Yes, I did. I went to see the much talked about, tweeted about, and oft reviewed movie Oppenheimer. Three hours very well spent. It is long. It is dense. It is fabulous. It covers so much history and political ins and outs but in the end it exposes the challenge of the sometimes murky ethical world in which scientific discovery resides.
The biopic gives the audience the complex and conflicting emotions of a brilliant man who, with his team of physicists, worked on the top-secret Manhattan Project – the development of the atomic bomb. On July 16, 1945 they witness the world’s first nuclear explosion. The course of history was changed that day and with it J. Robert Oppenheimer gained the name, “Father of the atomic bomb”. Woven through the story is the very real impact of McCarthyism (you remember a communist around every corner) which was prevalent in the US in the late 1940s and into the 1950s.
The movie exposes the machinations of political power but the major theme in my mind is the ethical morass around the development of nuclear weapons. This complexity was most clearly expressed by Oppenheimer himself. As he watched the first nuclear weapon detonate, a groundbreaking development of scientific understanding, that July morning in Los Alamos he quoted Hindu scripture, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The movie peels away the success of victory as it hints at the profound destruction that happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians.
In the movie, as Oppenheimer tried to bring on board a fellow scientist, the man demurred, when pressed, with Oppenheimer urging him to think of ending the Nazi reign of terror, his colleague replied “When the bomb falls it will fall on the just and the unjust.” And in the end that is what Oppenheimer was left to wrestle with. Success tinged with death. Victory tinged with destruction.
It is well worth seeing. It takes you to a place of deep thought. In protecting our own are we destroying the other? Sadly, it still goes on.
