Oppenheimer

A film review by Bettina.

A few days ago I went to see Oppenheimer at its premiere here in Thailand.

Since I had lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for over 20 years, I was very familiar with ‘The Hill,’ or ‘Los Alamos,’ or ‘Mordor’, as friends who worked there used to call it. I also visited Hiroshima a few years ago; where a couple of friends of mine ran a peace centre.

In light of this background, I already knew about the history of the creation of the atomic bomb. I knew about the dangerous fallout during initial experiments; and we all have heard about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So I was very much looking forward to seeing the film… and I was not disappointed. It tells the story of the creation of the atom bomb, interwoven with Oppenheimer’s life story. Brilliant acting by Cillian Murphy and the rest of the cast! I was impressed, in particular by Robert Downey Jr., who plays Oppenheimer’s Nemesis, Lewis Strauss.

It is mighty difficult to tackle in a movie the enormity of nuclear power, or to bring physics across in an understandable way, but the writer and director, Christopher Nolan, has managed that pretty well. At some point he even quotes the Bhagavad Gita, as in “I am death,” which gives the script a spiritual nuance – very Plutonian. Did you know that Planet Pluto was only discovered in 1933? No wonder Pluto rules death, destruction and transformation!

Oppenheimer seems to have been a “Mensch” who questioned his own actions, and realized soon enough what it meant to have let the genie of nuclear energy out of the bottle. Not that any of the politicians of the time thanked him for his concerns; rather the opposite happened: he became a victim of the McCarthy witch hunts against left-wing individuals and was removed from political influence after Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, started a campaign against him.

The powers that be have for over 80 years held back on using atom bombs.

Now we are close to the danger of unleashing them again.

I just hope this film will be a wake-up call to remind us of the enormity of the danger to us all.