In Oppenheimer, the pen is mightier than the bomb, even in the context of a three-hour biopic about the bomb’s father. Christopher Nolan’s summer movie adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is finally available to rent in the U.S. as of this week. Yet the movie’s single most effective scene, emotionally if not dramatically, hinges on the stroke of a pen and the mention of another country, where Oppenheimer won’t receive a theatrical release until 2024.
In this scene, Japan’s presence — felt but not seen in a room full of Irish and American actors — hints at a different kind of third act that could have developed if Nolan had chosen to open up the narrative to other perspectives. In an interview with Total Film earlier this year, he addressed Oppenheimer’s point-of-view, saying, “I wrote the script in the first person,” and, “The colour scenes are subjective; the black-and-white scenes are objective.” However, it ultimately feels like the black-and-white scenes just offer a second subjective viewpoint from another character.
For much of its runtime, Oppenheimer is riveting, but toward the end, as it gets caught up in courtroom drama and petty personal vendettas, it starts to feel like it’s so limited in its cultural perspective as to be almost myopic. Maybe that’s the point since it’s all about a man with supreme tunnel vision. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is focused so deeply on his scientific work that, until it gets away from him, he neglects to fully consider the collateral damage it might cause, or the damage he might cause in his relationships.
Japan in Oppenheimer (In Dialogue Only)
I could be wrong, but I don’t think Japan is even mentioned in Oppenheimer until around the 95-minute mark, when Oppenheimer declares, “Hitler’s dead, it’s true, but the Japanese fight on.” At this point, the movie’s already more than half over, and the nuclear arms race against the Nazis (Oppenheimer’s whole rationale for getting involved in the Manhattan Project in the first place) begins to casually shift targets.
A few minutes later, Chicago physicist Leo Szilard (Máté Haumann) approaches Oppenheimer about signing an anti-bomb petition and warns, “If we don’t act now, they’re going to use this thing against Japan.” This leads into a scene where Oppenheimer and other men in business attire and military uniforms sit in a room discussing A-bomb targets and deciding the fate of wholesale city populations. They do it as if they’re just having any other civil, bureaucratic discussion, and it’s the way of the world. Which it probably is.
By now, Oppenheimer, the gifted scientist, has effectively lost creative control of his work, and the wheels are in motion for the U.S. military to weaponize it however it sees fit. In a throwaway line, we’re told, “The firestorm in Tokyo killed 100,000 people, mostly civilians.” Like Hitler’s death, this is another major event that happens offscreen, but neither victory is enough to appease the military, which wants to make a big example of two other cities and thereby end the war, once and for all.
Oppenheimer couches his warnings about the A-bomb’s potential psychological impact in biblical language, likening it to “a pillar of fire” and “a terrible revelation of divine power.” The men in this room are playing God, but the conversation takes an even more chilling turn as the Secretary of War, William L. Stimson (James Remar), turns his attention to the list in his lap.
The Secretary of War’s Honeymoon in Kyoto
“We have a list of twelve cities to choose from,” Stimson tells the room. “Sorry, eleven. I’ve taken Kyoto off the list due to its cultural significance to the Japanese people. Also, my wife and I honeymooned there. It’s a magnificent city.”
These words, delivered with a bashful grin after Stimson has crossed the city name out and capped his pen, at once humanize the target and horrify the viewer. Kyoto is spared, and later, Oppenheimer hears about Hiroshima on the radio like everyone else. When confronted with slide projections showing the bomb’s long-term effects, it’s his facial reactions that we see, not the abstract victims.
“I feel that I have blood on my hands,” he confesses to President Harry S. Truman (Gary Oldman), who calls him a crybaby for his candor. This belies the full complexity of emotions that Murphy’s performance conveys, as if his Oppenheimer were just a man wracked with guilt over war crimes, and not also a man wrapped up in the trivial struggle to prevent his security clearance from being revoked. When the movie leans into the latter as drama, it somewhat diminishes the magnitude of its story.
One real-life atomic bomb fact that always stuck with me, after I edited signs for the Nagaoka War Damage Exhibit Hall in 2020, was that the city of Niigata, Japan, was originally on that list with Kyoto, being considered as a target for the bomb. As a result, it was spared any firebombing like Tokyo, and Nagaoka was the only city in Niigata Prefecture to be hit. The idea that such decisions could be made lightly, based on the whims of personal preference and someone’s honeymoon history (as we see in Oppenheimer), is incomprehensible.
According to MovieMaker, the Kyoto line in Oppenheimer was a bit of improvised historical conjecture. On an emotional level, however, it works, and for me as an audience member, the movie is never more engaging than when it allows the memory of Japan into the room.
