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.
Christopher Nolan accepts the award for Best Director for ‘Oppenheimer’ during the Oscars on March 10, 2024, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif.
(AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
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.
Hopefully, Academy Award winners will be chosen because voters believed in the actors’ performances − not because of some meta narrative about their off-screen behavior.
Page from a 19th-century illustrated Sanskrit manuscript of the Bhagavad Gita.
British Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
What constitutes righteous action in the face of moral ambiguity and the inevitability of violence? This question is at the heart of The Bhagavad Gita.
The words Robert Oppenheimer quoted from the Gita, seen written in dust on part of a deactivated nuclear missile at the Pima Air & Space Museum.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
Oppenheimer’s knowledge of Sanskrit literature was more than cursory. He used quotes and parables from Sanskrit texts as a guide to right actions in his life.
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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer would go on to be called ‘father of the bomb.’
Bettmann via Getty Images
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.
Robert Oppenheimer (third from left front), Leslie Groves (middle), and other scientists and officers after the Trinity nuclear test in 1945.
US Army Signal Corps
The Christopher Nolan film ‘Oppenheimer’ is set to become a summer blockbuster. But one of the featured sites in the movie is a sobering reminder of the horror of nuclear war.
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Universal Pictures
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.
In the 1957 worldwide bestseller, Australia is – briefly – the last habitable place on earth, following a nuclear world war. One character asks, as they wait to die: ‘Why did all this happen to us?’