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Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

Christopher Nolan
Martin Sherwin
Cillian Murphy
Emily Blunt
4.1K User reviews
476 Critic reviews
90 Metascore
344 wins & 359 nominations total

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Kitty Oppenheimer

Leslie Groves

Lewis Strauss

Senate Aide

Thomas Morgan

Gordon Gray

Lloyd Garrison

Patrick Blackett

Senator McGee

Chairman Magnuson

Senator Bartlett

Senator Pastore

Senator Scott
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Trivia In order for the black and white sections of the movie to be shot in the same quality as the rest of the film, Kodak produced a limited supply of its Double-X black and white film stock in 70mm. This film stock was chosen specifically for its heritage - it was originally sold to photographers as Super-XX during World War II and was very popular with photojournalists of the era.
Goofs The stop signs are yellow in the film, which is accurate. The United States used yellow stop signs until 1954.

J. Robert Oppenheimer : Albert? When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world...

Albert Einstein : I remember it well. What of it?

J. Robert Oppenheimer : I believe we did.

Alternate versions To get a U/A rating certification in India, the movie was edited to remove or censor all nudity using CGI. For example, the scene where Tatlock and Oppenheimer have a conversation and the former character was topless, the nudity was censored with a CGI black dress. Many Middle Eastern countries use this exact same censored version for release.
Connections Featured in Louder with Crowder: Going Out with a Bang! (2022)

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Jul 21, 2023
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July 21, 2023 (United States)
United States
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Oppengeymer
Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA (only interiors, Los Alamos facilities interiors, including Oppenheimer's house, Fuller Lodge Interior and Exterior)
Universal Pictures
Atlas Entertainment
Gadget Films
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$100,000,000 (estimated)
$329,862,540
$82,455,420
Jul 23, 2023
$971,368,540

Technical specs

Runtime 3 hours
Black and White
IMAX 6-Track
Dolby Digital

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For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face.

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan's primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico's desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy's face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. "Oppenheimer" rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others.

Sometimes the close-ups of people's faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven't happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don't just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer's team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer's life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The "fissile" cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer's career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact).

The weight of the film's interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer's, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon ), Los Alamos' military supervisor; Robert's suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer ( Emily Blunt ), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey , Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer's post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he's a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau's director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it.

That, I believe, is really what "Oppenheimer" is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war and the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it's not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn't indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do: Dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit in an aesthetically daring way while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that's about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about "Oppenheimer." It's not entirely about Oppenheimer even though Murphy's baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It's also about the effect of Oppenheimer's personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Safdie's Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock ( Florence Pugh , who has some of Gloria Grahame's self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn't going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman ) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic "crybaby" who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame's editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick -y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It's wedded to virtually nonstop music by Ludwig Göransson that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that's probably what it would feel like to read American Prometheus while listening to a playlist of Philip Glass film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it's like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one's own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn't delved into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn't important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the tale but the telling. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stories. But whether that characterization was true (and I'm increasingly convinced it never entirely was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it's been applied to a biography of a real person. "Oppenheimer" could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director's filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he'd been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward.

The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it's as if the park bench scene in " JFK " had been expanded to three hours). There's also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife honeymooned there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented further by the presence of "Full Metal Jacket" star Matthew Modine , who co-stars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) It’s an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, variously evoking Michael Mann's " The Insider ," late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like "Hiroshima Mon Amour," "The Pawnbroker," "All That Jazz" and " Picnic at Hanging Rock "; and, inevitably, " Citizen Kane " (there's even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti , talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond).

Most of the performances have a bit of an "old movie" feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered quickly, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet.

But as a physical experience, "Oppenheimer" is something else entirely—it's hard to say exactly what, and that's what's so fascinating about it. I've already heard complaints that the movie is "too long," that it could've ended with the first bomb detonating, and could've done without the bits about Oppenheimer's sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it's perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower's cabinet. But the film's furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how's and why's of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are appearing before a tribunal and bring called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The tribunal is out there in the dark. We've been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language.

181 minutes

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt as Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer

Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

Benny Safdie as Edward Teller

Michael Angarano as Robert Serber

Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence

Rami Malek as David Hill

Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr

Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols

Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer

David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi

Alden Ehrenreich as Senate Aide

Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush

Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman

Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez

Casey Affleck as Boris Pash

Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman

Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer

Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg

David Dastmalchian as William L. Borden

Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs

Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge

Tony Goldwyn as Gordon Gray

Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig

James Remar as Henry Stimson

Christopher Nolan

Writer (based on the book by)

Martin Sherwin

Cinematographer

Hoyte van Hoytema
Jennifer Lame
Ludwig Göransson

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Entertainment

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Grandson on What the Movie Gets Right and the One Scene He Would Have Changed

M oviegoers turned out in droves this weekend for writer-director Christopher Nolan's new film Oppenheimer , fueling an expectations-shattering domestic box office debut of $80 million . The three-hour-long biopic recounts the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), the theoretical physicist widely known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and has been praised by critics for its nuanced examination of a complicated historical figure.

