I can’t find a thread for Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER so here you go

so i watched “man who wasn’t there” again instead of this and i was thinking that if i did a story about mccarthyism i’d also put an idealistic, naive and curiously blank david byrne looking dude at the center, who just plows his way through fate on the strength of his convictions until he can’t anymore (i also finally watched eggers “northman”, lol, which is no more about mccarthyism than “man who wasn’t there” is)

i think oppenheimer himself gets blown out of proportion because if you make a movie about, say, fermi, you’re not really making a movie about america. all of his work at univ of chicago was a continuation of work from italy, with some of the same characters in the same roles!

it would be an immigrant story, like the godfather. it’s a great story - with the rise of fascism he and his small research group divvy up between axis and allies. there are some hair raising escapes, and there’s one weird young semi mystical physicist who maybe drowns at night when a boat sinks near gibraltar, or maybe he escaped to central american jungles, under an alias … but was never seen again!

and with the hat and his looks and time/life magazinems help oppenheimer was photogenic, not just recognizable but memorable (see also gandhi) in a way that resonated with usa wide open west cultural mythology bs … oh which brings me back to how much i really love “man who wasn’t there”, hopefully at least the b&w in this film looks as nice

also maybe nolan sucks but there’s still space for movies about mccarthyism, right? or did jack nicholson put that to rest w/ “a few good men”?

"i think oppenheimer himself gets blown out of proportion"

he was undoubtedly brilliant but only just a slightly a bigger dot than all of us are next to a big military warfare state that is reaching peak level.

one thing I heard was at first he thought he could do this project with a small bunch of physicists and unlimited dosh in a few months. But it proved you needed so many new departments building and so many different experts that the idea of nominating one person as the "architect of the nuclear bomb" seems ridic

as far as he could remember what Oppenheimer actually said was "well, guess that worked".

joss whedon's oppenheimer

the real tragedy was clearly Oppenheimer losing his security clearance

this is (or is related to / synecdoche for) the real tragedy tbf! hiroshima and nagasaki aren't tragedies; they're crimes. a tragedy looks like this:

There seemed to me to be an air of "if you're so smart, why couldn't you have seen this coming?"

(even the horrible bathos is a classic feature: i mean who rly cares how antigone and kreon feel about anything anyway? the city is surrounded by bodies)

i haven't seen this and have always been a nolan hater but i mean... i do like we-never-came-home-from-the-war! the-popular-front-betrayed! stuff (prob too easy a sell on it in fact) and then everyone keeps invoking the editing style of jfk so like... i should probably see it

yes the gradual building of the while town itself is an interesting story that gets a good treatment in those rhodes books and elsewhere … i find it fascinating because my mom grew up with white americans in one of those project towns. my grandfather was “lead geologist / native geotechnical engineer” for a california company doing a massive project in the iranian desert

yeah, a ufo hangar. you heard it hear first ppl

does this movie feature leo szilard prominently? he's the most central person in "making of the atomic bomb". that book is great for how it describes the rapid succession of scientific breakthroughs leading up to the bomb.

he's around in all the scientist crowd scenes, but his views and actions aren't strongly characterized

there’s a book called “the martians” about the great hungarian physicists (szilard is the voice of conscience figure from that group which also includes teller). i could have sworn that was a movie too but i guess not. the cold war is obviously prominent but that’s definitely got a wider scope than atom bomb stuff

i’m posting this because in general i agree that a lot of the people and their stories are a lot more interesting than both oppenheimer and the usa military’s ambitions

lots of biopics get made tbf

admittedly all things considered id rather they focused on the later years after he became dr manhattan but i guess nolan is using that known outcome as background to impregnate the "how did Oppenheimer become dr manhattan" aspect with foreboding like he did with his movie about joaquin phoenix becoming batman

To be fair, I think the argument for the tragedy in the last hour of the movie is less about him merely losing his security clearance, but that he lost it in the context of criticizing and urging caution. Whatever his mistakes were, and whatever his personal motivations were, there's at least some tragedy in the silencing of a voice of caution given the very dangerous nuclear arms race that happened next.

― fajita seas, Monday, 24 July 2023 6:24 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

True.

One other mild sticking point for me. I am not convinced Ben Safdie was the right man for his role and was distracted in most of his scenes. I kept thinking the scientist he was playing was sounding a lot like the character he played in Good Times, which was a funny thought in itself and gave some nice levity.
There were definitely some Safdie-esque “stress scenes” that went far beyond Nolan’s previous levels. Big fan of those

this was not a great film, I’m afraid

To be fair, Oppenheimer does seem like a faultless hero when you compare him to a vile sociopathic ghoul like Teller.

I have agreed to portray the first person ever to talk about someone's mom while doing the dozens. 'YoMommaHeimer' will be in theaters in January.

— George Wallace (@MrGeorgeWallace) July 24, 2023

maybe the saddest part of this movie was when they read from the hearing transcripts and it was less stilted than all the other dialogue

Oh no not this again.

Any means of forcing Japanese surrender would have killed incredible numbers of civilians, the guilty parties are the imperial officials who insisted on continuing a hopeless war.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 23, 2023

next day reflection is that my biggest disappointment in this is that Richard Feynman is reduced to a blink and you'll miss him bongo playing extra in the background.

