Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)

Poster

Looking forward to this and hoping Nolan can get back on track; I saw Tenet once in the cinema and have zero desire to see it again.

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Clever, live trailer where the countdown to release updates ...

https://youtu.be/hflCiNtY6MA

Nolan used actual planes to film the CIA hijacking scene by Bane in The Dark Knight Rises he is a method director plain and simple.

Full trailer has landed.

Looks and feels like a Nolan movie.

I'm assuming there will be some time-shift shenanigans (Flashbacks-within-flashbacks/flash-forwards etc) as the film is about Oppenheimer himself rather than just The Manhattan Project. So I'm assuming it will be framed around some points in the 50s (Trying to be vague here). But yeah, certainly more of a standard flow alright.

We all knew Nolan was going to attempt practical effects if at all possible. I have nothing against CGI but I do love when practical effects are used where possible: From Nolan to Del Toro. I'm assuming this will be done via (still massive) miniatures.

But please, Christopher. PLEASE dial-up the dialogue channel this time. I get it, you like that whole 70s Robert Altman dialogue-vibe. Where dialogue and background audio are all mixed for realism. But Tenet was basically indecipherable for much of its runtime. So dial back Zimmer just a smidge and dial up the dialogue. This has the potential to be really very good for Murphy but, as with Ryan Gosling's Neil Armstong, Oppenheiner wasn't exactly the most histrionic of people so it will be a slow burn. Not as flashy as some. Extremely INTERESTING, yes, but no Al-Pacino-arm-flapping.

Hmmmm, maybe they'll include Compartmentalization. I liked that part of the Manhattan TV series. Oppenheimer sounding like people are not knowing things could be related.. or just the wider world.

Looks like a poster for a feckin Marvel movie.

Cillian angling for a next Indiana Jones?

The sequel to A Quiet Place?

Don't think this one will be quiet!

new trailer

It looks good but you can kinda fill out the story in your head based on it.

Indiana Bones, maybe.

It looks like a Nolan movie. And that's enough to get me into the cinema - even if Tenet was underwhelming. Bonus, I think it's great to see Cillian landing a major leading role.

Might be an unpopular take, and I don't even know why, but I'd rather they cast someone other than Matt Damon here.

IIRC, Enrico Fermi was still jokingly offering odds on the notion of disastrously disrupting the atmosphere in the days leading up to the test, even after it had been discounted. One of the more amusing anecdotes. Less amusing, though admittedly and regrettably tongue in cheek, was the opinion voiced about reaching out to the Japanese and invite them to witness the initial test as opposed to using the weapon as a city-wide device (something that more and more of the team had significant concerns with, not to mention against Japan to begin with) - at that point there were still concerns that it might not work, and 'what would that demonstrate' - to which one of the scientists working with Oppenheimer suggested that 'they could just kill them if it failed' and the enemy would be none the wiser.

Been a while since I read American Prometheus, but it was a pretty fascinating biography, in which the actual test was decidedly low-key, bookended by the story of a fascinating individual. I'd imagine the film will obviously concentrate a significant amount on Los Alamos/Trinity, but you can obviously see from both trailers the black and white sections dealing with Strauss, the AEC, security clearance hearings etc. Be interesting to see how much story it invests in covering the doubts, concerns and objections. Well worth a read for anyone interested at all in the subject matter and the early stages of the nuclear arms race.

There is a whooooole lotta stuff that might be in the movie after the manhattan project, the communist stuff especially...

withdrawing his security clearance. and his interest in other parts of physics. family life.

Bingo

(and explained much better than my twee lines)

Oh yes, very much more a 'humanistic' view on the socialist spectrum, and in essence, even members of the American Communist Party became very disillusioned with what they were hearing from the Soviet Union leading up to the war and beyond, not to mention Oppenheimer himself, and what the world came to know as 'Communism' was very much at odds with his core beliefs.

In his early life, he strongly fell into workers rights, unions, donated to Spanish rebels fighting in Europe, led political debates among the scientific community along with other leading socialists, and, yes, ACP members. But the 'membership card-carrying security risk' that Strauss and such portrayed was very much a targeted character assassination. His powerful influence on the scientific fields and his concerns over the direction of the atomic world were marginalised, and its not even that long ago that the US Government finally overturned the findings of the commission and ruled it was a mistake to remove his security clearance, and posthumously apologised.

Teller is an interesting one, following a belief at odds with Oppenheimer's urging towards a policy of openness with the rest of the world with regard to atomic weapons. Even the likes of Szilard's belief of the need for atomic weapons to end war was tempered by an understanding to ban production or urge leaders and the military towards a more surgical approach to atomic warfare with tactical nuclear weapons used as weapons of war as opposed to city-busting blunt force instruments with Teller and such striving towards thermonuclear development.

What Oppenheimer, Bohr and various other scientists originally envisioned as a weapon which would end the war against the Nazis, which would in turn also lead to an end to all war. Adopting an open nature with other countries and sharing of knowledge would remove the fear of the technology and allow people to work together. Probably naive and showing some misunderstanding of the nature of humanity, which is part of a separate and much larger discussion, but then there are some that would argue that while we have lived under the threat of nuclear weapons, we haven't pushed the button. Yet.

Edit - actually only back in Dec re: the overturning of the AEC https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/17/j-robert-oppenheimer-atomic-bomb-security-clearance

I liked this one

who is the guy on the left?