We Have Become Death, Destroyers of Worlds
Barbenheimer Day 1: an Oppenheimer Review
please note: this review will have spoilers for the film. I warn before the specific spoilers in terms of cinematic choices, but if you don’t know what this film is about already I would suggest seeing it first.
When I was 13 years old, my middle school history teacher wheeled out the television and put on a video. The video was one that many people have seen, and that not nearly enough people have seen. This video showed first-hand footage of the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Charred shells of human beings, shadows of ash on brick walls, skin peeling off of the bodies of the living and the dying. As a jew, it’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly what moments in my life radicalized me, but this moment in my childhood would be very high up on that list. It’s something impossible to forget, and which no one should ever forget.
With all the press surrounding Oppenheimer’s release, I had high hopes for this film. Director Christopher Nolan seemed to be making it quite clear that he intended this work to be hard-hitting and cautionary, as any honest telling of the story of humanity’s greatest mistake should be. While I think he was successful in this endeavour, my honest opinion is that he did, in fact, pull some punches.
As a whole, the film is very likely Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece. It is beautifully shot, written, and edited. The sound editing and mixing were, I think, the champion of the entire piece and will deserve every award that the team receives. Robert Downey Jr. will likely get the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and Cillian Murphy may walk away with Best Actor as well. The final act of the film was near-flawless, and the final scene will go into my books as one of my favourite final scenes in a film. Stylistically, my only critique would be that I think it was half an hour too long. It spends far too much time on Oppenheimer’s personal life, and it takes quite some time before we even get to New Mexico where the bomb was made. More time should have been spent with the weight of what they were doing while they were doing it, rather than the majority of the weight being placed on the final act of the film. Oppenheimer’s personal life is insignificant, just as our personal lives are insignificant in the face of what this movie is actually all about: the existential horror that this team of scientists unleashed on the world and the consequences of their unbridled intellectual ambition.
It is this existential horror that is the beating pulse of this film, and which I have come to expect from this subject matter. I hold films such as these to the standard of the TV show Chernobyl, which depicted the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath (if you haven’t seen it, I cannot recommend it strongly enough). Like Chernobyl, I expect any piece of media about this subject to burn going down. It must hurt, it must horrify. It must be unbearable to watch and equally unbearable to pull your eyes away from because it is essential that we understand what we have done. We must, to remain empathetic and to remain scared, be constantly reminded. It is to this standard that I feel that Oppenheimer falls just short of greatness.
[SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT FORWARD]
There are two moments in which the film hints at the human story, the abject violence done to human beings by the machine of war. In one scene, Oppenheimer is giving a celebratory speech to the team of scientists, and in the middle of it experiences a traumatic aftershock, a vision of what was happening in Japan, happening right there in New Mexico to his crew. A woman in the crowd with peeling skin, a charcoal corpse he steps through, people crying, people vomiting, a scream and empty silence. It is effective, but it also only implies to an audience that is already in the know. If you know what is being represented here, you know that it’s a pale comparison to the reality. I wonder how effective it would be for those who don’t know.
In another scene, Oppenheimer is watching a slideshow of photographs from Japan, which are being described to him. He flinches and has to look away, but we the viewer never see the photos. At the risk of gaining an R rating, this is where I think the film fell just short of its purpose. In the wake of Barbenheimer fever, half of the people in their theatre seats would not have seen this film if not for the double-feature hype, and the greatest marketing success that this film achieved was not fighting but riding the Barbenheimer wave. I am not this film’s essential audience. The film’s essential audience is the people who haven’t seen the videos themselves, who may be somewhat detached from the reality of what our weapons are now far beyond capable of achieving. The purpose of films like Oppenheimer is to remind us, so remind us. Don’t cower away from showing exactly what you want to show. It has to hurt. Pain is how we remember not to get burned again.
As a whole, I would give this film an 8.5/10, an A- just short of becoming an A+. But I cannot in good conscience leave the review there without the following final points:
Journalist Alisa Lynn Valdés has been drawing attention on Twitter to a lie that has been told by this film, and by much of history: that the land that Los Alamos was built on was empty. It wasn’t empty, and the indigenous people who belonged to this land suffered tremendously from the nuclear fallout. Please do read the two linked tweets in this note for her full story.
This film, like every other film and television show, would be nothing without its actors and writers. These workers, essential to the entertainment industry, are currently striking for fair compensation for their work and to not be replaced by AI. Please support the strike, spread the word, and don’t be a scab.