2023 was the year the “Heimerheimer” phenomenon swept the globe. Remember? We all went to theaters and watched a double bill of Oppenheimer (2023) and Oppenheimer (2023), back-to-back. Heimerheimer was less fun than I’d expected. The two movies were extremely alike and it felt like six hours of the same thing. And while I don’t like to dabble in conspiracy theories, it’s odd that Oppenheimer (2023) and Oppenheimer (2023) both have the same production and distribution company. I smell a rat. It crawled into my walls and died. I called a contractor but he said he’d have to take down the entire wall to remove the rat and I said “no”.
Oppenheimer is a movie-shaped thing, not a movie. It has scenes and actors and dialog. It is not a movie. It lies flat on the screen, cerebral and unengaging, a filmed Wikipedia biography, a bullet point list of facts and events that aren’t emotionally explored but only noted. The film has a striking deadness. It contains four or five of the ten most important events of the 20th century, so why was I struggling to care, or understand? How do you make huge explosions boring? Despite its movie-parts, a spiritual “movieness” is simply missing from Oppenheimer, just as sirloin steak power-blended to gray paste has the same molecules as before, but isn’t sirloin steak.
It’s a character study of Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist credited with the invention of the atomic bomb. He is a hinge of history. Before him, the planet shaped us. After him, we shape the planet. No previous man or nation had the power to end our race, but afterward, many did (and do). He is Hephaestus, King Weaponmaker, burning his immortal essence atom-deep on everything. Trinity was the first of over five hundred above-ground tests, which (by 1963) had released the equivalent of 440 million tons of TNT into the atmosphere. Fission fallout from these tests means every gram of new metal is now faintly tinged with radiation (for zero-rad applications in science and medicines, we salvage pre-1945 metal from scuttled battleships). Humanity might die, but so long as there’s iron ore in the ground, Oppenheimer will live, the last of us.
It’s a dark legacy to have. Every blacksmith in history has had to contend with the fact that the thing they’re forging—an axe-head or a mace or a spear-tip—might someday end up buried in someone’s skull. Oppenheimer didn’t get a “might” or even a “someday”: his weapon was ripped from his grasp, still hotly glowing from the forge, and used immediately and horribly and repeatedly. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been necessary to avoid a bloody ground invasion, and Oppenheimer was compelled by circumstances beyond his control, but he was still tortured by guilt over what he’d done, particularly as bomb yields continued to grow.
I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent. (…) He thinks that the mishandling of the situation at Potsdam has prepared the way for the eventual slaughter of tens of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of innocent people. The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.
Diary of Henry Wallace, US Secretary of Commerce
But is a “guilt consciousness” penance enough for Oppenheimer? As the War Nerd once said, if you build a nuke and say “sorry”, history does not remember the “sorry”.
His success as director of the US Army’s Los Alamos Laboratory was matched—and marred—by a slow ostracism from those same halls of power. He was marginalized by the United States Atomic Energy Commission, and in 1954 had his Q-level security clearance revoked for petty reasons. As a European-educated intellectual with an unpalatable “culture fit” for the McCarthyist 1950s, he languished under a red cloud of suspicion. Despite many attempts to repair his reputation (he gained a late ally in John Fitzgerald Kennedy) Oppenheimer finally died in 1967 with little influence on US arms policy. He was not a fighter and never fired a gun in anger, but Oppenheimer’s story weirdly tracks with those schlocky Vietnam-era “veteren coming home” films like Combat Shock or Rambo: First Blood. A soldier serves his country, but then his country no longer needs him and he’s thrown out with the trash. As a historical figure, Oppenheimer is large yet small. He thought he was the destroyer of worlds, but the world destroyed him.
Nolan’s film takes the standard line (found in Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin’s American Prometheus) that Oppenheimer was a talented physicist but a clod-footed politician, and that he was outmaneuvered by enemies who wanted to destroy him. It depicts his early years, and his appointment to head of the Manhattan project, and ends with the disastrous 1954 hearing that led to the loss of his clearance. The bulk of the movie is not spent on the Manhattan Project, but in what’s basically a courtroom drama. He has to contend with the Red Scare, prompted by past dalliances with “liberal” student politics, as well as relationships with two former Communist Party members. He locks horns with Atomic Energy Commission member Lewis Strauss, who apparently has a personal hatred of him. This is the movie’s crux and climax: people sitting in chairs, asking Oppenheimer if he’s a communist. Over and over.
