1,266 words
Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite living directors. The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk are all big, eye-catching Hollywood spectacles, but with a difference. They are highly imaginative, deal with serious themes, have compelling dramatic conflicts, and are often quite moving. Nolan is not particularly politically correct, either. Granted, his last film, Tenet — with its ludicrous Affirmative Action Hero — was a major disappointment. But with Oppenheimer, he returns to form.
Oppenheimer has a highly literate script with important ideas and powerful dramatic situations, striking visuals without digital hokum, and superb performances from a vast cast. Cillian Murphy, who has appeared in five other Nolan films, gives his best performance in the title role. Robert Downey, Jr. is excellent as Admiral Lewis Strauss. Josh Harnett, Kenneth Branagh, Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt also deserve special mention. The only bad performance is Gary Oldman’s cameo as Harry Truman, which is more a problem with the script. Ludwig Göransson’s music is excellent. Let’s hope Nolan never returns to the Hans Zimmer factory.
Oppenheimer is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), the American-born Jewish physicist who directed the Manhattan Project that created the American atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer is not portrayed as a stainless hero or a martyr. He’s complicated. His genius is elusive. If you think atomic physics is hard to understand, imagine dramatizing it on the screen in tiny snippets. There is no doubt, though, that Oppenheimer was neurotic, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, and at best morally stunted. Early on in the film, he tries to murder one of his teachers over a minor humiliation. Moral qualms only occur to him the next morning.
After Hiroshima, Oppenheimer is clearly high on the acclaim of his colleagues. He delivers a little speech. He begins clinically. It is too early to evaluate the effects of dropping an atomic bomb on a city full of people — but he’s “sure the Japanese don’t like it.” Hardy-har-har-har. “Too bad,” he adds, that they “couldn’t have dropped it on the Germans.” Nolan uses his cinematic wizardry to intimate that Oppenheimer and his team had severe moral qualms about all this. But I don’t buy it.
I have no doubt that Christopher Nolan’s mind operates within “normal” moral and political parameters, but he’s never been “all in” on political correctness.
There are a few black characters in his films cast against type. In Oppenheimer, they are mostly wildly out of place faces in the crowd. All the main characters here are white or Jewish.
In Dunkirk, Nolan made a Second World War film that only referred to “the enemy.” Not zee Germans. Not zee Nazis. He had plenty of opportunity to deliver the standard platitudes, but instead he made a touchingly patriotic movie about the British returning home.
In Oppenheimer the Nazis loom larger, of course, but Nolan still foregoes cheap shots. When Oppenheimer says that the Nazis are “abusing” his people in their “camps,” this is surely historically realistic, but every other director would have juiced it up considerably. When Oppenheimer says that he hopes that “anti-Semitism” will impede German atom bomb research, the moral is not that Hitler chased away all the genius Jewish physicists. Oppenheimer knew the Germans had formidable thinkers such as Werner Heisenberg. But Hitler thought atomic physics was Jewish, thus he might not have given it the attention it deserved. This, too, is at least historically plausible.
Nobody could make a film about Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project without mentioning Jews. Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Isidore Isaac Rabi, Robert Serber, Lilli Hornig, Richard Feynman, and Leo Szilard were all Jewish. Oppenheimer’s brother Frank, Albert Einstein, and Admiral Lewis Strauss are other Jewish characters.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here.
It is interesting, though, that Nolan depicts Jewish tribal animus against the Germans as a major motive of the Manhattan Project. Indeed, when Germany surrendered, a number of these figures suddenly developed moral reservations about using the bomb on Japan.
The film leaves their motives murky. Clearly, some saw themselves as fighting against Germany, not for America, so once Germany was down, they lost interest in the war. Others, perhaps, had moral qualms about dropping the bomb on non-whites (but not on whites). The Manhattan Project was also riddled with Soviet spies, such as Klaus Fuchs, and once Germany surrendered, their priority would have been to slow down the American nuclear program until the Soviets could catch up.
Oppenheimer himself accepted the Pentagon rationale for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki: It would end the war quicker, save lives, bring our boys home, etc. He refused to sign petitions against bombing Japan, arguing that it was not the role of scientists to choose how the weapons they developed were used. Oppenheimer had no personal reasons for wanting to bomb Japan. He had already tested an atomic bomb in New Mexico, proving the effectiveness of both the weapon and his leadership. Unless he was curious to test his weapon on human subjects.
