11 Comments

Thanks, Noah. Your review is the best one I have read. As one who has worked in nuclear and especially in the endless clean-up of the nuclear weapons complex, I too had very mixed reactions to this film. I have visited and worked in many of these facilities. Your words helped me solidify my basic feeling that this is a terrible movie. Thanks. Great review.

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thanks!

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Excellent analysis.

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That doesn't sound like Einstein. Was that whole scene with him giving Oppenheimer his blessing made up out of whole cloth.

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I don't know. the movie is I think based on a book, but I haven't read it, and don't know how much liberty the movie takes (though I suspect it takes quite a bit.)

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Well, I certainly didn't watch it and probably wouldn't watch any version of it. But again, he didn't bomb anyone, that's just a weird false narrative.

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The whole film exists to give him credit for the bomb, fwiw.

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yeah, that's a fairly standard narrative but a dumb one. like giving a CEO credit for everything a large company does. when the company probably would have done something fairly similar and possibly better with a different CEO.

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I find your take on this kind of weird, mostly because Oppenheimer didn't actually make any decisions regarding the use of nuclear weapons. So it would be really weird to make the entire biopic about a decision he didn't make. And yes, he ran a lab that developed the weapons, but there were actually several such labs around the globe at the time, and if he hadn't run the US lab, I'm pretty sure someone else would have. The whole narrative of Oppenheimer as the "father of the bomb" is a fairy tale whether told as jingoism or told as pacificism. Not sure I'd like the film either, but I'm definitely not sold on the version you seem to want either: a 3 hour long biopic about Oppenheimer's guilt for actions that weren't really his (And one could do that, the real life Oppenheimer appears to have felt a lot of guilt.)

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I don’t need a film about him at all. A hagiography about how cool he is for feeling vaguely sorry for bombing people is shit, though.

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Other labs? Someone else would hav? But mom the other kids were doing it too!

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