The movie is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , one of numerous accounts of Oppenheimer's life and legacy. But according to Oppenheimer's grandson, Charles Oppenheimer, the famous physicist's family has their own their own approach to depictions of him and additional nuance to include.

Charles was born near Santa Fe, N.M., in April 1975, after both his grandfather and grandmother, Katherine "Kitty" Puening Oppenheimer (played by Emily Blunt), had passed away. However, he says he grew up having a very open dialogue about his grandfather's work with his father, Peter Oppenheimer, who spent several years of his early childhood at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

TIME spoke with Charles about what Oppenheimer gets right about his grandfather, what he would have changed, and the work he's doing to further Oppenheimer's legacy today.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

TIME: How was your grandparents' story told to you when you were growing up?

Charles Oppenheimer: Like most kids, I heard about my grandparents through my parents, and there was a marker at one point that stands out in my memory of speaking about Robert Oppenheimer being a famous person who had done his duty during World War II. He might have been a soldier, but his skills were in science, so he used science to do what he had to do during the war. But within the family, we had very open conversations. So my dad was always there if I had a question once I started hearing more about how we were related to a person that other people were talking about. I was always able to initiate a conversation and I do that to this day, especially with my father Peter.

So there was ongoing, open communication about who your grandfather was.

With a very big dividing line. Within the family, we absolutely talked about it as much as possible. With anyone outside of the family, my father doesn't discuss anything [about him] if he can avoid it.

Do you feel there are misconceptions about your grandfather?

There's such an incredible historical record of him. It's impressive, like every detail of every conversation of his spring break in 1924 is analyzed. If you have that much information and enough people writing and rewriting and interpreting, you can pick up any thread of meaning and narrative. The one that's developing right now is about as positive and as famous of an interpretation of him as you could have. And I find that being related to him and having insight into who he was doesn't always seem that interesting to other people. They're happy to ask a historian or a writer, and it's not necessarily true that my impression of his values is taken as the answer. So I kind of struggle with saying that I have a view of who he is and what he cared about and it not always getting across. That being said, I think with as much attention as is put on him, there is a large understanding of the complexity of the stuff he dealt with and the problems and opportunities of ushering science into the world.

Read more: Here's How Faithfully Oppenheimer Captures Its Subject's Real Life

You saw the movie. Were there parts that hit you the hardest, emotionally?

I was bracing myself for not feeling great about it, even though I talked to Chris Nolan and was very impressed by him. I saw him work on the set with an amazing intensity when I visited once or twice, and we had a great conversation. But I didn't know, am I going to love it? Am I going to hate it? I often have that reaction to biographies and pundits when they talk about my grandfather. I feel like they're missing something. And sometimes it really feels personal. Like when somebody wants to start a fight with you on the schoolyard, they'll talk about your family member. But during the movie, I found myself accepting and liking it. I thought it told a compelling story and I could just take it as art that was really engaging. I was really happy to have that reaction. I didn't expect it.

Were there parts that struck you as historically or emotionally inaccurate?

When I talked to Chris Nolan, at one point he said something roughly like, 'I know how to tell a story out of this subject. There are going to be parts that you have to dramatize a bit and parts that are changed. As family members, I think you're going to like some parts and dislike some parts.' That's probably led into my acceptance of the movie, even though I saw it very late, just when it came out. As a dramatized representation of the history, it was really largely accurate. There are parts that I disagree with, but not really because of Nolan.

The part I like the least is this poison apple reference, which was a problem in American Prometheus . If you read American Prometheus carefully enough, the authors say, 'We don't really know if it happened.' There's no record of him trying to kill somebody. That's a really serious accusation and it's historical revision. There's not a single enemy or friend of Robert Oppenheimer who heard that during his life and considered it to be true. American Prometheus got it from some references talking about a spring break trip, and all the original reporters of that story—there was only two maybe three—reported that they didn't know what Robert Oppenheimer was talking about. Unfortunately, American Prometheus summarizes that as Robert Oppenheimer tried to kill his teacher and then they [acknowledge that] maybe there's this doubt.