But after the war, Oppenheimer suddenly grew a conscience, opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb and promoting arms control talks and global government schemes.
Oppenheimer’s motives were murky. But it did not go unnoticed that his recommendations aligned with Soviet strategic interests. Nor did it go unnoticed that Oppenheimer was at the very least a Communist fellow traveler: a pinko, if not an outright red. His brother and sister-in-law were Communist Party members. His wife and mistress were also card-carrying Communists, as were some of his colleagues and friends at Berkeley. Trailing behind the party members was a long tail of fellow-travelers and sympathizers.
Nolan dutifully depicts the standard lies and evasions of the reds and pinkos: they were idealists; they were humanitarians; they were New Deal Democrats — they were anything, really, except willing conspirators working for the triumph of the most stupid, evil, and murderous ideology in human history. But Nolan also shows that Oppenheimer was approached by a Soviet agent through a friend on the Berkeley faculty. Only belatedly did he reveal this to the military, and when he did, he lied about his intermediary. Oppenheimer was, moreover, cavalier about security at Los Alamos.
The man was obviously a security risk. The United States government tolerated him because he was useful to the war effort. But after the war, when he became an obstruction to the H-bomb program, his security clearance was revoked and he was sidelined.
The story of Oppenheimer’s post-war travails is the weakest part of the movie, cutting back and forth between Oppenheimer’s security clearance hearing and a Senate hearing about Admiral Strauss’ (ultimately failed) appointment to the Eisenhower cabinet.
A more conventional filmmaker would have depicted Oppenheimer as the innocent victim of an anti-Communist “witch hunt.” (Oppenheimer could not be depicted as a victim of anti-Semitism because his principal opponents, Strauss and Teller, were both Jews as well.) Nolan, however, teases out the full moral complexity of the situation, and although he handles it all with great dynamism, he bloats the running-time of the movie to three hours.
In this case, I think that Nolan got too close to the material, causing his dramatic instincts to fail him. Inception, Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises, and Dunkirk all have emotionally shattering conclusions. But Oppenheimer is emotionally flat as well as flabby. If Nolan had focused on ending the film with the bombing of Japan, the emotional impact could have been measured in kilotons, but 40 minutes of hearing drama turns it into a damp squib.
Despite these problems, Oppenheimer is a serious and worthwhile film. It is not Nolan at his best, but even pretty good Nolan is better than most directors today.
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45 comments
The part about his security clearance and communist ties really shows how democracy is inherently incompetent. Imagine if the roles were reversed in the Soviet Union or in the Axis powers. Every bit of intel on his fellow subversive would have been squeezed out of him.
A country where anyone can be tortured based on allegation and private thoughts is not a country worth defending or living in.
Cry me a river with your stale platitudes. This is already the case in your country, and any country in recent memory where due process has been gutted for the War on Terror, which is now turning into the War on Whites.
See you in the camps, then.
If you want to defend your country you should use tortures and camps. It does not work without it.
Of course, the treatment of dissenter scientists, writers, composers and artists in the Soviet Union was much harsher, even in the vegetarian 1970-1980’s. Just compare the “oppression” of Oppenheimer with those of Sakharov, or Solzhenitsyn, to name only the most known.
There is an apparent attempt to slime the movie for casting an Irishman as Oppenheimer (Jews don’t count?):
https://www.newsweek.com/irish-actor-playing-oppenheimer-proves-once-again-that-jews-dont-count-opinion-1814578
While this angle was peculating before movie came 0ut, it brought to mind the guy who probably did the best Oppenheimer. In 1968 there was a Broadway play called In The Matter Of J. Robert Oppenheimer with Joseph Wiseman in the title role.
Now mostly known for playing the first Bond villain, Dr No, Wiseman was Jewish and totally convincing as Oppie. The play unfortunately played the character as a victim which he was not but Wiseman’s surreal mime made it work.
The primary racial attempt at sliming this movie seems to be taking the Asian angle as in “this movie doesn’t portray the Japanese side of things.” Which is a funny conundrum for Hollywood because while Asians like to play the minority game, they were the primary component of the Axis powers following Germany.
To which I’d say: maybe these bellyachers have a point. Make a villain of this scheming American Jew lobbing superweapons around, and portray the honorable Jap and his divine Emperor as the good guy. For social justice, of course.
But Hollywood is in Chinese pockets, not in Japanese ones.
