Christopher Nolan’s historical drama took home seven Oscars, but the film conspicuously avoids Oppenheimer’s intimate involvement in how his diabolical weapon was used – and where.
The success of ‘Oppenheimer’ at the Academy Awards presents an opportunity to think about critical criteria for viewing historical film — and what we are owed by historical filmmakers.
For all its praise, the film furthers the dominant narrative of the bombs as a morally fraught but necessary project, with American anxieties playing a starring role.
Alan Bollard, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
The Cold War was an economic standoff as well as an atomic one. The author of a new book describes the minds behind the great ideological battles on that 20th-century front line.
Remember building model molecules with balls and sticks in chemistry class? You have J. Robert Oppenheimer to thank for that, as a quantum chemist explains.
Nuclear weapons production and testing contaminated many sites across the US and exposed people unknowingly to radiation and toxic materials. Some have gone uncompensated for decades.
Lack of effective regulation means the risk of nuclear war is greater than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Other potentially existential military threats remain similarly uncontrolled.
Spying was a concern from the dawn of the nuclear age, but charges that J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the development of the first nuclear weapons, was a Soviet spy have been proved wrong.
As my seat shakes from the stereo effects, nobody in the nearly-full cinema flinches. The teenagers to my right are as used to explosions as J. Robert Oppenheimer himself.
The trailer for ‘Oppenheimer’ fails to include female physicists, which is indicative of a broader media trend that, if reversed, could lead to greater gender diversity in science.