Remove ads

Oppenheimer biopic by Christopher Nolan

TheParkerMachine said:
Are you guys telling me that Oppenheimer was a rizz king?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

One could actually argue the film underplays Oppenheimer's interpersonal ability, fitting him more to the mould of a genius visionary-scientist-orator who Couldn't Play The Game. And that's not entirely untrue - one look at the famous Truman anecdote will show you how he could misstep, particularly with powerful men. But also-

Consciously or not, some of Oppie's students began imitating his quirks and eccentricities. They came to be called the "nim nim boys," because they mimicked his "nim nim" humming. Almost all of these budding young physicists began chain-smoking Chesterfields, Oppie's brand, and, like Oppie, flicked their lighters whenever anyone took out a cigarette. "They copied his gestures, his mannerisms, his intonations," recalled Robert Serber. Isidor Rabi observed, "He [Oppenheimer] was like a spider with this communication web all around him. I was once in Berkeley and said to a couple of his students, 'I see you have your genius costumes on.' By the next day, Oppenheimer knew that I had said that." It was a cult or mystique that some found annoying. "We weren't supposed to like Tchaikovsky," Edwin Uehling reported, "because Oppenheimer never liked Tchaikovsky."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Strauss' rant about Oppenheimer poisoning the physicists against him maybe would've been more believable had this been in the movie. :V
 
Last edited:
I do think the movie gets at Oppenheimer's penchant for self-mythologizing, like when he gets the fedora and pipe it's shot like Batman putting on the bat suit.

The more I think on it, the more I feel like the film is (in addition to being a meditation on the compromises we make to produce art) riffing on Nolan's love of David Lean, and that this is "his" Lawrence of Arabia (so to speak). Both are stories about men who encourage and embrace their own self-mythologizing, only to realize halfway through that maybe that's a bad idea.
 
ManuJM1997 said:
Especially hilarious for someone like me, who while obviously knowing of the basic details of the Manhattan Project, didn't have much in depth knowledge, and when watching the movie, though "Yeah, Teller is obviously being exaggerated. There's no way he had this much of an explosion fetish"

And it turns out they actually toned it down quite a lot.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

There's just a bunch of stuff that you couldn't include because it just sounds extremely fake, like how Oppenheimer called his car Garuda.
 
Ford Prefect said:
There's just a bunch of stuff that you couldn't include because it just sounds extremely fake, like how Oppenheimer called his car Garuda.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Well, those tests do tend to kick up sandstorms.
Arthur Frayn said:
I do think the movie gets at Oppenheimer's penchant for self-mythologizing, like when he gets the fedora and pipe it's shot like Batman putting on the bat suit.

The more I think on it, the more I feel like the film is (in addition to being a meditation on the compromises we make to produce art) riffing on Nolan's love of David Lean, and that this is "his" Lawrence of Arabia (so to speak). Both are stories about men who encourage and embrace their own self-mythologizing, only to realize halfway through that maybe that's a bad idea.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Reminds me of Horikoshi's appearance in Wind Rises, realizing his contributions to aviation were going to get used for conflict.
 
waito_x said:
Well, those tests do tend to kick up sandstorms.

Reminds me of Horikoshi's appearance in Wind Rises, realizing his contributions to aviation were going to get used for conflict.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah The Wind Rises shares a lot of the same DNA as this, spending time building up the main character as A Man With A Dream before reminding you that his dream uh lead to the deaths of thousands of people. It's that tension, as @Ford Prefect so eloquently put it, between believing that war is the lowest of all human acts and that fighter planes are fucking sick.

Like the first half of the film is shot through with the energy of almost a heist film, as Oppenheimer and Groves assemble a crack team of physicists to tackle the bleeding edge of theory, Nolan manages to make a room full of men discussing particle physics edge-of-your-seat-stuff. You get why anyone who was anyone in physics was excited about the Bomb, with some (like Bohr) even nursing this utopian dream that the reality of the Bomb/vindication of his theory of physics will usher in this utopian age.