Was this movie similar to the Paul Newman flick Fat Man and Little Boy? As I recall most of that focused on General Leslie Groves. Oppenheimer was portrayed as an arrogant pr**k.
Never saw that one.
Fat Man and Little Boy (1989) was decent. Paul Newman as Gen. Groves gave the role some gravitas. Critics panned Dwight Schultz (“Howling Mad” Murdoch from the 1980s A-Team TV show) as Oppenheimer, but I didn’t think he was too bad.
Another good one from 1989 is Day One, starring Brian Dennehy as General Groves and David Strathairn as Oppenheimer. Based on the Nolan film trailers, I am not expecting much from Matt Damon as Gen. Groves compared to Newman and Dennehy.
I found Strathairn’s portrayal of Oppenheimer to be quite believable, but perhaps he did not capture Oppenheimer’s neurotic intensity so much. I have not seen the new version with Cillian Murphy yet because I am holding out for a fully IMAX theater.
The real Oppenheimer was hardly damaged by losing his security clearance ─ unlike some Rightwing academics today who have to keep silent about certain third-rail topics like Race or WWII aspects involving a peculiar people, lest such scholars face losing their passport or even imprisonment.
Dr. Teller is seen as a Strangelovian character and a stinker for testifying against Dr. Oppenheimer and doubting his judgement on certain strategic matters. But the truth is that Oppenheimer was his own worst enemy, surrounded by Communist Jews, and his chain-smoking did him in at the relatively young age of 62 in 1967.
I’ve forgotten the source now, probably Richard Rhodes, but it is believed that had he lived, Oppenheimer would have garnered a Nobel Prize for his work on Black Holes. EDIT: The opinion was from the experimental physicist and Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez according to the Wikipedia article on Oppenheimer.
🙂
Most American Jews anywhere in the first half of the 20th century would have been “surrounded by Communist Jews”. Read the memoiristic writings of “Second Thoughts” and “Red Diaper” neocons like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh, or Philip Roth’s (fictional) I Married a Communist. Communism and Jewishness were inextricably linked for much of the 20th century, here as well as, more consequentially, abroad. Indeed, it is doubtful if Hitler ever would have become Chancellor had Germans not been terrified of the specter of “Judeo-Bolshevism” raised by the various post-WW1 attempted Red Putsches and the actual short-lived communist “Red Republic” in Bavaria, virtually all of whose ringleaders had been Jews.
Some of them became later strongly Anti-Communists, like writer Leon Uris.
It’s worth a look
I’m curious: did you see this in either IMAX or non-IMAX 70mm? Why ought one to see it in those formats, which for me (at least wrt IMAX, XD, etc – not sure what 70mm exactly looks like) are great for action epics like LOTR, Gladiator, Avatar, Bond, etc? From the trailers, this seems more like a historical drama, the type that could be enjoyed on a small screen, or even a TV.
I saw it a regular theater. 70mm gives amazing detail and depth of focus from foreground to back, but aside from a few outdoor scenes in New Mexico, it wasn’t really needed. I honestly never sampled the IMAX gimmick.
All series and movies that portray openly jewish characters show us their real mindset and way of living.
In this case, the jew Oppenheimer is driven by racial hatred against germans, and profound sense of jewishness.
This is the only positive aspect of Hollywood: they show us how they really are.
You’ve persuaded me to watch. Even in a big old movie house, which I haven’t been in since Mary Poppins Returns.
The whole emphasis on Oppenheimer is misplaced and hyped by the Jews. He was really just an administrator. Groves could have hired three or four other guys who would have done the same job adequatly. Im not sure why he chose a jew.
On the other hand, without someone like Enrico Fermi the whole project would have never happened yet it seems he’s hardly mentioned.
Groves chose Oppenheimer because the FDR administration was determined that Soviet agents have full access.
Excellent. LMAO! Thank you. The full extent to which FDR was a conscious agent of the International Conspiracy remains, I think, to be clarified. Clearly, Old Rubberlegs favored the totalitarian Soviets over the (much less) totalitarian Nazis. Equally clearly, he was always itching to figure out how to violate his 1940 campaign slogan (the one about being unwilling to “drag American boys into another European war”). We know his Screw Deal Administration was riddled with communists and Soviet spies; surely, FDR must either have known or suspected as much, too, but in good hypocritical liberal fashion elected to turn a blind eye to any threats from the Left.
