‘Oppenheimer’: Film retelling has promise

Here it comes again. Another telling of the story that placed New Mexico at the center of world history and the man who made it happen.

Only this time the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, which ushered in the age of nuclear weapons, laid the foundation for what is now Los Alamos National Laboratory and thereby greatly impacted Northern New Mexico, is about to be presented in a big-budget, star-studded summer blockbuster movie.

If you believe the hype in advance of the July 21 release of Oppenheimer, this one promises to outdo previous accounts of how a poetry-loving, charismatic physics professor from Berkeley gathered a group of brainy, dedicated scientists on a remote mesa above Santa Fe and engaged in a highstakes race with the Nazis to develop the most destructive weapon ever devised.

It will undoubtedly shine a brighter spotlight on our vicinity than the recent TV series Manh(A)ttan, which also filmed here. That fictionalized show, about how “flawed scientists and their families attempt to co-exist in a world where secrets and lies infiltrate every aspect of their lives,” premiered in 2014 and was canceled after two seasons.

Writer/director Christopher Nolan’s film is based on the 2005 book American Prometheus. Irish actor Cillian Murphy, who gained prominence for his role in the BBC period drama series Peaky Blinders, stars as the brilliant and complicated Oppenheimer.

It was Oppenheimer who convinced security-minded Gen. Leslie Groves to build a secret city at the site of the former Los Alamos Ranch School, a place the outdoorsy Oppenheimer knew well.

Groves, a hard-driving, get-it-done military man who was more chunky than hunky, is played by Matt Damon. In a previous attempt to make Groves more cinematic, the general was portrayed by Paul Newman in the 1989 flop Fat Man and Little Boy, for which producers spent more than $2 million to re-create 1940s Los Alamos on a set outside Durango, Mexico.

Numerous locals also were recruited for scenes filmed at various Manhattan Project-era buildings at Los Alamos, including the house where Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty raised their children during the bomb project.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Nolan said he made sure certain extras were real-world scientists. “We needed the crowd of extras to give reactions and improvise, and we were getting sort of

impromptu very educated speeches,” he said. “It was really fun to listen to. You’ve been on sets where you’ve got a lot of extras around, and they’re more or less thinking about lunch. These guys were thinking about the geopolitical implications of nuclear arms and knew a lot about it.”

Los Alamos County hopes the limelight from the movie draws more tourists. Promoters are getting help from the National Park Service, which oversees the Manhattan Project Historical Park. The agency offers a self-guided walking tour of Oppenheimer locations such as the Civilian Women’s Dormitory, Fuller Lodge and even the Lamy train station, which was the first stop for scientists and workers on their way to Los Alamos. (Their next stop was 109 E. Palace Ave. in Santa Fe, where anyone headed to the Hill had to get a pass from local gatekeeper, fixer and Oppenheimer assistant Dorothy McKibben.)

It will be interesting to see how the film captures the personality of Oppenheimer, a slender, chain-smoking 6-footer in a pork pie hat with high cheekbones and piercing blue eyes. One of his contemporaries during the intense Manhattan Project said Oppenheimer existed on “coffee, cigarettes and martinis.”

And how will the film handle issues surrounding the production of nuclear weapons? Biographers have said Oppenheimer agonized over the consequences of his work but had hoped that creating an atomic bomb could scare people enough that it might actually prevent another war. “This might convince everybody,” he wrote, “that the next war could be fatal.”

Due to his relationships with people who had joined the Communist Party during the Great Depression and the sensitivity of his mission, the proud and sometimes arrogant polymath was constantly under suspicion and surveillance. That, along with his opposition to development of the hydrogen bomb and his postwar attempts to promote arms restraint, helped lead to his undoing during the anti-communist hysteria in Washington of the 1950s.

He was never the same after he was notoriously stripped of his government security clearance. In an act seen as an apology, then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1963 presented Oppenheimer with the Fermi Award in a White House ceremony.

Four years later, the “father of the atomic bomb,” whose vices had included pipe smoking, died of throat cancer at age 52.

But he and his connection to New Mexico lives on books, documentaries and Hollywood movies.