Sometimes facts get dragged through a game of telephone. In the movie, it's treated vaguely and you don't really know what's going on unless you know this incredibly deep backstory. So it honestly didn't bother me. It bothers me that it was in the biography with that emphasis, not a disclaimer of, this is an unsubstantiated rumor that we want to put in our book to make it interesting. But I like some of the dramatization. I thought Einstein's conversation with Oppenheimer at the end was really effective even though it wasn't historical.

James D'Arcy as Patrick Blackett and Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr in Oppenheimer

What was your role, if any, in the movie?

The family policy around media, books, and what I'd call the cult of Oppenheimer, is not to participate in it. It's a business to write and talk about Oppenheimer, and the model that my dad chose is: 'It's not very classy, and I'm not going to be involved in publicly representing Oppenheimer in ways that other people do as a business.' But when I saw this movie was coming out, I said, 'Wow, that's going to be really big.' I also have a big interest in representing my grandfather's values for today's world. That's the most important thing in my opinion. So I reached out said, 'Hey, could I get involved?', and Chris Nolan was nice enough to give me a courtesy call through Kai Bird—whose book I just criticized. I do think American Prometheus is really good, I just had a complaint about that one part.

So Chris Nolan gave me a call. He had finished the script and he said, 'I have so much material with American Prometheus .' I explained that my dad probably would be unlikely to talk. But I don't think he needed input from the family. And as an artist, he obviously has every right to do that. You need art to tell this story. And it's just a fact that when somebody writes a biography about our family, we don't have input or the ability to make decisions. The chain of this movie was American Prometheus was published and then Nolan licensed it. I tried to give my perspective, but there wasn't any official involvement.

Is there anything you would have advised them to do differently, had you been asked?

I definitely would have removed the apple thing. But I can't imagine myself giving advice about movie stuff to Nolan. He's an expert, he's the artist, and he's a genius in this area. But one amusing family story is that, if I invited myself to the set, they would entertain me coming, which I did twice. And so one time I visited the set in New Mexico. I saw them film and, in that particular scene, Cillian Murphy walks into a room and part of his line was calling someone an 'asshole.' And when I went back to Santa Fe and told my dad, he was horrified. He said, 'Robert Oppenheimer never swore. He was such a formal person. He would never, ever do that.' And I was like, 'Well, it's a dramatization.' But I was worried that in the movie he would be this swearing, abusive guy. Anyway, I think he said one swear word in the movie and I just happened to be in the room. So there is a chance that if we had been consultants, we could have added some details and depth. But there's such a complete record. It was enough for Nolan to tell the story he intended to.

Did the movie help you come to any kind of deeper understanding of your grandfather?

When I saw how Nolan put this together, I was like, wow, there are thousands of pages of more details than what he put in there. But he was able to summarize it to the effect of: are we going to destroy ourselves as a species? That told as a story is really important. It's not exactly a revelation, but it's an important message. I always look at my grandfather's actual words instead of what other people said about him. And I think his advice is really relevant today, because he was right about how to manage atomic energy. If we had followed his actual hard policy proposals, we could have avoided an arms race right after World War II.

Robert Oppenheimer saw where we should go and he was right at that time. That really counts for a lot. It's not just the fact of like, ‘Oh, I regret something I did.' He put in effort to affect policy that could have literally changed history, and being overruled and discredited, which is what Nolan tells the story of, is important in that light. The way he told this story through [Lewis] Strauss’ perspective was really masterful.

There have always been two facts in tension: on the one hand, Oppenheimer helped create a weapon of mass destruction that was used to kill hundreds of thousands of people . On the other hand, the existence of nuclear weapons has succeeded as a deterrent for nearly 80 years, with superpowers like the U.S., Russia, and China avoiding war for fear of what would happen if those weapons again got into play. What are your thoughts on that complex legacy?

To me, that's the most interesting part and the most relevant today. The movie, while really good, had less emphasis than I would have put on the period of 1945 right before the bomb dropped to 1947, which was the time where we could have avoided an arms race. It is true that he ushered these weapons in, and then we went into an arms race, and we haven't destroyed ourselves. But the difference is him and [Niels] Bohr saw the arms race coming and said, ‘We really must avoid this.' It's not good enough that we just haven't died yet. It was a disaster that we got into an arms race and it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of science, as illustrated in the scene they have in there with Truman where Oppenheimer had been telling people that if we don't co-manage this with our allies, which were the U.K. and Russia at the time, we're going to get into an arms race and it's going to be extremely dangerous.

