Oppenheimer

An incredible drama whose pulsating musical score keeps you emotionally pinned to your seat for 3 hours.

Let me begin by saying that I saw this magnificent film with “Z”, our former Saudi exchange student visiting from his home in Riyadh. He is working on a master’s degree in Chicago.

We both were overwhelmed by the movie from beginning to end. Director Christopher Nolan tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer from his youth in the 1920’s to his death in 1967. You watch his teaching experience that led to his appointment to the top-secret Manhattan Project where the atomic bomb was produced and exploded at Los Alamos, N. Mexico on July 16, 1945.

Our country then dropped this bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to the end of World War II. But when Russia developed its own nuclear bomb, Oppenheimer turned from hero to villain. You watched congressional hearings where his alleged connection to Communism resulted in the suspension of his security clearance.

It is hard to imagine that Cillian Murphy will be denied an Oscar for his stunning role as Oppenheimer. He was able to use a casual relationship with Einstein (Tom Conti) to his advantage while his marriage to a boozy wife (Emily Blunt) survived his affair with a beautiful, disturbed woman (Florence Pugh) who committed suicide when he ended their relationship. I’m convinced that the film’s R rating emerged from close scenes of their naked, sexual encounters.

The film has some great supportive roles but let me just point out Matt Damon as General Groves and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss. Damon’s Gen. Groves oversees Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos project, and his harsh, demanding approach is unforgettable. Ironically, Downey is unrecognizable as a government man whose role in Oppenheimer’s character assignation led to his own political destruction.

Despite my love of this movie, I wish that Mr. Nolan had substituted some of his lengthy scenes of Oppenheimer’s congressional interrogation and focused on the destruction in Japan caused by the two atomic bombs. Close to 200,000 Japanese civilians died and that should not be forgotten.

Let me put it in Oppenheimer’s words when he witnessed the detonation at Los Alamos,

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”.