Where’s it written a fella can’t change his mind?

Back when this beast was announced, I poured snark on the idea, as the art-house version of The Imitation Game, and because I’m heartily sick of films about WW2:

Additionally, and I think we’re all starting to feel this, the World War II well is feelin’ kinda dry. They’ve been making movies about it since it was happening. We’re 80 years in at this point. It’s the Harry Potter of wars. I wanted to see Fury, but never got around to it. I didn’t even bother with Sea Wolf, or whatever that navy movie with Tom Hanks was called. Roland Emmerich’s Midway? Heard it was good, haven’t bothered. I’ve seen these battles fought so many times under so many directions. I recognize that it’s the conflict that made the world we live in. But I’m really tired of mining it for drama. The further it passes from living memory, the more it becomes captured by the ideological constructs of today, and the less real it becomes. War – a thing endemic to human existence – needs a fresher vision than two hours of tinkering with math to become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.

“Christopher Nolan is Making a Movie About Robert Oppenheimer, and Variety Wants Me to Care” – contentblues.com

But circumstances convened to allow me to see Oppenheimer last night, at a theater full of women dressed in pink to see Barbie, which was amusing. I sat through all three hours of it. I’m glad I did.

My problem was that I had presumed what Nolan’s take on the film was going to be – two hours of tinkering with the math to make the Hiroshima Bomb, with some jibber jabber on either side. I was pleased to be wrong. As the film points out to us, Oppenheimer wasn’t that good at math. He was an idea man, an organizer. The film becomes less about Oppenheimer himself – although you learn a lot about him – than about the world that made the Bomb, the world that both celebrated and mistrusted the man that had the job.

If the movie has a theme, that theme is Chain Reaction. There is no moment when anyone says “Hey, you know what we could do with atomic fission? We could make a huge honkin’ bomb with it!” The idea is already there, latent and obvious in the reality of nuclear fission. And nuclear fission is latent in the idea of atoms having nuclei, of radioactivity itself. Oppenheimer and Heisenberg and everyone else is presented as having simply followed the steps that Einstein laid out. Once man discovered these things, he was bound to pick them apart, and in an age of brutal, mechanized warfare, he was bound to weaponize them. The only question is who would do it first.

In the end, it was the Manhattan Project, as led by Robert Oppenheimer, who was, we discover, a man equally driven by the realities of his time. He was not a Communist, but as a New Deal Democrat academic, he could hardly avoid having social relationships with Communists. He was not a soldier, but he understood the military necessity of the Bomb, and drove himself to complete it, even as it terrified him. He was not a politician, but his scientific work was of immense geopolitical significance, and he was forced to bow to the political winds of the time.

And within all of this, he was a man, who had a family, a difficult marriage, affairs both tempestuous and banal. He is a sympathetic character, but, the movie tells us, it is up to us to decide if he was a good man.

The film tells us all this through a non-linear progression, a series of events centered around political hearings, depositions and accusations and cross-examinations. The work at Los Alamos is fleshed out and given life, but always broken up by cruelties, accusations, difficulties. There is no peace in the mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and he is beleaguered as he delivers the Death of the Old World.

On a more technical note, I have heard people complain about the scoring of the film, and the sound being wrong. There is a plethora of music, and I’m not sure if the sound mixing was optimized for the theater experience. Sometimes one has a hard time following every last line of dialogue. It didn’t ruin my viewing experience, but I can understand why it did for others. This is a flaw to be acknowledged.

Other than that, I take back what I earlier said about Christopher Nolan. While this film indeed treats upon themes of perception and reality, it does so in a unique and fresh way, that is unrelated to Memento or Inception. In Oppenheimer, perception is a weapon, and used to drive wars and vendettas. A useful and truthful meditation, and I’m glad people are embracing it.