The gut reaction from Truman and others was, let's just make as many of these bombs as fast as possible and we'll keep it secret and the Russians will never get the bomb. So you have a scientific expert that's telling the government, this is what we need to do, and you have the government doing the opposite. We got into an arms race not because of a hard-nosed, pragmatic understanding of we need to build these bombs, but a scientific misunderstanding that we could keep it secret. Robert Oppenheimer's deepest message is that the world had changed around the atomic bomb dropping. But it wasn't just atomic bombs, it was the fact that the scope of our technologies had increased to the point where we could destroy ourselves and we had to unite in a new way. And that's exactly what he said: Mankind must unite or we will perish. That's the message that we can bring into today's world.

You started the Oppenheimer Project to continue your grandfather's work today. Can you tell me a little bit about what the organization does?

Even though I spent a lot of time in this interview trying to correct some historical detail, you never win that discussion. But if you look at Robert Oppenheimer's values, what he wrote, what he said, how he led scientists, it’s clearly an amazing record. He led scientists to solve a hugely difficult technical problem under the threat of existential risk. And then he talked about, how do we manage the outcome of improving science and technology at that speed? He had a poetic way of talking. So when he spoke about what should we do about it, it wasn't just an engineered answer. He had a really deep, rounded view of it because of his education and interest. And what he said was, we need to unite in a new way—and his policy tried to put that in place.

It's exactly what we need to do today in the world. We can draw dots between the idea that if we hadn't gone into an arms race, we would have actually been able to use that scientific discovery for abundant nuclear energy . The same science could have made unlimited energy. We had a little bit of a push there of making it, but we were making bombs constantly at the same time, and that eventually sabotaged the public acceptance of nuclear energy. Now, we've gotten carbon output and climate change. So if we could use the idea of ushering in technology in an industrial scale effort to affect a really threatening problem, like climate change and lack of enough energy, we could apply the same type of effort that we had in the Manhattan Project towards today's problems. And it wouldn’t include creating a bunch of bombs, because that method of warfare stopped working in 1945. It doesn't work. Our institutions haven't caught up with that insight.

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– Entertainment Analysis and Reviews

Exploring “Oppenheimer”: A Masterpiece by Christopher Nolan

“Oppenheimer,” the 2023 biographical thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan, stands as a masterpiece that delves into the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the renowned theoretical physicist often referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb.” Based on the 2005 biography “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, this cinematic gem chronicles the fascinating journey of Oppenheimer, who played a pivotal role in the development of the first nuclear weapons during the iconic Manhattan Project, marking the beginning of the Atomic Age. With an impressive ensemble cast, including Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt as his wife Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the film brings the enthralling historical narrative to life.

Nolan’s passion for storytelling and keen eye for cinematic detail shine through in “Oppenheimer.” The film’s production was no small feat, with the use of IMAX 65 mm and 65 mm large-format film, and, for the first time in history, sections shot in IMAX black-and-white film photography, creating a visually immersive experience. Moreover, Nolan’s preference for practical effects over computer-generated imagery adds authenticity to the film’s portrayal of historic events.

Premiering at Le Grand Rex in Paris on July 11, 2023, “Oppenheimer” received widespread critical acclaim, with accolades showered upon the cast, screenplay, and visuals. The movie’s simultaneous release with another film led to a unique social media phenomenon, urging audiences to view both movies as a double feature, contributing to its impressive box office success, grossing over $180 million worldwide.

As we embark on this cinematic journey into the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, let us explore the intricate layers of brilliance that Christopher Nolan has meticulously crafted, and uncover the riveting tale of a man whose contributions shaped the course of history and the world as we know it.

The Making of “Oppenheimer”

Unraveling j. robert oppenheimer’s life, what is oppenheimer about, oppenheimer’s role in the manhattan project, personal and professional milestones, movie themes, the cinematic brilliance of “oppenheimer”, ending explained.

“Oppenheimer” came to life through the creative vision of Christopher Nolan, who both wrote and directed the film. The project was officially announced in September 2021 after Universal Pictures won a competitive bidding war for Nolan’s screenplay, indicating the industry’s anticipation for another Nolan masterpiece.
The casting process for “Oppenheimer” saw Cillian Murphy taking on the challenging role of J. Robert Oppenheimer, embodying the complex character with fervent intensity. Accompanying Murphy, other talented actors, such as Emily Blunt as Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, were chosen to bring depth and authenticity to the film’s pivotal figures.
In preparation for filming, pre-production began in January 2022, laying the groundwork for what would become a visually stunning and historically accurate portrayal of Oppenheimer’s life and the events surrounding the Manhattan Project.
To achieve a unique cinematic experience, Nolan utilized a combination of IMAX 65 mm and 65 mm large-format film. Notably, sections of the film were shot using IMAX black-and-white film photography, adding an evocative element to the storytelling. This dedication to visual excellence showcases Nolan’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of filmmaking.
Throughout production, Nolan stayed true to his signature style of relying on practical effects over computer-generated imagery, further immersing the audience in the world of “Oppenheimer” and capturing the authenticity of historical moments.
The film’s use of IMAX 70mm screens presented a challenge and a unique opportunity, as only 19 theaters in the U.S. had the capacity to showcase it as intended. However, this decision ultimately allowed viewers to experience the sharpness, clarity, and depth of the image unparalleled in other formats, delivering a feeling of three-dimensionality without the need for special glasses.

