Oppenheimer will open July 21 exclusively in theaters and in IMAX. It will be the longest film of his career, clocking in at nearly three hours. And honestly, for me, that isn’t long enough, now having read 2/3rds of American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, the book upon which the script is based.
This is a big story to tell. It’s not just the story of Oppenheimer as the director for the Manhattan Project. His life was expansive in ways I am honestly not sure even exist in people anymore. He was as exceptional, if not more, than Einstein and he belongs in the pantheon with him and every other major scientist we remember and revere – like Galileo, Da Vinci, Darwin.
The deets:
Writer/Director – Christopher Nolan
Oppenheimer: Cillian Murphy
Truman: Gary Oldman
Kitty Oppenheimer: Emily Blunt
Jean Tatlock: Florence Pugh
Leslie Groves: Matt Damon
Robert Downey, Jr.: Lewis Strauss
Cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema
Score: Ludwig Göransson
Editing: Jennifer Lame
Production Design: Ruth De Jong
Costumes: Ellen Mirojnick
Cillian Murphy will be playing Oppie, with Matt Damon as Leslie Groves.
This is already an incredible year for film and something to be excited about. Between Oppenheimer – Christopher Nolan, Killers of the Flower Moon – Martin Scorsese, and The Killers – David Fincher it’s almost like we have great movies back. Two out of three of those are on streaming platforms (though will get theatrical release). Aiming at large canvas movies means we can have the best of both worlds.
Nolan is taking Oppenheimer to IMAX and will apparantly not show the nukes dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I think, but I don’t know). If so, I think that’s for the best. We’ll see the Trinity test explode — and that is enough.
Because dropping the bombs that ultimately ended World War II was such controversial decision, showing that kind of horror would be, I think, too overwhelming for audiences. It remains as controversial today as it did then, which is why we don’t see it discussed much. Similarly, the barbarism at the hands of greedy whites in Oklohama on the Osage Indians has been too shameful of a story to be told in any kind of major way.
The book American Prometheus takes us into the life of the brilliant Oppie whose active and curious mind had him learning multiple languages, reading every book he could get his hands on, his love life – fascinating unto itself. He was accused of “being a homosexual” by J. Edgar Hoover but the biographers insist that was Hoover’s paranoia – he doesn’t seem like a person who would rule out any kind of experimentation, though.
He has three major relationships with women – one is Jean Tatlock (beautiful, fascinating, probably gay, maybe murdered by the FBI for being a communist and them fearing her leaking Oppenheimer’s nuclear secrets to the soviets, or maybe kiling herself) who will be played by Florench Pugh, and his wife Kitty (mother of his two kids, one of whom also takes her own life eventually) played by Emily Blunt.
I kind of fell in love with Oppie while reading this book, I’m not gonna lie. He’s just so brilliant and charismatic, even just through the pages of the book and in the few interviews that remain. He has what the Talking Heads would call a “face with a view,” eyes that depict a depth of soul.
Though his curiosity and ambition to do something “important” brought him to Los Alamos to build a small city to build a big bomb, after the end of the war he told President Harry Truman, “I have blood on my hands.” Truman essentially wrote him off as a “crybaby” and commanded his staff never to let him near the White House.
When Oppie objected to the development of the Hydrogen Bomb (“The bomb, Dmitri. The hydrogen bomb.”) he was called to testify in the anti-communist hearings and had his security clearances revoked. They’d been tracking him as a suspected Communist for years but the mass hysteria reached its peak in the 1950s after the Soviets got the bomb and after the Rosenbergs were outed as Russian spies (then executed).
When Oppenheimer releases this July, it will be the 77th anniversary of the Trinity test, which was on July 16, 1945. They dropped the bomb on Japan the following month of August. It killed hundreds of thousands of people, though Oppie thought it would kill around 20,000.
Oppie and the other scientists believed they were building the bomb to stop Hitler. Oppie was Jewish and a victim of anti-semitism throughout his life and going after Hitler seemed justified. But after Germany surrendered, the decision was made to drop it on Japan since they refused to “unconditional surrender.” There is some disagreement in the book about that, though. Could they have warned them? Could they have demonstrated the power of the bomb to force them to surrender? The book even suggests that negotiations could have been made.
Oppie would spend much of the rest of his life trying, and failing, to find a way to eliminate the nuclear program entirely so such a tragedy could never occur – yet, here we are.
During World War II there was ongoing desperation to end the war before even more of our soldiers died. We’d already bombed so much of Japan by now, yet they kept coming, kept fighting because they wanted control of territory for economic reasons – not ideological ones. That meant, for them, they had to win. They attacked us first, and if you attack America first you’re going to get pounded.
When they dropped the bombs they aimed for areas that could cripple Japanese economy, but also those areas as yet untouched by the bomb, so they could measure its strength and destructiveness. It’s easy for us to look back and pretend we know what the right thing to do was – it’s a no-brainer to me. Don’t drop a nuke. But in the fog of war, it’s not easy to make the right decisions…
The result was that Oppie, a smart, sensitive scientists, was co-opted by the US military and opened a Pandora’s box. On the other hand, there’s a good chance someone else might have invented the bomb first.