But was FDR someone actively advancing the Soviet agenda, or was he a mere dupe whose behavior was better explained by liberal naivete than outright treason? The reason I always hesitate to brand him an intentional Sovietist was his 1944 dumping of his VP, the actual Kremlin confidant, Henry Wallace – but maybe this was done more for the sake of his reelection, Wallace having become a burden, than out of any patriotic conviction.
The WW2 period can never be over-studied; our modern travails, here and across Europa, all stem from that era.
Indeed, WW2 can never be overstudied. Now that the witnesses are all dead, the lies are stamped even harder. For 50 years, war movies (the only studies 98% of the country does) portrayed the Germans as the bad guys, but the soldiers were generally portrayed simply as soldiers fighting on the other side. Today, there is an entire genre of filth wherein Germans are, to a man, absurd villains built up as so evil that the audience can revel in satisfaction over their eventual painful and humiliating deaths, and the more gruesome the better. I caught 2 minutes of some dumb movie some dorks were watching, and in the background every German soldier was, everywhere they went, even indoors inside a building, goose stepping.
I am convinced that FDR was an active supporter of communism. Elizabeth Dilling pointed this out in her 1936 book The Roosevelt Red Record.
https://archive.org/details/rooseveltredreco0000dill
She ended up being one of the defendants in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944 for her trouble.
https://codoh.com/library/document/a-trial-on-trial-the-great-sedition-trial-of-1944/en/
Would a true liberal support Stalin even before World War 2 ? I don’t think so. It was well known that Stalin was a dictator yet I cannot find one single quote where Roosevelt condemns him with the same venom that he reserved for fellow dictators Hitler and Mussolini. I believe it is FDR who came up with the absurd nickname “Uncle Joe”. And it was Roosevelt himself who said in 1939 that “Some of my best friends are communists”.
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/fdr-scandal-page/fdr.html
That’s not surprising for anybody who has read Diana West’s book AMERICAN BETRAYAL, it is full of facts about Soviet/pro-Communist influence agents in Roosevelt’s administrations and around it.
The Soviets have had Harry Hopkins. Oppenheimer and all another real or imagined “Atom Bomb Spies” were small fishes when compared to him.
I agree that Oppenheimer was not necessarily indispensable to the project, but there was a limited pool of Gentiles to choose from in the new niche area of “Jewish Physics,” and Oppy knew how to herd those kinds of J cats.
The trope that the atomic scientists were not too concerned about using the weapon on their Nazi enemies ─ whom they feared would beat them to the punch ─ but suddenly had regrets about bombing Japan, that is quite a post hoc affectation.
I’m sure some Leftists like Leo Szilard ─ who had originally postulated the idea of the nuclear chain reaction while watching traffic signals in 1933 London, and who refused to work for the military during the war ─ really did not like the idea of bombing Asians, especially compared to Whites. But I still think this is somewhat overstated. The late Samuel T. Cohen, the inventor of the so-called Neutron Bomb, related that the mood at Los Alamos just before Hiroshima was like a tribal orgy before a battle.
Enrico Fermi was married to a Jewess, which is supposedly why he immigrated from Italy and accepted a job at Columbia University in 1939, just before the outbreak of the war.
Fermi had grown up building things like electric motors on his hobby bench, and he had the very rare quality of being an excellent experimental scientist while being no slouch on the deep theoretical stuff that Werner Heisenberg and the moody Edward Teller excelled at.
Fermi had already created a sustained chain reaction at the University of Chicago Pile in late 1942, while Heisenberg was still struggling to do so at Haigerloch when he was captured two days before the end of the war in Europe.
Captured German uranium of exceptional quality (originally from the Belgian Congo) was sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee for isotope separation, and this became the fuel for the Little Boy bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The 1967 David Irving book, The German Atomic Bomb is excellent. Germany was generously funding atomic research before WWII, but after the declaration of war, they were forced to narrow their research priorities. This also sabotaged the A4 rocket aka V2 missile as well which was reduced in priority in 1939 until Peenemünde was bombed in mid-1943, after which the rocket program was then given top priority.
The dilemma here is simply that it is difficult to know exactly what weapons efforts will pay off beforehand when allocating limited resources, because ideally R&D needs to have both breadth and depth.
The Americans could afford to build plutonium production reactors on the Columbia River in Washington State, and uranium isotope separation plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and a top secret laboratory on a remote Mesa in New Mexico, plus at least three kinds of strategic bombers which were mass-produced.