“Oppenheimer” takes the audience on a captivating journey through the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant theoretical physicist whose contributions and controversies left an indelible mark on history. The film begins with an exploration of Oppenheimer’s early years in the 1920s, where he grapples with homesickness and anxiety while studying at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge under the mentorship of the demanding Patrick Blackett.

Completing his PhD in physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, Oppenheimer meets the renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg during his time there. Upon returning to the United States, he sets his sights on expanding quantum physics research within the country, commencing his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology.

Throughout the film, Oppenheimer’s life is presented in a nonlinear narrative, alternating between key events at various stages. Viewers are privy to his interactions with significant figures of his time, such as Niels Bohr, whose life he inadvertently saves by preventing him from consuming a poisoned apple left for Patrick Blackett.

One of the significant aspects explored is Oppenheimer’s personal relationships, including his romance with Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party USA, and his marriage to Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, played by Emily Blunt. The film portrays the complexities of his emotional journey, as well as the profound impact these relationships have on shaping his choices and actions.

As Oppenheimer’s career progresses, “Oppenheimer” delves into his instrumental role in the Manhattan Project, where he takes on the directorship of a secret weapons lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This part of the film portrays the moral dilemmas faced by Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists as they wrestle with the profound implications of harnessing nuclear reactions for warfare.

Nolan’s masterful storytelling weaves together Oppenheimer’s scientific brilliance with his personal struggles, painting a multifaceted portrait of the man behind the atomic bomb. As Cillian Murphy portrays Oppenheimer’s character with fervor and intensity, viewers are invited to witness the internal conflicts and challenges he faced, both within the scientific community and from external forces during the controversial McCarthy era.

“Oppenheimer” is a 2023 biographical thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The movie chronicles the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a renowned theoretical physicist who played a pivotal role in the development of the first nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Oppenheimer’s work led to the creation of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, marking the beginning of the Atomic Age.

The film delves into Oppenheimer’s journey from his early academic years in Cambridge to his position as the director of the Manhattan Engineer District in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It explores the complexities of Oppenheimer’s character, showcasing his brilliance as a scientist, his personal relationships, and the ethical dilemmas he faced while working on the development of the atomic bomb.

As a biographical thriller, “Oppenheimer” offers an in-depth and thought-provoking portrayal of one of history’s most influential scientists, shedding light on the moral implications of scientific advancements and the far-reaching impact of Oppenheimer’s work on the world. The movie received critical acclaim for its cast performances, narrative structure, and Christopher Nolan’s cinematic brilliance in bringing Oppenheimer’s story to the screen.

At the heart of “Oppenheimer” lies J. Robert Oppenheimer’s pivotal role in the Manhattan Project, a top-secret research and development effort during World War II to construct the world’s first atomic bombs. As the director of the clandestine weapons lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer led a brilliant team of scientists and engineers on the path to harnessing nuclear energy for warfare.
The film meticulously portrays the intense scientific endeavor involved in the development of the atomic bomb, highlighting the challenging and often morally conflicted decisions faced by Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Their quest for the successful realization of the bomb’s potential is both awe-inspiring and unsettling, as they grapple with the potential consequences of their work.
The Manhattan Project culminated in the successful testing and eventual deployment of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, marking the end of World War II but also raising profound ethical questions regarding the use of such destructive power.
Nolan’s approach to depicting the Manhattan Project focuses on the process of building the bomb rather than sensationalizing the actual detonations. This decision demonstrates his commitment to portraying the human side of the story, exploring the intellectual and emotional challenges faced by those involved.
The film showcases the intellectual camaraderie and tensions among the brilliant minds at Los Alamos, providing a glimpse into the collaborative efforts and the unique perspectives of scientists like Oppenheimer, whose work and decisions would shape the course of history.
The profound impact of the bombings and their aftermath on Oppenheimer’s conscience and the world at large forms a central theme in the film. Oppenheimer’s complex emotions, ranging from pride in his scientific achievement to guilt over the destruction caused, add depth to the character portrayal.
“Oppenheimer” underscores the historical significance of the Manhattan Project and its legacy, prompting reflection on the responsibility of scientists and society at large when dealing with powerful and potentially devastating technologies.
Throughout the film, the audience is immersed in the moral dilemma faced by Oppenheimer and his team, raising questions about the fine line between scientific progress and the ethical implications of weaponizing such knowledge.
Nolan’s sensitive and nuanced depiction of the Manhattan Project not only adds authenticity to the narrative but also invites viewers to contemplate the far-reaching consequences of scientific advancements and their impact on humanity.

