The atomic bomb arose from the meeting, in the United States, of the most eminent physics minds of that time, led by Walter Oppenheimer, with the war needs of World War II. History could have placed on the shoulders of Oppenheimer, as leader of the project, the responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of deaths left behind by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. But it hasn’t been like that, or not at all. A paradox, one more, of the many presented by Christopher Nolan’s film, a great winner on the night of the 2024 Oscars with seven statuettes to its credit, including those for best film, director and original screenplay.
We are facing a complex film. Where space and time – especially time – is twisted for greater dramatic effect. A complete success at the global box office, with more than one billion euros in revenue. In its first part, it goes through what we could define as training cinema, that of Oppenheimer himself. To then metamorphose into a unique judicial film where, contrary to Nolan’s fame and his taste for spectacle, the close-up and the word prevail. Like the book by Bird and Sherwin, on which it is based, it explores the reverberations of the scientist’s life in the world of politics and science at that time, marked by the Cold War. Without forgetting the profound implications for all humanity that his contribution to the global arms race had.
Nolan draws a multifaceted portrait of a unique scientist. A character who walks the tightrope between reason and madness. Something that, in some way, also happens in science itself since Einstein and his theories of relativity. Without forgetting quantum mechanics, to which Oppenheimer, as a scientist, contributed with the first intuitions about black holes. That intriguing way of understanding physics where strict causality disappears to make way for purely mathematical intuitions; there where, paraphrasing Einstein himself, it seems that God is gambling what is left of reality, as we understood it, in the casino of uncertainty.
Oppenheimer, as a film, offers us a very different vision of the scientist from what cinema, in general, has accustomed us to. There is no need to go back to the times of the mad scientist stereotype. An eccentric, distant figure, or outright a villain determined to destroy the world. A colorful figure, in short, who would reach his culmination in Dr. Strangelove from Red Telephone? We fly to Moscow (1964), by Kubrick, where a “mad doctor” reigns, played with black humor by Peters Sellers.
Over time, the image of the scientist in cinema has evolved towards more nuanced and, to a certain extent, realistic portraits. At least more compassionate with the figure of the nature researcher. With titles, to name a few, such as A Beautiful Mind (2001), about the mathematician John Forbes Nash trapped in schizophrenia; Deciphering Enigma, about the tragic life of Alan Turing, or Hidden Figures (2016), about three African-American scientists – Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P.Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) – who worked at the NASA space agency in the early sixties, in the midst of the space race.
However, no film had until now drawn a profile of a scientist like Oppenheimer does, at the most dramatic confluence in history with science. A Promethean figure, it should be added. From what Oppenheimer has of Prometheus, by extracting a secret from the gods – in this case, the secret of atomic energy – he is capable of creating worlds or destroying them. Without forgetting either, as an obligatory reference, the figure of Faust, determined to sell his soul to the devil for knowledge and wisdom. Is Oppenheimer selling out to power? However, does he know how to manage that power to his advantage?
The figure of Oppenheimer, with his lights and shadows, as contradictory as he is fascinating, has helped Nolan get closer to a unique scientist and a singular moment in history. When humanity, with the deadly release of atomic energy, is aware for the first time of its ability to generate its own destruction.
