Oppenheimer is Not What it Could Have Been

Too much attention was on Strauss, a confusing character poorly acted by Robert Downey Jr.

Human flight was considered mysticism in 1902, then suddenly, science in 1903.

Just 36 years later, a 38 year old mad man asks for $23 billion today-equivalent cash to manifest the power of the sun from something less than a grain of sand.

The preposterous absurdity.

The basis? Some napkin math.

For thousands of years humans thought we could never fly, then we do and a few years later we bring the sun to earth. Who needs to fly to the fire in the sky when we can conjure it from our wits’ wrists?

Yet somehow this defining cataclysmic contrast was not captured by Nolan’s typically epic narrative. Instead the film gets lost in political clerk boy smirks, mutant Tony Stark Sherlock Holmes bumblings, inconsistent black&white grading, patronizing quantum physics lectures, and constant audience reminded distractions of “but the Russian’s did it!” that watered down the enormity of this unthinkable, unimaginable, inconceivable event.

Highlighting the prosecution that Oppenheimer went through was admirable, and potentially interesting, but the opportunity to portray politics as a shadow that looms over mushroom clouds is missed by Nolan’s artistic decision. The punch does not come. Instead he incongruently weaves in and out of the mundane stutterings of too many casted characters and their supporting sidekicks.

Oppenheimer is shown ostracized as a womanizer, but it should be because he believes in something far crazier than communism: Particle physics. This degrades the degeneracy of lunatic ideas that become real. The opposition he faced on his rise was far more quackdom than the slander that slid after he proved chalk powder could turn to bomb dust.

These men and women would have sounded like homeopathy patrons had they explained their theories to the public. “The way we build a bigger bomb is we take smaller and smaller pieces of metal rocks. Because everyone knows that to make things explode you use metal not flint.” Ingesting a speck of immunized duck for healing powers should sound less crazy than ‘give me $23B and in exchange I’ll spark an infinite energy machine, pinky promise no con here’s some voodoo math symbols that say its true’.

In a 3 hour cinematic event, we get two emotionally powerful scenes. The shame Oppenheimer feels when confessing to cheating on his wife, and the fear he has of all his colleagues being radiated to ash after becoming the destroyer of worlds.

But without embracing how deviant Oppenheimer’s theories were, we can never understand what it felt like to be the father of the atomic bomb.