MOVIE NEWS – “We knew that the world would never be the same again. Some laughed. Some cried. Most people remained silent,” said theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in a 1965 TV interview about the event twenty years earlier, when the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated in the White Sands desert of New Mexico as part of the secret program called the Trinity Test.

Oppenheimer, who went down in history as one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, was not a PR specialist, yet he left behind a surprisingly large number of quotable sayings. “I was reminded of a scene from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad-gita. Vishnu wants to convince the prince to do what he has been tasked to do. To impress him, he assumes a many-armed form and says: I am Death, destroyer of worlds. I think, one way or another, we are all spellbound by this sentence.”

In 1939, President Roosevelt ordered research into how uranium could be used to make a weapon because intelligence indicated that the Nazis were trying to do the same. A team of scientists and generals was assembled and began working on the development of nuclear weapons. Work accelerated after America entered World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1943, Oppenheimer became the director of the Los Alamos laboratory, where the experimental atomic bomb was assembled, as well as, shortly after, those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Christopher Nolan, nominated for five Oscars, directed the first biographical film of his career about Oppenheimer, who has never worked with him when it came to cinema (Memento, Batman trilogy, Origins, Dunkirk, Tenet).

Who is in the movie? the question arises. Who doesn’t? asks Adam Starkey, New Musical Express critic. Nolan parades all the big guns, of course with his favorite actors at the forefront. Oppenheimer is played by Cillian Murphy, his wife is played by Emily Blunt, the commander of the military engineers is played by Matt Damon, the chairman of the nuclear energy commission is played by Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer’s lover, who was an activist of the Communist Party, was Florence Pugh. About a dozen or so other important actors strengthen the team, from Rami Malek to Gary Oldman, of whom it is not yet known what role they have been given.

Murphy told the Observer what attracted him to the character of Oppenheimer: that he was a controversial figure who could be compared to his co-star Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders with his bandit leader. “I can’t comment on the scientific aspect of the atomic bomb because I don’t have the intellectual capacity to grasp it, but I’m fascinated by such confusingly complicated characters. People are attracted to contradictory figures, because we all have a lot of incongruous things swirling around in our heads all the time.”

(Oppenheimer – domestic premiere: July 20, 2023)

Source: UIP