Nolan says he felt that “to depart from Oppenheimer’s experience would betray the terms of the storytelling” and Oppenheimer is very clear about its focus on the protagonist, hence a final act that largely dwells on Strauss’s successful attempt to sully the scientist’s reputation by having his security clearance removed.Ten years ago, a little indie comedy shot in Idaho burst into the mainstream and made Napoleon Dynamite a household name. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you look at photographs of actual survivors and read accounts of what happened to them it was a very horrifying, gory death,” said Carol Turner, a co-chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s London branch. “The effect of the blasts was to remove the skin in a much more gory and horrible way – in the film it was tastefully, artfully presented. This drew criticism from one nuclear campaigner, who told the Guardian that the result was an “unbalanced” film, with the impact of the Japan blasts instead portrayed by a quasi-nightmare sequence where Oppenheimer is beset by disturbing visions in a supposedly triumphal speech to Manhattan Project workers in Los Alamos. The film shows the first ever nuclear explosion in an impressively staged sequence but does not show what followed: the weapon’s use on civilian targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer is very clear about its focus on the protagonist … Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss. Einstein was ambivalent about Oppenheimer’s theoretical work and, as played by Conti, he is an enigmatic figure in the film at least. Other performances feel faithful to the book as well: Matt Damon as the gruff Lt Gen Leslie Groves, the military overseer of the project and a key supporter of the enigmatic Oppenheimer Emily Blunt as the scientist’s alcoholic wife, Kitty Robert Downey Jr as Oppenheimer’s vindictive foe, Lewis Strauss, who pursued his target with a zeal that appeared to be based on perceived personal slights rather than any patriotic principle and Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, the Danish quantum genius who makes a brief appearance as the film’s seer and moral conscience. If there is one detail Murphy captures in particular, it is Oppenheimer’s soft voice and, of course, their similarity in looks (Murphy, at 47, is broadly the same age as Oppenheimer was, at 41, when the bomb was first tested in 1945). His performance in Oppenheimer is even more impressive in the context of the nuanced, assiduous biography by Bird and Sherwin, which portrays an individual as complex as you would expect a high-achieving theoretical physicist to be. Murphy’s leading man credentials are not in doubt, with a résumé that includes Peaky Blinders and critical hits such as Sunshine. Impressive … Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer. As with Oppenheimer, has the technology community left it too late to address the potential consequences of their achievements? Cillian Murphy: best man for the job? It is worth noting that signatories of a letter calling for a six-month pause in AI development this year included Elon Musk, an initial backer of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, Yoshua Bengio, a winner of the Turing prize (or “Nobel prize for computing”) and the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. Nolan told the Guardian that there are “very strong parallels” between Oppenheimer and the AI community. (I should note here that, in real life, Oppenheimer consulted a different physicist, Arthur Compton, about his apocalyptic concerns.) There are obvious parallels with the modern day and artificial intelligence, whose creators are now calling for development of the technology to be tamed. The excellent biography on which the film is based, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, goes into great detail about Oppenheimer’s regret over, and attempts to rein in, the monster he created. It is a devastating moment and is the emotive payload of the film, followed by a montage featuring rows of nuclear missiles, vapour trails of projectiles puncturing the sky, the planet being consumed by fire – and Oppenheimer’s stricken face. Einstein, played by Tom Conti, says: “What of it?” To which Oppenheimer replies: “I believe we did.” The film ends with a conversation between the godfather of the nuclear bomb and Albert Einstein in 1947, in which Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reminds the German-born theoretical physicist that he had once approached him about fears that his project would “destroy the entire world”. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures A devastating moment … Tom Conti as Albert Einstein and Cillian Murphy as J Robert Oppenheimer.
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