Unlike most Nolan films (where it’s difficult to say what’s wrong, just that they don’t work), Oppenheimer has large and specific problems.
It has a naked lady in it. That’s problem #1. I spent most of Heimerheimer drowning in my own projectile vomit. Was it really necessary that we see Florence Pugh’s tits? For that matter, was it really necessary that we see the bomb explode? Was it really necessary that the screenplay be typed in 12 pt. Courier? Was it really necessary that Christopher Nolan direct the movie (instead of, say, Neil Breen), that Cillian Murphy star in it (instead of, say, Donald Trump Jr), or that Hans Zimmer write the score (instead of, say, noted New York drill chanteuse Ice Spice)? Was it really necessary that the runtime be 180 minutes instead of 180 seconds or 180 years? Was it really necessary for any of us to be born? I’m just asking: was it really necessary?
Second, we don’t care about the main story. As issues go, it’s not that interesting whether Oppenheimer’s Q-level security clearance will be renewed: this is a fussy and bureaucratic note to end on, particularly after the epic backdrop of World War II and Trinity.
I think Nolan must have written a screenplay around Oppenheimer’s hearing, realized it was a bit dry, and sexed up the script with bomb test footage and “I am become death” etc. But this instead of strengthening the character drama, it weakens it, since the Los Alamos scenes are vastly more compelling than the “poor man’s Aaron Sorkin” procedural drama at the end, causing the movie to sputter out anticlimactically. The flash of the bomb blinds us thematically as well as literally. Once we’ve seen Trinity rip the sky in half through the desert bunker’s Spectrographs, Nolan’s character study seems even more drab and flat.
You know what would help? If I had any sort of emotional investment in the outcome of the hearing. I repeatedly asked myself “what do I want to happen here? Do I want Oppie to get his security clearance? What consequences would that have?” I wasn’t sure. I was watching a game play when I hadn’t put down any chips on the table.
Yes, Oppenheimer expresses remorse for his role in building the bomb. We sense that he’s a few existential crises away from becoming a peacenik, an anti-nuke activist, and that maybe wouldn’t be the worst man to have steering nuclear policy. Theoretically, we should be in his corner.
But Oppenheimer has been thoroughly undermined by the script at this point. He’s conflicted and confused and indecisive and emotionally compromised: we simply don’t believe he can make steely-eyed strategic decisions anymore. He is manifestly unfit to lead. And the story is based on history, so we already know that things work out fine with Oppenheimer in the passenger’s seat. That’s another problem: although we understand Oppenheimer’s fear of the coming years, we do not share it.
Oppenheimer was not owed a hand in 1950s nuclear policy, just because of Los Alamos. The world had changed. War itself was unrecognizable. Oppenheimer’s dark baby had matured into twisted new deathforms he could neither foretell nor recognize: Teller–Ulam multi-stage bombs, yields in the tens of megatons, Ivy Mike and Castle Bravo, blasts so huge that they melted the anti-rad paint off the planes that dropped the bombs, everything caught between a Scylla of détente and Charybdis of mutually assured destruction. Maybe he didn’t deserve to lose his clearance. But by 1954, it’s also unclear that he still deserved to have it.
A common alt-history nerd-snipe: what would Chinggis Khan (or Alexander the Great, or…) do if transported to the modern age? Honestly, I think the answer’s “not much”. Temujin was brilliant, but his skillset was contextual to the world he lived in. He would quite probably fail miserably in command of the Pacific Theater, just as Admiral Raymond A. Spruance would probably also fail if appointed khan at a 12th century Mongol kurultai. Great men are suited to their years. The film itself admits this, such as in the scene when Oppenheimer and his mentor-turned-enemy Lewis Krauss watch Albert Einstein out on the grass, diminished by age and distance to a puff of white hair.
STRAUSS: The greatest scientific mind of our time?
OPPENHEIMER: Of his time. Einstein published his Theory of Relativity more than forty years ago
As it stands, the who’s-who of famous “Martian” physicists also falls flat, as we don’t know what any of them are doing or contributing to the project. Particularly, Nolan keeps us at arm’s length from the Trinity bombs, as though he’s scared we might leak schematics to the Russian. We don’t know how they work, and they might as well be magical artifacts in a fantasy movie. When we see the Gadget assembled, it’s creepy and weird. It looks like a large crab hauled out of a black ocean. But what happens if one of those wires is misplaced? Who solders and crimps them into place.
