Oppenheimer is a masterpiece

But, on the bright side, it was not a trial!

Being somewhat of a geek about that chapter in real history, to really reflect all of the creepy, bomb-related, cold war, cloak and dagger, nazi, communist, McCarthyist stuff that was going on, you'd need an 18 hour movie and that would be a brief introduction to the topic. The Bomb was the most important military project in history to that point and whoever got it first would win the war and control the fate of the world.

The USSR, the British, French, Japanese, Germans and possibly some other countries had projects, all going on in secrecy of course so nobody was talking about their progress, or in most cases, their lack of progress or resources. It took huge resources that, realistically only the US and the USSR could muster. The Germans were fortunately handicapped by their ideology. It's still scary to think of Stalin with Bombs. Hitler was not going to get one, but nobody knew that at the time. The movie minimizes the role of scientist Leo Szilard, the guy who conceptualized the bomb, but way before the war. He was a sort of Johnny Appleseed, who planted the idea around Europe, chatting in cafes. Nobody thought that making a bomb was realistic. I don't think Szilard even appears in the movie. I'd like to see more on Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), the guy who cracked the whip on a building full of guys interested in pure science. Groves understood the consequences of a bomb and his grouchiness kept the science guys on task.

A movie about that needs a grandiose film maker, Nolan coming to mind, but even Nolan's head would spin trying to tell the whole story. As far as it went, I thought it was awful damn good but I'm waiting for the other dozen movies on the subject. The historic image (standing in the post-bomb-test wasteland) is the inspiration for the book Fat Man and Little Boy. I would not want to be standing there.

Only Neil Breen could've made Oppenheimer better.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

He has several scenes, actually

And Oppenheimer was suppose to be smart? Good grief didn't anyone tell him about a little side effect of the gadget called radiation?

Nobody fully appreciated the risk at the time. They still thought that if you didn't get obvious radiation burns you were OK. The long term problem was not clear yet. This was all novel science. Ironically, you'd be a little bit safer at ground zero after a period of time then downwind where the fallout came down and you could inhale or ingest it. Ground zero was cooked to ten million degrees and the radiation somewhat diminished. NOTHING was left there.

Ironically, Oppenheimer died in his early 60's, a chain smoker with lung cancer.

Wow! That is very surprising. I guess it goes along with chain smoking is a good idea!

That makes sense, as also the blast would be symmetrical pushing the radiation out from the center.


That's sad, he could've contributed so much more.

I'll have to look for him next time.

This is the guy who plays him (without a beard in the film)

April Fools!

This post > other thread posts.

You just can't appreciate the simple beauty of a Nolan film.

You're just a bunch of snobs.

I have great appreciation for Nolan's near-minimalism but that Bomb story is so big, long and involved so many people and so much politics that trying to make it simple ends up not telling a big part of the story. The movie version neglects things like isotope separation (not simple at all but absolutely necessary), making a nuclear reactor (to make plutonium), keeping all of these huge activities secret and hopefully not igniting the earth's atmosphere (a fear but not a reality) when you do get a bomb.

Nolan did a Nolan movie, which is a good thing, but it's also like I said, that you really need a bunch of movies and I think even Nolan would lose focus doing that.

The CG looked fake!!!

OK, that's why I didn't see him. The real Szilard was less handsome, more geeky.

Yeah, but it's hard to get permission to detonate A Bombs on a movie set.

You do realize they used makeup for the movie? The actor doesn't look like that AT ALL in the movie, much closer to the real Szilard

Everything near the epicenter was incinerated, rose up to the stratosphere and fell somewhere downwind. Much of it was "hot".

I'd be curious to know what Oppenheimer might have done if he had not been dragged into the whole red-baiting, paranoid, McCarthyist thing. I have some distant family stories in that Robert's brother, Frank had some experience at Hopkins, in Baltimore and some of the old folks not related to me, when I was a kid, made statements like how "he was a communist, you know". There seemed to be some evil chemistry between being Jewish, smart, liberal in politics, a physicist and apparently also a communist in some minds. A lot of guys like them, who bristled at the idea that being too smart is dangerous, found themselves in that situation.