I didn't realise he was meant to be Feynman. I only knew he must be someone because I recognized Jack Quaid.

i didn't know it was Jack Quaid. i wonder if there was more of him that didn't make the final edit?

the weirdest fact about jack quaid is that nobody ever references his innerspace remake from 1991

the weirdest fact about jack quaid is that nobody ever references his innerspace remake from 1991

the weirdest fact about jack quaid is that nobody ever references his innerspace remake from 1991

what's the weirdest fact about Jack Quaid?

he actually hates Billy Joel

Tell him about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNumdLhDV2M

is the "dropping of the bomb was necessary to save millions of lives" narrative still as prevalent as it once was?

I've always found it to be horseshit, but the Hiroshima thread on ILX was pretty mixed back in the day.

This film suffered from bloody horrible audio mixing. I hate this new thing in film and TV where you can hear every foot shuffle, every jacket lining, even people breathing, to the detriment of dialogue

Blame the Foley Artist Union

is the "dropping of the bomb was necessary to save millions of lives" narrative still as prevalent as it once was?

I've always found it to be horseshit, but the Hiroshima thread on ILX was pretty mixed back in the day.

I think even in the '90s, during the 50th anniversary coverage, America's mainstream was ambivalent at best, but maybe I was just selectively taking in the coverage

Admittedly my position was more emotional cos I'd read Hiroshima in school and was pretty shook by it

i would say the question is as controversial and unanswerable as ever.

the facts are the japanese (branches of military, imperial court, civil society) were themselves at odds with each other over the question of surrender. meanwhile publicly they are calling for collective fight to the death, and at this point even avowed pacifists and anti war activists are getting into kamikaze fighters (semi willingly) to defend the home islands. so like in real life, people's stated motivations and their actions are confused and contradictory. on the other side, you can't fault the allies for starting to ask whether it was really going to be foxhole combat on a thousand little islands for another six months. and yes there is also debate in the us govt about whether dropping the bomb is necessary and whether they should just test it on people either way, while they can.

so this is real murky stuff because even in retrospect it's not clear why they did what they did. in real life henry stimson finally "agrees" to dropping the bomb on the condition that 1) it's not on kyoto or other cultural landmark site (overruling the army) and 2) it's out of humanitarian necessity and to get ahead of an inevitable arms race, and NOT simply just to see how well it works in a real life use case ... and truman respects not just #1 but uh ... also #2? but what does that even mean, since it ends up looking no different?

Debates about the motivations of an event the killed hundreds of thousands of civilians indiscriminately always come off as a little misguided at best? I am Thomistic with my morality, believing that there is a balance between circumstances and intention when judging a moral decision. But this one? I think the gravity of the effect makes discussion of “intentions” shallow.

Just reminded me of another moment in the movie when my ears went red. When Stimson crosses Kyoto off the list and people in the cinema “laughed” at this moment. Maybe it was just the cinema crowd enjoying some gallows humour, but that was too much for me

Also xp otm about audio mixing. How does Nolan get away with it? I was more forgiving on this one because, you know, I was comparing it to Tenet.

today muscular liberalism is saying again, there are benefits to incinerating entire fucking cities!

uhhh the communists believe that too

When Stimson crosses Kyoto off the list and people in the cinema “laughed” at this moment. Maybe it was just the cinema crowd enjoying some gallows humour, but that was too much for me

this is just ignorance (and maybe bad filmmaking). stimson had lived in kyoto with his family and did not want to see it destroyed

do you guys have these thoughts about other parts of wwii also? they killed more ppl bombing dresden and tokyo (in one night!) than hiroshima

that’s two separate instances

of course I have thoughts about the fire bombing of civilians by the British and US in Germany and Japan - it was barbarism and mass murder and there should have been the strategists from bomber command and the US air force put on trail for crimes against humanity.

I was gonna say, do you know who you're posting to? lol (<3 calzino)

The laughing at the Kyoto comment was more on the crowd than the film, it wasn’t presented as a funny comment.
My opinions are not personal attacks on your positions the late great, I can appreciate what you are saying. But co-sign with Calzino. Just because the nazi’s/Japanese/communists were notthe good guys in that point of time, does not mean America gets to be by process of elimination. There are no winners in war, especially not innocent evaporates civilians. Woe to us who like the strategy room, make those lives part of a mathematical strategic equation by turning it into a trolly problem. Lives are worth more than that.

*evaporated

I visited Hiroshima maybe 7 years ago? Going to the peace memorial museum was an extremely emotional experience.

The only other time a history museum effected me in a similar way was when viewing a photo in Berlin’s topography of terror. It was a photo of German civilians being forced to look at a mass grave of concentration camp victims. The Germans are wailing in the photo while surrounded by US or USSR soldier.

The thing I try to keep in mind is how Grave of the Fireflies was based on massive 'regular' bombing of Kobe.

wait am i giving the impression i think the us were the good guys? and in any case, is that the message of the film? i didn’t see it but i thought the movie was unequivocal about the bomb being bad?

No you’re not giving that impression. The movie is about how Oppenheimer was a complex bloke, that he had a lot of grit and genius, that he was not particularly wise with his personal choices, and that he is haunted by his work and subsequently thrown away due being the weaker force in a U.S. policy battle regarding what to do with atomic power from here (curtail vs expansion).The movie is primarily about Oppenheimer, and only secondarily about the Bomb as it relates to Oppenheimer. The movie is no unequivocally about the bomb being bad

ok yeah, make sense. i’ve already deleted several posts on the topic of the atomic bomb for a similar reason - the posts were about wwii and not oppenheimer, i assume they are ultimately tangential to this thread about christopher nolan’s oppenheimer movie

I think Shaq would do a commercial for genocide if the check was on time

— Trill Withers (@TylerIAm) September 28, 2018

we're so close to this

uhhh sorry wrong thread