The usual “Nolanisms” undermine the film. Too much exposition. Weak characters. Over and over, he introduces a famous physicist by having someone explain that they’re a famous physicist. We’re told that Oppenheimer is homesick, but don’t feel it. Richard Feynman was among the most vividly colorful figures in history, but to Nolan, he’s a guy who played the bongos.
It’s full of historical events (too many, they whirl across the screen in a zoetrope’s manic flicker) but as I’ve said, it doesn’t get under their skin. We see what happens, but not the why. Early in the movie, Oppenheimer poisons Nils Bohr’s apple, only to chicken out and warn Bohr before he takes a bite. Why does he do any of that? I don’t know. Nowhere else in the movie does he seem like a prankster.
Lewis Krauss hates Oppenheimer, it seems, because of an incident that happened when they were younger. Oppenheimer was talking to Einstein, Lewis Krauss tried to join the conversation too, and Einstein rudely rebuffed him. Krauss believes Oppenheimer was trash-talking him to Einstein. At the end of the movie, we flash back to the conversation, which of course had nothing to do with Krauss (it was about physics): the grudge was always hollow. But this leaves the mystery of why Einstein didn’t like Krauss unresolved.
Speaking of physics, there’s a distinct lack of it in the film. This reflects a failure of nerve on Nolan’s part: a belief that the audience won’t be able to handle talk of nondimensional pressure analysis and polonium-beryllium sequencing. As anyone who’s spent two hours sucked into a Youtube video about Billy Mitchell—and been entranced by detailed descriptions of circuitry diagrams in Donkey Kong arcade machines—this fear is hollow. Technical details don’t hurt human stories, so long as you have an eye for what matters. They actually help. They anchor the character work in rich soil. There are ways to make this stuff interesting. Nolan didn’t try.
There’s craft and artistry on display. Nolan’s jumps through time are well handled, stitching a macrame of cause and effect that is gradually exposed before our eyes. Nolan also delineates “objective” scenes (such as Strauss giving testimony) from “subjective” scenes (that we see through Oppenheimer’s eyes) with color grading. The first are black and white. The second are in lush color. Hallucinations are dragged into the movie, and they’re like a breath of fresh air against the stuffiness of history. So, yes, there are a few things I liked. Nolan could have gone a lot further with these elements.
The strongest defense you can mount for Oppenheimer’s defense is that it’s not a product. It was clearly made with the desire to create something great. But this is also one of the sticks you can use to beat it with. Nolan has the skills and desire to create good movies: so why does he fail? At his best, he directs like a man with an English literature degree. At his worst, he directs like a man who wants you to know he has an English literature degree: all surface and artifice and games and no feeling.
I’ve seen complaints that the film doesn’t actually depict the final fruit of Oppenheimer’s work: the bombs falling on Japan. But that’s the point of Oppenheimer’s story: he doesn’t have to look. He’s a scientist who is protected against reality, and the most emotionally powerful point of the film comes when he hallucinates a white flash ripping through a hall of Americans, vaporizing their flesh. This is the first time he emotionally digests the consequences of what he’s creating.
Oppenheimer was powerful, but he was, in the end, a servant of his art. Maybe that’s the reason for his political destruction: because the US government needed a spiritual fall guy: a sacrificial lamb. Maybe I’m reading too far into things I don’t understand, but here’s a post I read on a forum once:
[…] In the past I had a job as a quality assurance inspector. I realized very soon after I started doing the job that a machine could easily do my job with less errors and for less then I was being paid so I wondered “Why do they pay for a human to do this job?” My conclusion was that if a machine makes a mistake as it is bound to do eventually they can’t really fire it or yell at it well as a human can be. A human can be blamed.
This doesn’t map to Oppenheimer’s situation. In 1945, a computer couldn’t have done his job. But he was nevertheless a man who could be blamed for the spiritual error of creating the bomb. The United States of America were the machine, but it’s hard to blame such a diffuse conglomerate (the generals and President who made the decision would all be out of office or retired soon). So Oppenheimer was useful in that sense: a man who could be stuck with the punishment the entire nation deserved.
Perhaps the movie’s failure comes down to the same issue: it’s about a thing so much larger than any one man, that a biopic is the wrong form for it. Everything is dwarfed or shadowed, even the desire to make a good movie. The second the Gadget incalesces the sky, it’s over.
Nolan is up against subject matter that he cannot work into a compelling narrative. The Bomb is what it is. These events depicted are too big and oblique and sinister for him to do them justice. So he does exactly the same thing as Oppenheimer himself: he hunkers down in the bunker, straps on antiflash goggles, and watches.
