If someone thinks that the movie boiled down to: Great Man shouldn’t be stopped by annoying government to do their awesome research, then I think they need to improve their media literacy.

Movies can be serious. That’s fine and sometimes necessary, depending on the subject matter. Saying a movie is bad because it is not ‘fun’ (whatever you mean by that) is either unclear or asinine. I agree that Nolan’s films are pretty humorless but that’s not why people go to his films. I’d also have prefered his films if he smoothed out the flow between high-brow seriousness as a tone with other moods and tones.

Regarding the Great Man Theory: The film is obviously centred around Oppenheimer. Nolan is one of the last Hollywood filmakers making classical dramas and epics. The film is mainly about his tragedy. It is what it is. We can critique it for not expanding its interest (and I certainly would in relation to the actual consequences at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) but honestly I think we should also try to appreciate individual stories for what they are, recognizing the strengths when they’re there. The film does portray both the theoretical and practical achievements of the scientists and engineers that were necessary for Oppenheimer’s work (which was itself extremely historically important). It was obviously not perfect.

His tragedy is linked to how his understanding of reality, translated into practical and technological reality, and his hypocritical and morally cowardly choices about the practical consequences, give us a man who was brilliant but not wise, intelligent but naive. He wants to play God. He wants divine power. In this way the movie if philosophical. If you don’t like the theme of people who, literally, find their understanding of the deeper levels of reality (they are foundational physicists, they study the fundamental nature of the physical universe) translated into real practical consequences (which isn’t fundamentally different from the turning or use of Marxist knowledge into or for concrete, practical political activity, with its both positive consequences and negative consequences), then that’s on you. It’s a naturally, actually existentially important discussion about the relationship between knowledge and power and how that creates tragic situations (impossibility of ‘moral’ choice). I also would have thought that more people claiming to be Marxists would have appreciated the theme of the problems of the relationships between theory and practice.

I’m honestly suprised that few people seem to have caught on to what seems to me to be a key possible interpretation: the film is a tragedy about a hypocritical genius who matyrs himself after acquiring ‘he thinks’ divine power. Oppenheimer is trying to play God, and he is suffering the consequences of trying to play God. This is why the film loops back round at the end to Einstein, who reminds Oppenheimer that he cannot control the consequences of his achievement. If he wants to reach for divine achievement, he must pay a price (not a deserved price, of course).

This is also why the scene with Truman is important (not just because they correctly portray him as a slimy sociopath; albeit, incorrectly, as more charismatic than he actually was). Recall Truman says to him: “Do you think the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki give two shits about who created the bomb? They care who dropped it. I did…Don’t let they crybaby back in here”. Truman’s voice changes here, becomes less charming and more menacing. He is calling out Oppenheimer’s bullshit, like many of the people around him, notably Einstein. He’s reminding him of his limits as a human individual. He is not in power in this society. The imperialist state is in power, and nuclear weapons are now part of this power. Remember also that Oppenheimer looks away from the images of Hiroshima. I’ll come back to my criticism of this below, but this reflects Oppenheimer’s hypocrisy and moral cowardice again: he is not God. When God drops a church roof on a room full of his followers, he’s looking the whole time. God, or a god, can take responsibility, indeed claim the right, to the divine violence they unleash. Oppenheimer cannot.

That also underlines the importance of the Bhagavad Gita, which is about how a warrior, Arjuna, is inspired to do what is necessary in war by being shown divine power. The power of Vishnu (Krishna) is compared to divine power, ultimate power to destroy the world that comes from a deeper understanding of reality, which in the case of Oppenheimer and the scientists around him boils down to quantum theory and nuclear physics. The most chilling and critical interpretation of Oppenheimer as a person is that he is perhaps precisely convinced to not oppose the use of the bomb because he sees its ‘divine’ power. Perhaps he also thinks it necessary to end the war, but he himself later admits that the Japanese seem to have been near defeat and basically ready to surrender. His choices become a farcical imitation of a tragic myth.

I appreciated how they didn’t avoid the fact that Oppenheimer was an obvious communist-sympathiser, and that his broader circle of friends, family and lovers were filled to the brim with communists. The communists are obviously portrayed the most heroically and positively in the film. Some people seem to think it portrayed the unionization and communists negatively, which I really didn’t see at all. Like I really don’t know how people came to this view if they watched the same movie I did. This feels either like media illiteracy or contrarian reaching. Also: the more anti-communist the character became, the more vile they proved to be.

People might not like communists portrayed as broken, disappointed, and cynical about their past life as communists or bitter over their past political choices, but if you think that doesn’t exist then you clearly haven’t spent much time amongst communists and ex-communists. The joke in the movie that, since Oppenheimer has read all three volumes of Das Capital, he was better read than most communist part members, was honestly funny as it is often true. Also, it portrayed Oppenheimer as engaging in actual militant practice as a syndicalist, and part of its critique of him lies in his moral ambiguity, in his inability to state clearly what he believes politically, and the fact that he lets all of that fall to the wayside in his desire to ‘see God’, or ‘become God’, in any case to access divine power, and then matyr himself over it.

It also made clear that his relationships to women were deeply problematic. As his communist lover tells him: ‘you can come and go as you please; that’s power’. A woman scientist at Los Alamos argues with a colleague over the effects of the radiation on her reproductive system. Oppenheimer’s wife is confined to the role of housewife and clearly suffers from depression and alcoholism. Of course, I would never call it a feminist piece of film-making. That’s not Nolan’s focus. I would agree that the lack of characterization of women was a noticeable flaw.