The Germans were very reluctant during the war to commit the resources necessary to build a heavy-water isotope separation plant to continue research towards an atomic chain reaction. Quantum Physicist Heisenberg later claimed to have passively stalled the German atomic bomb project, but this is not very believable.
From secret recordings made at Farm Hall with the German scientists in captivity as they learned of the American atomic bomb dropped on Japan, Chemist Otto Hahn ─ who had discovered nuclear fission in 1938, and whom David Irving interviewed in person ─ was nearly in tears that he and his colleagues had so badly let down his own country, which was heavily bombed during the war.
General Groves was an engineer’s engineer who oversaw the Pentagon construction for the Army Corps of Engineers, under budget. The Germans needed a General Groves to manage such a risky project as an atomic bomb.
My complaint with Gen. Groves is that he did not understand why so many Jews were or had been Communists and why this mattered. He thought they were now loyal freedom-loving American citizens like any other, and he would never have understood why the Germans of that time period believed differently.
In Groves’ 1962 memoirs Now It Can Be Told, he had not thought that the Soviets could duplicate an atomic bomb before twenty years. They actually did so in four years ─ and today we know that it was practically a carbon copy of the Fat Man design, thanks to the Manhattan Project being riddled with spies.
Unlike the Germans during the war, the Soviets knew after the war that it could be done so they had no misgivings laying out the resources to make it happen.
The Soviets also had undeniable help from the bomb’s creators back to the beginning when Dr. Szilard convinced the celebrity scientist Albert Einstein to write a prewar 1939 letter to President Roosevelt claiming that the diabolical Germans were already doing so. Szilard did not drive a car so Teller chauffeured him to Einstein’s villa on Long Island.
Roosevelt favored the Navy which was not that interested in a super bomb and did not quite know what to do with the idea of atomic energy ─ but once the war was on, the Army was very interested.Col. Groves related that after completing the Pentagon in late 1942, he was originally not too enthusiastic about leading a team of scientists ─ but it came with some promotions, and he did find the idea of a weapon that would end the war intriguing.
The Manhattan Engineer District Project was also given a blank check by Congress who did not even know what the money was going for. Groves asked the U.S. Mint for a massive number of tons of silver bullion to make low-loss magnet wire for giant “Calutron” isotope separators in Tennessee. The fussy bureaucrat at Fort Knox replied: “Sir, our unit of measurement is not tons but in the Troy ounce.”
Oppenheimer absolutely deserved having his security clearance yanked, and Teller (who had seen the Red Terror as a boy in Hungary) was justified in calling him out.
🙂
Leslie Groves does deserve credit for putting the kibosh on sending shipments of uranium ore to our Soviet buddies during the Lend-Lease program, in which they otherwise got exactly what they wanted thanks to one of FDR’s comsymp whiz kids named Harry Hopkins.
That’s good that you remembered this. Most people do not know or have forgotten the role of Great H.H. in Soviet nuclear efforts, they know only Rosenbergs or Fuchs or Hall and some another names, but they all were only “small fishes” comparing to H.H.
One of my earliest articles was about the Lend-Lease Program. I say that Harry “The Hop” is long overdue for his Order of Lenin medal.
Greg, I wondered if you’ve ever seen the Czech film Kolja and, if so, whether Trevor Lynch would deem it worth putting on the presumably long to-review list?
I saw it years ago and was quite moved by it then. Been thinking about a rewatch to see how it holds up.
Not yet, but I will add it to my list. Thanks
Looking forward to seeing this one in the theater, as I haven’t been since I saw Maverick last year. Re Nolan, I honestly thought Inception was bloated and overrated and Dunkirk was just okay. And I like Tim Burton’s take on Batman way more than Nolan’s dull, brooding, three-part ordeal. OTOH, I thought The Prestige and Memento were incredibly well-done. As soon as I heard about Oppenheimer, I was already dreading the familiar shitlib whine about “McCarthyism” that I knew was inevitable, but it sounds like the movie doesn’t dwell on it as much as it could have. I’m cautiously optimistic about this one.
The movie does not go all soy about McCarthyism and “witch hunting.”
But does the film show, that Dr. Oppenheimer DID CONTACT Soviet intelligence officers? Because he did and this could be seen as treason, and would be seen as treason in every country of the world.