One of the most dread-inducing and depressing scenes in the film is when Fat Man and Little Boy are boxed up and unceremoniously stuffed into the back of a truck, and everyone is like "wait that's it?"
 
It just seems bizarre, given all the secrecy and smart minds brought aboard, that the two bombs made in the first batch were not even as sophisticated as a bowling alley pin resetting armature, or even a German torpedo. The mechanism of sliding rings of enriched uranium into each other at some hundreds of meters a second is no more genius or sophisticated than a deck crew member of the ship that hauled these devices across the Pacific bringing palms together to squish an eye level mosquito.
 
waito_x said:
It just seems bizarre, given all the secrecy and smart minds brought aboard, that the two bombs made in the first batch were not even as sophisticated as a bowling alley pin resetting armature, or even a German torpedo. The mechanism of sliding rings of enriched uranium into each other at some hundreds of meters a second is no more genius or sophisticated than a deck crew member of the ship that hauled these devices across the Pacific bringing palms together to squish an eye level mosquito.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The simplicity of the basic concept rather belies the extreme complexity of actually making them work.
 
Flectarn said:
The simplicity of the basic concept rather belies the extreme complexity of actually making them work.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It's also obvious in retrospect, but at the time they were still inventing particle physics on the fly. Yes, theoretically, if you slam some uranium or plutonium together you'll get a hell of a reaction, but to do that you have to get enough uranium or plutonium, prepare it in an extremely specific way, slam it together at a very precise speed, etc.

Like they cover this in the film, the Manhattan project was the culmination of years of bleeding edge theoretical particle physics that's now taught in grade school.
 
waito_x said:
It just seems bizarre, given all the secrecy and smart minds brought aboard, that the two bombs made in the first batch were not even as sophisticated as a bowling alley pin resetting armature, or even a German torpedo. The mechanism of sliding rings of enriched uranium into each other at some hundreds of meters a second is no more genius or sophisticated than a deck crew member of the ship that hauled these devices across the Pacific bringing palms together to squish an eye level mosquito.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There were two different types of bomb. What you are describing is a gun type bomb which relative to nuclear weapons is that simple (though still nontrivial) and they were able to determine would work for sure without testing a completed one. Trinity was a test of an implosion type bomb which is a significantly different beast. It is a step up theoretically and the engineering to actually design a working device is significantly more complicated, hence a test.
 
Little Boy was a gun type bomb. Fat Man just like Trinity was an implosion type bomb.
 
'OPPENHEIMER' debuted at #1 in Korea with a $4.3M opening, the biggest opening ever for a Christopher Nolan film and the biggest Hollywood opening of 2023 in Korea.

Audience reactions were mostly positive, but some lamented the bittersweet ending in which the Americans only drop two bombs.

If you don't get it, read it again.

By the way, they premiered the movie on Liberation Day. Which is why South Korean audiences are only seeing it now.

China has their release on the 30th of August. So it might do numbers then.
 
demonthese2211 said:
There were two different types of bomb. What you are describing is a gun type bomb which relative to nuclear weapons is that simple (though still nontrivial) and they were able to determine would work for sure without testing a completed one. Trinity was a test of an implosion type bomb which is a significantly different beast. It is a step up theoretically and the engineering to actually design a working device is significantly more complicated, hence a test.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yes, my first glimpse of the workings of either bomb dropped that August month was of the Little Boy.

Zhade said:
Is there a source to this other than a tweet that looks like it's making an edgy joke?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The user posted message adorning the repost.
 
Last edited:
I'm pretty sure the 'joke' in question is the idea the Koreans would have really dug more bombs getting dropped on the islands
 
variety.com

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ Surpasses $700 Million Globally

Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has surpassed $700 million at the global box office, becoming the fourth-highest grossing movie of the year. After five weeks of release, the R-r…
variety.com variety.com
After five weeks of release, the R-rated historical drama has generated $718 million at the worldwide box office, including $285 million in North America and $437 million internationally.

