By: Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee
“I have been dreaming about this moment for so long,” said Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife and producing partner, accepting the best picture award. Oppenheimer is the star –studded biopic thriller that blazed its way through award season. The film, which had 13 nominations going into the night and won seven. Nolan, who won two of his three nominations finished shy of the record for most Oscar wins in a single night. “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho won four Oscars in 2020 and Walt Disney won the same number in 1954. It was really a thunderous night for Oppenheimer and Director Christopher Nolan who bagged the best director Oscar for the epoch making film reflected that the medium of film is only just over a century old; for the Academy to “know you think I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me” Nolan has won the best director Oscar for Oppenheimer at the Academy Awards that took place in Los Angeles. This is the first time Nolan has won the award, having previously been nominated for Dunkirk in 2018. He was considered the strong favourite for the statuette, having won a series of best director awards in the run-up to the Oscars, including a Golden Globe, Bafta, Critics Choice Award and Directors Guild of America Prize . At the Oscars, Nolan saw off a strong field Oppenheimer, which Nolan also produced and wrote, stars Cillian Murphy as the pioneering nuclear scientist J Oppenheimer.
“Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the secret Los Alamos laboratory that designed and built the first atomic bombs. It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. The atomic bomb and what it impacted define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes.
Yoked with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie using the hashtag #Barbenheimer, the film became a significant commercial hit, with total revenue currently recorded at $960.6m. Oppenheimer is a 2023 epic biographical war thriller film written, directed and produced by Christopher Nolan starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer , the American theoretical physicist credited with being the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project , the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. Based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kaj Bird and Martin J Sherwin the film chronicles Oppenheimer’s career, with the story predominantly focusing on his studies, his direction of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II and his eventual fall from grace due to his 1954 security hearing. It is Nolan’s first film not distributed by Warner Bros.
Pictures since Memento (2000), due to his conflicts regarding the studio’s simultaneous theatrical and HBO Max release schedule .Among its many awards, Oppenheimer was named one of the top ten films of 2023 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute, film is presented as a nonlinear narrative, with two different timelines interwoven together. The first is “Fission”, playing out in color, about Oppenheimer giving a subjective account of his life at his 1954 security hearing, while the second is “Fusion”, in black and white, which is Lewis Strauss’s viewpoint on Oppenheimer during his 1959 Senate confirmation hearing. The plot summary is linear. In 1926, 22-year-old doctoral student J. Robert Oppenheimer grapples with anxiety and homesickness while studying experimental physics under Patrick Blackett at the Cavendish Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. Upset with Blackett’s attitude, Oppenheimer leaves him a poisoned apple but later retrieves it.
Oppenheimer completes his PhD there and meets fellow scientist Isidor Isaac Rabi. They later meet theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg in Switzerland. Wanting to expand quantum physics research in the United States, Oppenheimer begins teaching at the University of California, Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology. He assembles a team consisting of Rabi, Hans Bethe, and Edward Teller at the Los Alamos Laboratory, and also collaborates with scientists Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and David L. Hill at the University of Chicago. Teller’s calculations reveal an atomic detonation could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction that ignites the atmosphere. After consulting with Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer concludes the chances are acceptably low. Teller attempts to leave the project after his proposal to construct a hydrogen bomb is rejected, but Oppenheimer convinces him to stay. After Germany’s surrender in 1945, some Project scientists question the bomb’s relevance. Oppenheimer believes it would end the ongoing Pacific War and save Allied lives. The Trinity test is successful, and President Harry S. Truman orders the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in Japan’s surrender. Though publicly praised, Oppenheimer is haunted by the mass destruction and fatalities. A flashback reveals that Oppenheimer and Einstein’s 1947 conversation never mentioned Strauss. Oppenheimer instead expressed his belief that they had indeed started a chain reaction—a nuclear arms race—that would one day destroy the world. Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘Father of the atomic bomb’ is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms. The film condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. This film is about genius , hubris and error both individual and collective brilliantly charting the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II- cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominate age. The film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. It also isn’t a story that builds gradually; rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods. This fast pace and narrative fragmentation continue as Nolan fills in this Cubistic portrait, crosses and recrosses continents and ushers in armies of characters, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), a physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project. Nolan has loaded the movie with familiar faces — Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman — some distracting. The New York Times nicely wrote,” Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically.” (The author is currently Affiliate Faculty of English in Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond and a Multilingual writer email bhattacharjr@vcu.edu)
