Remove ads

Oppenheimer biopic by Christopher Nolan

Alex said:
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.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...


I did appreciate that fear of the Nazis getting the bomb was a motivating factor until relatively late, especially given that Oppenheimer was born to a Jewish family.

Then of course you get to 1945 and there's sunk cost cost fallacy re the bomb on top of the anxiety over ending the war quickly, but also the natural fear of what comes after.

Oppenheimers meeting with Truman was, IIRC, as much about the fears of nuclear proliferation as anything else.
 
I mean the way the movie frames the Oppenheimer/Truman meeting it's clear it was explicitly about Oppenheimer's fear of nuclear proliferation.
 
TheParkerMachine said:
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.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah Teller is genuinely one of those people who maybe should've not pursued their passion for building giant nuclear powered explosives

I think even Feynman later in life was like "Yeah…in retrospect maybe it would have been better if Ed had never been born."
 
Edward Teller somehow looks almost exactly like the main villain of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
 
TheParkerMachine said:
Didn't he want to nuke Alaska to make an artifical harbour?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah like a lot of nuclear physicists post-Hiroshima he got very into the idea of using nukes for non-city vaporizing purposes, it's just that his ideas were a little more...out there...than everyone else's. AIUI on it's face using nukes as super demolition charges isn't that insane, it's just that Teller was going all in on using the biggest bombs possible for the biggest and most outlandish construction projects possible.

Like he spent his twilight years spending the last of his social and political capital trying to get the US to develop a nuclear armed anti-asteroid space defense system.
 
Tbh I feel like at a certain point (once no one takes you seriously), it loops back around to being cool/funny. "What if... bigger boom!"
 
BurnBright said:
Tbh I feel like at a certain point (once no one takes you seriously), it loops back around to being cool/funny. "What if... bigger boom!"
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Reagan did listen. The SDI program was inspired by Teller's ideas. Did not contribute much in the way of actual ability to shoot down ICBMs but did contribute quite a bit in other research in high energy physics and lasers. And made the Soviets more paranoid and kind of weakened the MAD doctrine.
 
TheParkerMachine said:
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.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Teller, growing gradually more deranged and frothing at the mouth: "We must build the biggest, most powerful bomb… always bigger and more destructive damn the cost! We must be ever-watchful against the communists by showing them we can build bigger bombs!"

"…But oh yeah, I was just crunching some numbers too and the greenhouse effect is going to fuck us soon. We need to start switching to alternate forms of power. I, of course, recommend nuclear."

I also find it very funny that Teller had the last laugh technologically but not in the way he thought. The Teller-Ulam design is now the basis of almost every nuclear-armed country's entire stockpile, but not because it's just so inherently stronger and more destructive that it makes for more credible singular city-killers (or Earth movers, if you take the Operation Plowshare stuff seriously). It's more materially efficient in terms of a bigger boom for your material, but it turns out they ran into the brick wall of the square cube law so more, smaller nukes let you better distribute the destruction for the resources spent on the stockpile. It turns out there's very little practical demand to break into the megaton levels, like they were all chasing with the big early-Cold War thermonuclear tests, so most known and estimated warheads sit in "just" the hundreds of kilotons.
 
Last edited:
I still think Penn Jillette and Edward Teller would make for a hell of a magic show.

"With one flash, this whole city will dissapear. "
 
Geckonator said:
Teller, growing gradually more deranged and frothing at the mouth: "We must build the biggest, most powerful bomb… always bigger and more destructive damn the cost! We must be ever-watchful against the communists by showing them we can build bigger bombs!"

"…But oh yeah, I was just crunching some numbers too and the greenhouse effect is going to fuck us soon. We need to start switching to alternate forms of power. I, of course, recommend nuclear."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
He didn't just want to stop climate change with nuclear power, he wanted to stop it with nuclear power.

As in, as you can read here, he's like "well the issue is that too much of the sunlight will be reach Earth due to a shrinking ozone. If only. There was some way. 👉👈To shoot tons of sunlight scattering particles into the air that could block this new sunlight. Like the volcanos do. Hmm. Hmmmmmmm. 🤔"

Man literally wanted to reverse rising temperatures with a fucking nuclear winter.
 
Last edited:
Sarissa said:
He didn't just want to stop climate change with nuclear power, he wanted to stop it with nuclear power.