Oppenheimer in Japan (In Real Life)
Some people might come out of Oppenheimer not knowing that he visited Japan in 1960 on a lecture tour. The movie doesn’t educate viewers on that fact, maybe because Nolan felt it wasn’t relevant to the story he was telling. In real life, while Oppenheimer never set foot in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, he did leave audiences in Tokyo and Osaka with quotes like this (via the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Library of Congress/Asahi Evening News):
“Even in pure science with no thought of practice, no weapons, no bombs, no immediate change in life, a great discovery is a source of terror. Nils Boor once said to me, 'When I have a great idea I am always close to suicide.’”
“The title of my lecture is ‘The Future of Civilization’, this was not quite my own doing. I do not use this phrase easily, for I am one of those who share with my many colleagues at home and here in Japan profound doubts of the very existence of a future.”
“The legend of the Tree of Knowledge, of Adam, and the legend of Prometheus—they both attest to the danger of going beyond the familiar compass of human life.”
It would have been interesting to see Nolan’s film explore some of this, even just briefly confronting Murphy’s character and the audience with the sight of Japanese people in post-war Tokyo (where Oppenheimer spoke at the Bunkyo Public Hall in 1960). Maybe Nolan could have worked it in toward the end where we see that one flash forward of an older, white-haired Oppenheimer receiving a medal at the White House in 1963.
As it is, the movie portrays Oppenheimer as the victim of a cabal of McCarthyist character assassins, and it’s almost hermetically sealed into its Eurocentric perspective while doing so. Nolan has received some criticism, even from fellow filmmakers, for eliding “what happened to the Japanese people,” as Spike Lee put it in an October interview with The Washington Post. Instead, he employs his usual non-linear, ticking-time-bomb bag of tricks in service of a narrative where the enormity of what Oppenheimer has unleashed on the world is sometimes less important than how that jeopardizes his personal reputation.
Pivoting to Strauss as the Villain
In its third act, Oppenheimer does this thing where it’s cross-cutting and ratcheting up the tension with the tick-tocking sound of Ludwig Göransson’s score, while Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) and Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) are both frothing at the mouth and bringing their cases against Oppenheimer to a climax in black-and-white and color, respectively. The intensity builds, and it’s played as a sequence of high drama, but Nolan is using the same tricks he would in a Batman movie to tell a much more insulated — sometimes sedentary — story where the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are never shown.
Strauss, who emerges late as the movie’s mustache-twirling antagonist, sneers: “J. Robert Oppenheimer, the martyr. I gave him exactly what he wanted. To be remembered for Trinity, not Hiroshima. Not Nagasaki.”
That dialogue almost lands like a meta confession or self-criticism from the screenwriter about how he handled Oppenheimer’s story. It’s as if Nolan, the writer-director, is subconsciously acknowledging the flaws of his film within the text itself.
Don’t get me wrong: Downey is good as Strauss. He’s already played an industrialist with a resentful streak in superhero films like Captain America: Civil War, and his performance here taps into that latent side of him as the wounded, would-be villain a little more. Throughout the movie, we see how Oppenheimer repeatedly condescends to Strauss and snubs him in ways subtle and not-so-subtle, with Göransson’s “A Lowly Shoe Salesman” adding a sad, tender note to their first encounter. Yet if Nolan meant for Strauss to be a true, three-dimensional character foil for Oppenheimer, maybe he shouldn’t have lumped him together prosaically with the bad guys at the end, showing him and other foes conspiring against Oppenheimer behind closed doors.
The way it’s staged makes it seem as though the movie comes down more on Oppenheimer’s side and wants us to root for him and against Strauss. It takes judgment of them at the end in almost black-and-white terms, much like the supposedly “objective” (really, subjective, grudge-holding) perspective Strauss offers. This reduces some of the nuance the film has built up between the two characters. While there may be a historical basis for the characterization of Strauss as vindictive, Oppenheimer arguably makes a miscalculation by highlighting that while ignoring a larger, more significant aspect of history.
To be blunt (no Emily Blunt pun intended), who gives a s**t about Oppenheimer’s precious security clearance? Maybe we’re not meant to be invested in that and it’s just intended as a framing device, an excuse to put him on trial. At a certain point, though, having that and Strauss in focus comes at the expense of what really matters, since the movie visually filters out the consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two places burned hardest by the fire of the gods that the “American Prometheus” stole and gave to man.
“I’ll bet the Japanese didn’t like it,” Oppenheimer says sheepishly at his post-bomb pep rally. “I just wish we had it in time to use against the Germans.”
Watching the Bomb Blast From Afar
Oppenheimer initially brought the theater of World War II to home media back on November 21, 2023. For the first four weeks, however, it was only available to buy, not rent, on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital platforms like Prime Video and the iTunes Store. While the movie still doesn’t have a release date in Japan yet, it’s been confirmed, as mentioned, that it’s coming to theaters here next year.