“Oppenheimer” delves into the personal and professional milestones that shaped J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life, portraying the multidimensional nature of this influential figure.
The film explores Oppenheimer’s early academic years in Cambridge, his interactions with renowned physicists like Niels Bohr, and the profound impact these relationships had on his intellectual growth.
Oppenheimer’s return to the United States and his endeavors in expanding quantum physics research at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology showcase his dedication to scientific exploration.
The portrayal of Oppenheimer’s romantic relationships, particularly with Jean Tatlock, a political firebrand and member of the Communist Party USA, adds complexity to his character and the various influences in his life.
The film delves into Oppenheimer’s marriage to Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, played by Emily Blunt, and the challenges they faced as a couple amidst the pressures of his career and involvement in the Manhattan Project.
Oppenheimer’s role as the director of the Manhattan Engineer District in Los Alamos is a central focus, depicting his leadership and the camaraderie among the brilliant scientific minds working towards harnessing nuclear reactions.
The controversy surrounding Oppenheimer, particularly during the McCarthy era, is explored, shedding light on the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined his career and the impact on his personal life.
“Oppenheimer” presents a nuanced portrayal of Oppenheimer’s character, showcasing moments of brilliance and vulnerability, allowing the audience to witness the complexities of his emotional journey.
The film also highlights Oppenheimer’s friendships and romances, demonstrating the role they played in both supporting and troubling him throughout his life.

Scientific Pursuit and Ethical Dilemmas: The film delves into the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the profound ethical dilemmas faced by scientists, particularly regarding the development of the atomic bomb.
Complexity of Historical Figures: “Oppenheimer” explores the multifaceted nature of historical figures, portraying J. Robert Oppenheimer as a brilliant physicist with personal struggles and conflicting emotions.
Legacy and Historical Impact: The film examines the lasting legacy of Oppenheimer’s contributions to science and the far-reaching impact of his involvement in the Manhattan Project.
Moral Responsibility: Themes of moral responsibility are prominent, prompting reflection on the consequences of scientific advancements and the weight of decisions that shape history.
Personal Relationships and Human Connections: Oppenheimer’s personal relationships, both romantic and platonic, add depth to the narrative, emphasizing the significance of human connections amidst scientific pursuits.
Inner Conflict and Self-Reflection: The film delves into Oppenheimer’s inner conflict, reflecting on his journey of self-reflection and grappling with the implications of his work.
Time and Memory: Through its nonlinear narrative structure, “Oppenheimer” explores the significance of time and memory, weaving together past and present to offer a comprehensive portrait of the protagonist.
Brilliance and Fallibility of Humanity: Themes of brilliance and fallibility underscore the complexity of human nature, portraying Oppenheimer as a flawed yet remarkable individual.
The Impact of War: The film touches on the devastating impact of war, highlighting the role of scientific advancements in shaping historical events and the consequences on humanity.
Historical Accuracy and Context: “Oppenheimer” emphasizes historical accuracy and context, providing an insightful glimpse into a critical period of scientific and global history.
Existential Questions: The film prompts existential questions about the nature of scientific discovery, human progress, and the moral implications of groundbreaking achievements.
Intellectual Camaraderie and Collaboration: Themes of intellectual camaraderie and collaboration are explored as brilliant minds come together in pursuit of scientific breakthroughs.

