the project.
Nolan is among the most interesting and influential directors in Hollywood, one of a handful – and it really is only a handful – who can get massive projects greenlit simply by his involvement. His movies have made $5billion at the box office across multiple genres, including superheroes (The Dark Knight trilogy), thrillers (Insomnia, The Prestige) and science fiction (Interstellar, Inception).
In a world of tentpole franchise releases, it can sometimes seem as though he’s pretty much singlehandedly flying the flag for films that are both intelligent and commercial. At first glance, Oppenheimer fits this bill to a tee. Everything about the film is heavyweight. It’s based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus. Its cast includes Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer himself, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh and Rami Malek.
At least three major studios were interested in making it after Nolan’s long-term relationship with Warner Bros soured, and it’s a sign of Nolan’s clout that those chief executives – Jim Gianopulos of Paramount, Sony’s Tom Rothman and Donna Langley of Universal – went to see him at his home rather than asking him to come to their studios. Universal won out and appears to have granted most of Nolan’s demands, including total creative control and 20 per cent of gross box-office revenue.
It’s easy to see why Oppenheimer’s story should be cinema gold. He was a fascinating character: intense, brooding and fiercely intelligent, but also troubled and prone to depression and self-destructive tendencies. “I need physics more than I need friends,” he once told his brother, and certainly he was far from universally popular. As a young man at the University of Göttingen, where the New Yorker went to study in 1926, his fellow students threatened to boycott classes unless he stopped dominating seminars.
Like many charismatic men, he divided opinion. Some, particularly academic colleagues, dismissed him as a pretentious poser. But, as a professor at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, he inspired near hero-worship from many students, who would adopt his gait, speech patterns, mannerisms and propensity to read texts in the original language (his famous Bhagavad Gita reference tells only half the story: he had learnt Sanskrit and therefore recalled the original quote rather than the English translation).
Either way, he proved an inspired choice for the Manhattan Project. His fellow physicist Victor Weisskopf called him a director “in the real sense of the word. His uncanny speed in grasping the main points of any subject was a decisive factor.” Oppenheimer was also not a man to direct from his office. “He was present in the laboratory, or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived,” said Weisskopf. “It was his continuous and intense presence that produced a sense of direct participation in all of us.”
But, of course, creating something like a nuclear weapon is not merely a question of scientific skill or organisational aptitude: it also has profound moral consequences. Oppenheimer became so concerned about the ramifications of the bomb that he lobbied for international control of nuclear power to prevent an arms race: to such an extent, in fact, that many people in the US government and military considered him a troublemaker or even a traitor.
In a meeting with President Truman after the end of the war he said that he had “blood on my hands”, a remark which so infuriated Truman that he later snapped: “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.” In 1954, Oppenheimer had his security clearance revoked, effectively stripping him of any direct political influence.
Every scientist has to accept that they will not always be able to control how others use the results of their research and discovery, and this dichotomy will surely be at the heart of Oppenheimer. Even the title of the source book, American Prometheus, is a nod to this: Prometheus was, of course, the god who stole fire and gave it to humanity as a forerunner of knowledge, technology and civilisation. Mary Shelley gave her novel Frankenstein the subtitle “The Modern Prometheus”, a reference to the titular scientist unleashing a monster he could not control.
It is easy to see why this project attracted Nolan. But there is much riding on it for him too. His last movie, Tenet, barely broke even once marketing costs were accounted for, and received mixed critical reviews. The lacklustre figures can partly be explained by the pandemic – Tenet was released in the late summer of 2020, when many cinemas were still closed and many people reluctant to go to the ones that were open – but the reviews were unusually poor for a director who is usually feted by the critics.
While Nolan has proven form when it comes to the Second World War, with 2017’s Dunkirk grossing more than $500 million worldwide, that movie tapped into conventional tropes: an underdog triumph, individual acts of bravery, and the overarching narrative of good seeing off evil. Oppenheimer will, by its very nature, have few of these; the subject matter alone ensures that it will be a much more nuanced, murky and compromised story.
In that respect, and even given how much will happen in the world between now and the movie’s release in July 2023, Oppenheimer sounds like a perfect story for today. The prospect of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine is a throwback to the Cold War, when annihilation seemed a very realistic prospect.
Now it feels as though we are back here again. The Doomsday Clock, created in 1947 under the auspices of a board chaired by Oppenheimer himself and designed to show how close the world is to nuclear annihilation, currently stands at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been (although these days it also takes account of climate change and disruptive technologies).
Human progress cuts both ways, and our capacity to do things almost always outweighs our capacity to decide whether or not we should do them. Oppenheimer may be a story about a man of his time, but it is also very much a story for our times and for all time.