I feel a little bit late to be covering Christopher Nolan’s last movie during the summer of Odyssey. The thing is that I like Nolan, but that summer I much preferred to watch Barbie. Then the hype died, and I just never got to it. Plus, as you all probably know, I’m anti-war, so that didn’t help either. But Nolan knows how to put a movie together, so I finally got here.
Oppenheimer is beautifully constructed, but ultimately kind of boring. While Cillian Murphy delivers an outstanding performance, Oppenheimer himself is uncompelling. And Nolan does do an incredible job putting this movie together. I mean, he uses explosions as a central device in various aspects of the film, mirroring The Bomb itself. Honestly, brilliant. I’m just left wondering why we choose people like this to make biopics of.
Oppenheimer doesn’t really have any redeeming qualities, and there’s probably not a single dude I could relate to less than Oppenheimer. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am always going on about how stories don’t need to feel relatable and I stand by that. It’s exactly because the writing and acting were so good that I came away with a deep dislike in Oppenheimer. I hope I never understand what it is like to seek conquest with no remorse like this. May I always be able to foresee the consequences of my actions before people die.
I read so many comments on Oppenheimer during the Summer of Barbie(tm) about how Oppenheimer was ultimately about the man’s moral turmoil over building a weapon that could destroy the entire planet. But what I saw was a man obsessed with discovery as conquest. A man who would conquer anything to be The One to build the bomb. A man that wraps the self importance of the United States around his shoulders and goes up against half of the world to win WWII himself. A man in a crafted deep denial about the most obvious use case of a mega bomb just so he could be the one to discover it.
In the early middle of the movie (because it is so damn long), everyone starts to buy into what they’re doing. No one seems to really question any moral standing about building a bomb. Instead, the bomb is meant to bring peace. They think: if we build a bomb that could potentially destroy the entire world, the promise of mutually assured destruction means a stalemate, and a stalemate means peace. A world finally at forever peace, through the only medium the white man seems to know: violence.
These men believe that they discovering the New World.
Oppenheimer spends the late middle part of the movie convincing everyone and himself that “it isn’t up to him how they use the bomb,” but he knows how they’ll use it. We all know how they’ll use it. It’s a bomb. But he relishes in being able to be in the position to Discover but also absolve himself from guilt. And then he only feels bad once it happens, as if setting it off isn’t the most obvious outcome of building a bomb. For the US military.
The thing that I couldn’t stop thinking about the whole movie is that, as much as Oppenheimer claimed it isn’t, it is up to us how they use it if we build it. Everything the imperial machine is able to accomplish is because of the labor that we, the people, put into it. But without the means of production, so many of the horrible things they do could be stopped. And we are the means of production. Our labor creates the bombs, the missiles, the drones. We do have the power to stop it if we decide to say no.
I mean, imagine what the world would look like if every one of us refused to contribute to the military industrial complex. What if they couldn’t find the staff to build anything? You could say, “I can say no, but someone will always take the job.” and you may be right today but I simply think we can dream bigger than that.