“Oppenheimer” showcases Christopher Nolan’s unparalleled storytelling prowess, infusing the film with his signature style and cinematic brilliance.
The use of IMAX 65 mm and 65 mm large-format film adds a visual grandeur to the film, creating a breathtaking and immersive experience for the audience.
Nolan’s decision to shoot certain sections of the film in IMAX black-and-white film photography adds a striking contrast and depth to the narrative, emphasizing pivotal moments in Oppenheimer’s life.
The film’s nonlinear structure, with strands of Oppenheimer’s life intertwined like the double helix of DNA, highlights Nolan’s mastery in constructing complex narratives that captivate and challenge viewers.
By employing the words “fission” and “fusion” as motifs in the film, Nolan subtly weaves scientific and thematic elements into the storytelling, contributing to a more profound and thought-provoking cinematic experience.
“Oppenheimer” exemplifies Nolan’s commitment to historical accuracy and attention to detail, capturing the essence of the era and the scientific advancements that defined it.
The extensive practical effects used throughout the film contribute to the authenticity of the period and enhance the audience’s immersion in Oppenheimer’s world.
The lush color palette and high-contrast black-and-white sequences, coupled with Ludwig Göransson’s evocative musical score, create a multisensory experience that complements the film’s narrative.
Nolan’s direction and the stellar performances from the ensemble cast, led by Cillian Murphy’s fervent portrayal of Oppenheimer, elevate the film to a powerful exploration of a complex historical figure.

“Oppenheimer” culminates with a poignant and contemplative ending that leaves audiences reflecting on the profound impact of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life and work. As the film draws to a close, viewers witness Oppenheimer grappling with the weight of his contributions to the development of the atomic bomb, the cataclysmic force that reshaped the world.

The nonlinear narrative, skillfully crafted by Christopher Nolan, seamlessly weaves together Oppenheimer’s past and present, providing a deeper understanding of the man behind the historical figure. The juxtaposition of key moments from his academic years in Cambridge, his involvement in the Manhattan Project, and the post-war period where he faces the consequences of his actions, creates an emotionally charged portrayal of Oppenheimer’s journey.

Cillian Murphy’s riveting performance as Oppenheimer captures the inner turmoil and conflicted conscience of a man burdened by the moral implications of his scientific achievements. The film delves into Oppenheimer’s relationships, revealing the complexities of his personal life, from his romances with Jean Tatlock and his wife Kitty to his friendships with fellow scientists.

As the haunting musical score by Ludwig Göransson resonates, the film drives home the immense responsibility that comes with wielding scientific knowledge for military purposes. The devastation wrought by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is felt deeply, and Oppenheimer’s role in the creation of such destructive power is presented with unflinching honesty.

The concluding scenes find Oppenheimer facing a pivotal moment, where he confronts the moral consequences of his work during a security hearing in 1954. This poignant sequence showcases the internal struggle of a man who recognizes the weight of his actions and seeks to come to terms with his role in shaping the course of history.

In a thought-provoking denouement, the film offers no easy resolutions or absolutes. Instead, it leaves the audience with lingering questions about the nature of scientific progress, the ethical implications of groundbreaking discoveries, and the human capacity for both brilliance and fallibility.

In its entirety, “Oppenheimer” emerges as a cinematic tour de force, celebrating the complexity of the human spirit while delving into the intricacies of one man’s profound impact on the world. Christopher Nolan’s masterful direction and the exceptional performances of the cast combine to create a film that is as intellectually stimulating as it is emotionally resonant.

In conclusion, “Oppenheimer” stands as a cinematic masterpiece crafted by the visionary Christopher Nolan, weaving a captivating narrative that unravels the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. With meticulous attention to historical accuracy and a dedication to storytelling excellence, Nolan’s direction brings to life the complex web of personal and professional milestones that shaped Oppenheimer’s journey.

The film’s use of IMAX 65 mm and 65 mm large-format film, along with sections shot in IMAX black-and-white film photography, immerses the audience in a visually stunning experience, emphasizing the emotional depth of the story. Nolan’s nonlinear narrative structure, emblematic of the DNA’s double helix, enriches the exploration of Oppenheimer’s life, transcending traditional biographical portrayals.

Through brilliant performances from the ensemble cast, led by Cillian Murphy’s intense portrayal of Oppenheimer, the film delves into the man behind the scientific genius, revealing his vulnerabilities and internal conflicts. Oppenheimer’s role in the Manhattan Project is depicted with nuance, as the film navigates the ethical dilemmas and moral complexities faced by the brilliant minds that forged the atomic bomb.

“Oppenheimer” is not only a powerful biographical thriller but also a profound reflection on the consequences of scientific progress and the responsibility that accompanies it. By merging historical accuracy with cinematic brilliance, Christopher Nolan’s film prompts introspection on the legacy of those who have shaped our world and the impact of their actions.

As audiences embark on this cinematic journey into the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Oppenheimer” remains a testament to Nolan’s visionary storytelling and his ability to delve into the human spirit behind pivotal historical events. With critical acclaim and box office success, the film solidifies itself as an enduring exploration of a complex individual whose contributions forever altered the course of history.