I didn’t realize Oppenheimer was such an enigmatic figure until I read American Prometheus. A boy genius who could learn languages in a couple of weeks. He studied physics in Germany, graduated from Harvard, taught at some of the best universities, and lived the life of a bohemian in the 1930s.
Oppenheimer was the kind of guy who would take off on a long horseback journey, armed with only Vienna sausages, booze, and chocolate, and would ride for days and days, sometimes even in the pouring rain. Then he would sit by the fire and read DH Lawrence. I mean, COME ON. Just try to resist the man.
Back then, being a Communist was like being “woke.” They were “social justice warriors” who were concerned about equality and economic rights. Communism would become a dirty word much later, once it became clear the darker side of the ideology (see 1984, and
By the way, that trajectory – from the 1930s through the 1950s was the last “Fourth Turning.” We’re in another one now. Hold onto your butts.
As far as the Best Picture race, we have no idea how it will go but there are some things we can still be sure about. The first is this: the biggest and most important films this year will be directed by men, and probably many of them white, many of them heterosexual, all still a problem for Hollywood, even if half of the directing team of last year’s Best Picture winner was a white male. No one wants to say any of this out loud, but they don’t call it a Fourth Turning for nothing. I’m not going to lie to you, dear readers. I have to tell it like it is, no matter how much people want me to tell it like they want it to be.
The films that I would ordinarily see as Best Picture frontrunners would be:
Oppenheimer – Christopher Nolan
Killers of the Flower Moon – Martin Scorsese
The Killer – David Fincher
The Holdovers – Alexander Payne
Napoleon – Ridley Scott
Ferarri – Michael Mann
Poor Things – Yorgos Lanthimos
The Color Purple – Blitz the Ambassador (Samuel Bazawule)
Next Goal Wins – Taika Waititi
Maestro – Bradley Cooper
Pain Hustlers – David Yates
White Bird – Marc Forster
Leave the World Behind – Sam Esmail
Zone of Interest – Jonathan Glazer
Dune Part Two – Denis Villeneuve
Then we get to the higher profile films by women:
Barbie – Greta Gerwig
Past Lives – Celine Song
Saltburn – Emerald Fennell
Film Twitter does seem to drive the Best Picture race these days, and they seem to be 100% on board with Past Lives at the moment, according to the Queen of Film Twitter, Zoe Rose Bryant (no shade, it’s just the truth — she’s unseated Matt Neglia for the moment. Someday I want to write the definitive power list for Film Twitter but that day is not today):
As usual, it’s not the movies or the directors when it comes to what drives the awards race. It is how the movies reflect how the industry wants to be seen. And for the moment, how they want to be seen is as “good puritans” for their inclusivity utopia. That’s not a bad thing. It just is what it is. It used to revolve more around the Holocaust because the Academy was ruled (still) by the Greatest Generation. Then, when the boomers took over, it was about “important” movies, though the Holocaust and race relations still resonated, especially with the older voters.
Now, since the Academy opened the gates and invited many younger or international members in, things changed dramatically in terms of what they consider “important.” It’s hard to argue against the idea that identity matters more than anything else, and identity vis a vis the new reversed hierarchy of the internet. What does that mean? Well, the old hierarchy, driven by the free market and the ticket buying majority, was mostly controlled by THE PATRIARCHY. Specifically, the WHITE MALE PATRIARCHY. Even more specifically, the WHITE, MALE, HETERONORMATIVE, CIS-GENDERED PATRIARCHY.
The internet mostly reversed that hierarchy as Gen-Z came of age birthed from the loins of Tumblr circa 2012 and helicopter parents like me. What that means is that they feel good when anyone BUT the (see above) wins. A woman, a woman of color, a transgender person, someone who is disabled. And the list keeps getting longer. It’s basically anything but the majority in America.
I know this bothers people when I talk about it. I’m meant to say it’s all about inclusivity and progress, etc. And for them it really is. It isn’t just virtue signaling. This is something deeply felt, a religion of sorts, as we saw when Everything Everywhere All At Once won everything everywhere all at once. It was a kind of religious rapture. So when people are deciding what movie they think should win, they are judging it from inside that utopian bubble, as opposed to how it used to be decided: box office, alpha male prowess, who was King for a Day.
There’s no point in sugar coating what most people already realize about what the film industry and the Oscars have become. Not that it’s a bad thing. It just is what it is.
Thus, even if all of the movies this year are directed by (see bad thing above) that doesn’t mean they will be the frontrunners. If the Oscar race is micromanaged by the activist-driven Film Twitter, then we know how this is going to go. They will need “correct” winners, and when a white male is involved, in general, they will pick it apart and criticize it in a way they would never do with films directed by people at the top of the reversed hierarchy.
That said, I will do my best to mitigate some of that, where possible, meaning, I will go to war with Film Twitter if they, say, go after David Fincher. So we can pretty much have that drama to look forward to. Hey, we have to entertain ourselves somehow, right? Here, at the world’s end.