That wasn’t always a given considering the subject matter and the controversy over the cultural phenomenon of “Barbenheimer.” Cue the fan art of Margot Robbie’s living blonde Barbie doll, juxtaposed with Murphy’s no-nonsense protagonist in his ‘50s hat against a backdrop of atomic fire.
Leaving aside the obvious cultural insensitivities of such imagery on social media, I watched the Barbenheimer phenomenon play out from a great distance, like one of the guys in Oppenheimer, putting on his goggles to view the morning mushroom cloud across the desert. The mash-up images struck me, the American expat, as the epitome of a certain kind of cheery ignorance in the face of impending doom in my home country (where capitalism is king, maybe to the detriment of all else).
To paraphrase Nolan’s Inception, “What’s the most resilient parasite? Optimism. The American dream.” It’s a wonderful thing, that dream, but when it’s mixed with entitlement, it can also breed deep resentment if it goes unfulfilled and the Promised Land doesn’t live up to its promises. When you’ve got enough resentful people together, things like the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, happen.
Since Japan is over half a day ahead of the East Coast of the U.S., I woke up on my 40th birthday on January 7, 2021, to see the news about that. As horrifying as it was, there’s a part of me that, in hindsight, can understand how things might reach a boiling point like that in America, where people often grow up living the dream until it fails them. That same combustible mix of naivete and bitterness is something I’ve felt baked into my own creative projects and interpersonal relationships before.
The part of me that’s intrinsically doomed to dream despite harsh reality brings to mind that old music video for Modest Mouse’s “Float On.” If you haven’t seen it, the video gives visual expression to the phrase, “like sheep to the slaughter,” with pop-up-book-style sheep blinking stupidly as they await their deaths in the slaughterhouse.
Incidentally, said phrase has biblical roots, but President George Washington also used it, and it was later wrongly co-opted to imply Jewish passivity during the Holocaust (as if its victims let themselves be led like sheep to the gas chambers). That kind of philological devolution, the change in meaning, seems timelier than ever given the resurgence of antisemitism and the openly Hitlerian rhetoric of some U.S. presidential candidates. To say nothing of their musically inclined dinner guests, who continue to disappoint.
Oppenheimer himself was Jewish, of course. On the train in Europe, when a Yiddish-speaking colleague, Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz), asks Oppenheimer if he’s homesick, he follows it up with the question, “Ever get the feeling our kind isn’t entirely welcome here?” With opposition to the Israel–Hamas war only giving license to more hatred (on both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict), you have to wonder if some Jewish people in America aren’t asking themselves the same question these days about the country they call home.
The Ending of ‘Oppenheimer’ and Meaning of Its Final Lines
Although Nolan filmed Oppenheimer in IMAX and 65 mm and clearly meant for it to be seen on the big screen, I blind-bought it small back on November 21, since even without a VPN, I’m still able to connect to my stateside iTunes account. As I sat in Tokyo watching the movie that night, there came a moment where I had to pause it, take off my noise-canceling headphones, and look away from my laptop because of some nuclear saber-rattling on another nearby screen. It was the TV screen, which Azusa happened to be watching in our living room. North Korea was in the news again just then, firing another missile over the Japanese archipelago and forcing Okinawa’s citizens to take shelter.
In moments like that, it’s tempting to think the sky really is falling and humanity, with all its nukes and autocrats, has doomed itself to self-destruct in this generation or the next. The film industry seemed to be on the verge of imploding this year as well, with only the twin blockbusters of Barbie and Oppenheimer to prop it up before Hollywood’s working actors joined its writers on strike. Keep in mind that, before Jaws and Star Wars, “blockbusters” were originally a kind of World War II bomb, just like the one Oppenheimer helped invent.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, meanwhile, which Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein both contributed to in their lifetime, continues to update its Doomsday Clock online. It’s currently ticking away at 90 seconds to midnight, “a time of unprecedented danger,” as they call it. That’s the closest we’ve ever been to the doomsday hour.
It was only on my second viewing of Oppenheimer, with the urgency of these considerations swirling around in my head, that the film’s final portentous lines really clicked for me, meaning-wise. Earlier in the movie, we see how there was a fleeting moment where the scientists behind the atomic bomb feared it might ignite the earth’s atmosphere when detonated, turning our whole planet into a ball of fire. It turns out they were wrong in the short term, even though there was a “near zero” (yet not quite zero) chance it would happen.
At the end, Oppenheimer references that moment to Einstein (Tom Conti), saying, “Albert, when I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world?”
“I remember it well,” Einstein says. “What of it?”
Oppenheimer: “I believe we did.”
Historically, humanity survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though hundreds of thousands died in those cities. With these last words, however, and the final images of nukes firing through the clouds and flames engulfing the earth, Oppenheimer seems to write an epitaph for himself and humanity. The implication is that the chain reaction has already started and is happening even now. In the short term, we survived the proliferation of nukes, yes. But in the long term … well, who’s to say?
