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.
The U.S. detonates an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in Micronesia in the first underwater test of the device.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images
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.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is responsible for a fundamental idea in the field of quantum chemistry.
AP Photo/John Rooney
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.
Packaging excavated radioactive materials at the Hanford site in Washington state.
USDOE
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.
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.
Cillian Murphy as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in ‘Oppenheimer.’
Universal Pictures
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.
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.
Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Nolan’s production.
Universal Pictures
The subject of the new Christoper Nolan film, Robert Oppenheimer, is often placed next to Albert Einstein as the 20th century’s most famous physicist.
Lise Meitner, in the front row, sits alongside many male colleagues at the Seventh Solvay Physics Conference in 1933.
Corbin Historical via Getty Images
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.
The Doomsday Clock has never before been as close to midnight as it is now. There is scant hope of it winding back on its 75th anniversary.
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