The film has outperformed "Fast X" ($704 million) and "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" ($686 million) and trails behind "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" ($1.35 billion), Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" ($1.2 billion) and Marvel's "Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3" ($845 million).

...

"Oppenheimer" has been a particularly huge draw in Imax with $146.4 million from the premium format's screens. It's the fifth-highest grossing Imax movie ever — and the top four were $2 billion blockbusters: "Avatar" and its sequel "The Way of Water," "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and "Avengers: Endgame."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
I know that it really wasn't the focus, but having The Demon Core incident and one of Oppenheimer's coworkers die due to it might have worked.
 
waito_x said:
It just seems bizarre, given all the secrecy and smart minds brought aboard, that the two bombs made in the first batch were not even as sophisticated as a bowling alley pin resetting armature, or even a German torpedo. The mechanism of sliding rings of enriched uranium into each other at some hundreds of meters a second is no more genius or sophisticated than a deck crew member of the ship that hauled these devices across the Pacific bringing palms together to squish an eye level mosquito.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
For the Little Boy gun-type bomb, as mentioned they were so sure it was going to work they didn't make a test bomb. It really is pretty simple. The hard part was getting enough of the enriched Uranium, which wasn't really covered by the movie.

For the Fat Man implosion-type bomb, it's way more intricate than it looks. For example, the explosives have to all go off at exactly the right times to properly compress the core. The different wires leading to individual segments of the explosives being a bit different in length would cause enough of a difference to make the bomb fail to properly go off.
 
variety.com

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ Crosses $850 Million Globally

Christopher Nolan’s dark historical epic “Oppenheimer” has crossed another remarkable box office milestone with $850 million in global ticket sales. The movie, starring Cillian Mu…
variety.com variety.com
The movie, starring Cillian Murphy as the so-called "father of the atomic bomb," has generated $311 million in North America and $542.7 million internationally to date. ... It cost $100 million to produce and will be hugely profitable for Universal, who backed the film, as well as Nolan.

...

It also stands as the third-highest grossing release of the year behind "Barbie" ($1.36 billion) and "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" ($1.35 billion), managing to surpass new installments in blockbuster franchises like Marvel's "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" ($845 million) and "Fast X" ($704 million).

A few other milestones: it's Universal's highest grossing R-rated film (and the studio's first R-rated film to reach $300 million) at the domestic box office, as well as the biggest R-rated film of the year ahead of "John Wick Chapter 4" ($187 million).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
Destynova1 said:
Showing how dangerous the materials are+don't fuck around with the sleeping dragon.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The movie fortunately didn't really do any type of anti-nuclear hysterics like that. It's entirely focused on the actual real and present danger of nuclear weapons being used for war, not how radiation or even nukes in particular are 'scary'. Some idiots playing with plutonium is not a threat to civilization.
 
Last edited:
Cloak&Dagger said:
The movie fortunately didn't really do any type of anti-nuclear hysterics like that. It's entirely focused on the actual real and present danger of nuclear weapons being used for war, not how radiation or even nukes in particular are 'scary'. Some idiots playing with plutonium is not a threat to civilization.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah I think an under appreciated aspect of the movie is that while it deals with the horror of nuclear war and how even the best intentions can lead to disaster it notably doesn't demonize nuclear power or nuclear research. It threads the needle pretty well in putting the blame on callous and short sighted politicians and military men rather than some bullshit luddite "there are things man was not meant to know" scaremongering.
 
Edward Teller is easily one of the most insane people of all time. Oppienheimer's nowhere near as bad as Teller. Teller walked so Donald "let's nuke the hurricanes" Trump could run. And yet he was one of the first people to be alert to climate change. Dude deserves his own film -- perhaps a pseudo-sequel to Oppenheimer.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top