As in, as you can read here, he's like "well the issue is that too much of the sunlight will be reach Earth due to a shrinking ozone. If only. There was some way. 👉👈To shoot tons of sunlight scattering particles into the air that could block this new sunlight. Like the volcanos do. Hmm. Hmmmmmmm. 🤔"

Man literally wanted to reverse rising temperatures with a fucking nuclear winter.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
And it would have worked too! As documented in famous work of hard science-fiction, Futurama.

It is a great loss for the human race that Teller was not allowed to cook as he should have been.
 
Any one else not recognise RDJ Jr until the end credits?
He didn't have to doubt his acting after the MCU, he didn't seem like Tony Stark at all!
 
Sarissa said:
He didn't just want to stop climate change with nuclear power, he wanted to stop it with nuclear power.

As in, as you can read here, he's like "well the issue is that too much of the sunlight will be reach Earth due to a shrinking ozone. If only. There was some way. 👉👈To shoot tons of sunlight scattering particles into the air that could block this new sunlight. Like the volcanos do. Hmm. Hmmmmmmm. 🤔"

Man literally wanted to reverse rising temperatures with a fucking nuclear winter.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Hey, when all you have is a multi-megaton nuclear weapon, well…
 
Maybe I don't have knife-fight someone to get a seat for the 70-mill this time.
www.hollywoodreporter.com

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ Returning to Imax After $183M Worldwide Box Office

The thriller about Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Atom Bomb, will get an exclusive one-week encore run from Nov. 3, including Imax 70mm film projection locations.
www.hollywoodreporter.com www.hollywoodreporter.com
The blockbuster historical drama will be back on the big(gest) screen starting this Friday, including six Imax 70mm film locations: AMC CityWalk Stadium 19 in Hollywood, Calif.; AMC Irvine Spectrum in Irvine, Calif.; AMC Lincoln Square in New York City; AMC Metreon 16 in San Francisco; BFI London in the United Kingdom; and Melbourne Museum in Australia. These premium screens were the first to sell out during the film's initial box office run.

The rare encore run for a Hollywood tentpole on Imax screens follows Oppenheimer grossing over $183 million worldwide on the company's large format screens to date.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
In a moment of sleeplessness, I decided, as one does, to look up what the right-wing media says of Oppenheimer.

Christian Answers warns me it has "mild wokeism". Also, people have sex, which is bad.

I strongly discourage anyone from viewing "Oppenheimer" (please note the stars do NOT warrant a recommendation either. They are based on cinematic quality ONLY). As I mentioned previously, this film is NOT for children, teens or Christians in general. You are better off reading a history book on this matter instead.

Nudity: Extreme
Sex: Very Heavy
Vulgar/Crude language: Very Heavy
Profane language: Moderately Heavy
Violence: Moderate
Drugs/Alcohol: Moderate
Wokeism: Mild
Occult: None
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

On the other hand, it only features white people, which is good, and it is "dominated by men", which is even better:

The trailer praises both American ingenuity and the nuclear (no pun intended) family. The teaser mentions how the sequestered scientists had company while trying to beat the Nazis to the ultimate weapon.

"If we don't let scientists bring their families, we'll never get the best," a voice says.

How … reactionary.

Plus, the film is dominated by men, another no-no in modern Hollywood. Is this another exercise in Patriarchy 101? Well, it's history if that's Nolan's defense.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

But the weirdest take of all is probably from he contrarian crank who somehow landed the job of film reviewer at the National Review:

Oppenheimer opens exactly at the moment when we have lost faith in culture and politics — the perfect time for the British Nolan to assert his trendy nihilism and his antipathy toward America. That's what regime-media reviewers are raving about. They finally have a big-budget epic that replicates Millennial self-destruction — not the only recent film to celebrate Armageddon.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
Hendryk said:
But the weirdest take of all is probably from he contrarian crank who somehow landed the job of film reviewer at the National Review:
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I just imagine their copy editor doing a bit of a Jonathan Swan interviewing Trump take, while said contrarian crank wishes they had a cigar to pull off the barking mad J. Jameson Daily Bugle cosplay.
 
Congrats to Oppenheimer for cleaning up at the Golden Globes: Best Drama Motion Picture, Best Director for Motion Picture (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor for Drama Motion Picture (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture (Robert Downey Jr.), and Best Original Score for Motion Picture (Ludwig Göransson).

The categories it lost were Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture (Emily Blunt was the nominee), Best Motion Picture Screenplay, and Cinematic and Box Office Achievement.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top