Here I would also recommend to read the book Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History by Jerrald and Leona Schecter. The book is 20 years old, but informative and easy to read. There are some good informations there about R.O. and his character flaws and possibilities of his (unwittingly?) contacts with the Soviet intelligence agents.
Possibly the problems of the film were because Nolan is mostly the good director of sci-fi and fantasy films, but not of biopics. Or because he based his story on the Kai Bird’s and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography book about Oppenheimer (American Prometheus). I did not read the book, but I know that it is more than 700 pages long, which means that it is very detailed, and that’s why maybe boring.
Thanks for the review, Trev. I am looking forward to seeing the film. I also enjoyed Fat Man and Little Boy, a very underrated movie. I cannot help but compare the two films as I watch the new Nolan movie. FM&LB inspired me to write a Summary timeline of Nuclear physics discoveries that made Manhattan project possible. Link below:
https://www.houseclarkreviews.com/movie-of-the-week-posts/movie-of-the-week-47
Thank you. This was interesting reading.
Despite it being a Nolan film, it smells of moral autopsy, one of my least favorite literary forms.
And I don’t think I am being wild-eyed to imagine that if timing had been different and we could have dropped the Bomb on Germans, Oppenheimer’s ethical qualms would disappear and the date of the drop would be a national holiday.
This is not a must-see movie, but Nolan fans can rejoice that he has recovered from Tenet.
I saw PBS’s American Playhouse rendition of Oppenheimer in the 80s with Sam Watterson in the title role. I didn’t watch the whole show but caught the part where two sinister looking FBI agents are reasoning Oppie’s sudden reluctance to use the bomb after Soviet Russia became the new enemy instead of Germany.
As you’d expect, the depiction of Oppenheimer as a poor victim of hysterical McCarthyite red-baiting was the main theme of the show so I shut it off, but that dialogue sunk in with me and made me wonder about his sudden shift in sentiment. The Jewishness of Oppenheimer was never mentioned, but later it was a missing piece of the puzzle that made me do an “A-ha!” many years later.
The narrative that the anti-Communist crusade of McCarthy and others was a “witch-hunt” is 100% lying Communist propaganda. Like witches, Communists are real, and they are much more dangerous. The Roosevelt and Truman governments were massively penetrated by reds, as was Hollywood.
Turning real Marxist infiltration into “the Red scare” was a dress rehearsal for all the other “conspiracy theories”, like The Great Replacement. Making truth un-cool is one of their standard tactics.
As for witches, I often reply to charges of “racism” by replying that it’s just a modern version of “witchcraft”, an evil power that everybody believes in but that nobody can put their finger on. Rhetorically, I find that useful.
However, as Edward Dutton argues in his 2021 book, Witches, Feminism and the Fall of the West, yes, they do exist.
The European witches were keepers and practitioners of ancient pre-Christian European beliefs, practics and knowledges and as those they were eliminated by the alien and anti-European Levantine Christianity which condemned everything European and pre-Christian as “heresies”. See Sigrid Hunke’s books Europas andere Religion. Die Überwindung der religiösen Krise and Europas eigene Religion. Der Glaube der Ketzer.
I haven’t seen the movie and likely won’t. First, let me say I disagree: I disliked Dunkirk a lot. I thought it was narrow, one-sided, and lacked any kind of perspective of the Germans, here remaining faceless; in the earlier film Battle of Britain we saw the German side of things. I thought not including them wasn’t artistic; it belittled the subject. I also disliked the unheroic side; a British soldier, transported back, kills a young boy on the boat that saves him, he simply walks off and disappears. I thought that was disgusting. Also, we saw Dunkirk as a town barricaded and defended in the streets. it had mostly been leveled by then. The French troops are shown as shirking and irresponsible. French troops fighting off the Germans helped to save the BEF, and of course the English filmmaker typically ignores this. It was a bland, disappointing film; a Tony Blair kind of patriotism.
Oppenheimer? I’ll be honest, I’m just not interested in the character and his life. I’ve read enough. There was also a play I read in college, Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a 107 page (long play…people LOVE to talk about him, don’t they?)
dealing with his appearance before the Congressional Committee on his security clearance. It was pretty much a copy of the transcript, and it just didn’t do much for me, of course showing Oppie as a genius and Congress as the usual bunch of McCarthyite lunkheads. I grant he did make a nice quote about the atom bomb, but I’m just not moved to see the film. I’m sure the review catches it all.
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