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Christopher nolan's oppenheimer : release date, trailer, cast & more, get the inside scoop on oppenheimer learn about the plot, cast, release date, imax format, and watch the trailer on rotten tomatoes..

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Billboards and movie theater pop-ups across Los Angeles have been ticking down for months now: Christopher Nolan’ s epic account of J. Robert Oppenheimer , the father of the atomic bomb, is nearing an explosive release on July 21, 2023.

Nolan movies are always incredibly secretive, twists locked alongside totems behind safe doors, actors not spilling an ounce of Earl Grey tea. But there are always curtains to pull to glimpse the magic behind the prestige, even with a Nolan film based on real events. So with more than five months left until IMAX theaters are packed to the brim, here’s everything we know about Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer :

Behind the Film

Christopher Nolan on the set of Interstellar

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©Paramount Pictures)

Christopher Nolan returns after three years and Tenet’ s rocky pandemic-delayed release for his 12th feature film, Oppenheimer . The biopic about the infamous theoretical physicist represents a number of transformations for Nolan’s career. First and foremost, the film is his first with Universal Pictures following his dramatic split with his previous studio partner, Warner Bros., which had released all of his films since Insomnia . (Paramount and Warner Bros. shared distribution on Interstellar .)

In 2021, WB opted to debut their entire feature slate in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously . In response, Nolan, an avid defender of the theatrical experience, called them “ the worst streaming service .” Numerous studios — Sony, Paramount, Apple among them — engaged in a war to land production and distribution for Oppenheimer . Universal acquiesced to Nolan’s conditions, which included total creative control and a traditional theatrical window, and won out at the end of the day.

(Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)

Nolan’s production team has solidified, but slightly changed, too. Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson , who is only a Tony away from an EGOT, returns after his first collaboration with Nolan on Tenet , furthering the question of whether Nolan’s famed partnership with Hans Zimmer is over or just on pause. Oppenheimer will mark the fourth Nolan picture shot by Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema , who can literally carry an IMAX camera on his shoulders . And visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson ( Mad Max: Fury Road , Dunkirk , Tenet ) tag-teamed with long-time Nolan special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher to simulate the nuclear tests. (More on those later.)

The newcomers, however, are 45-year veteran costume designer Ellen Mirojnick ( Behind the Candelabra , The Greatest Showman , Bridgerton ) and production designer Ruth De Jong, who worked with Van Hoytema and Universal on Nope .

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer (2023)

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©Universal Pictures)

Roughly 20 years after Cillian Murphy’ s screen test for Nolan’s Batman Begins , which was so entrancing to the director that it led to Murphy’s casting as the villainous Scarecrow, the Irish actor finally steps into a leading role for one of his greatest cinematic partners. And if the trailer is any indication, with close-up after close-up, Murphy’s hypnotic eyes will be the window into one of the most complex minds in human history.

Matt Damon also steps up from secret role in Interstellar to mustached general Leslie Groves Jr. And the reunions run deep overall, as Oppenheimer features Casey Affleck ( Interstellar ), Kenneth Branagh ( Dunkirk , Tenet ), James D’Arcy ( Dunkirk ), Matthew Modine ( The Dark Knight Rises ), David Dastmalchian ( The Dark Knight ), and Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight Trilogy) as President Harry S. Truman.

Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt

(Photo by Emma McIntyre, Karwai Tang, Mondadori Portfolio, Kevin Mazur/Getty Images)

It seems that there wasn’t a place for a return of Harry Styles , but Nolan is tapping into younger audiences through Oscar nominee Florence Pugh . And there’s an unexpected additional avenue into the social media generation: Josh Peck , whose casting echoes Topher Grace’ s appearance in Interstellar , begging the question of whether the Nolan household is a fan of early 2000s sitcoms.

The remainder of the cast is a who’s who of Hollywood stars. Robert Downey Jr. , Rami Malek , and Emily Blunt are the remaining big names, while Alex Wolff , Dane DeHaan , and Devon Bostick bring a bit of the indie darling vibe. And then there’s a deluge of That Guys, headlined by premiere That Guy Jason Clarke , but also including young Han Solo Alden Ehrenreich and Josh Hartnett , who, like Murphy, was nearly cast as Batman but turned down the role .

Perhaps the most tantalizing piece of the acting puzzle, however, is Tom Conti as Albert Einstein. The casting was not heavily reported on, but then, in the IMAX exclusive trailer ahead of Avatar: The Way of Water , bam, there was Einstein, a bombshell cameo to rival the obsessive superhero cameo culture.

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

At first glance, the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, presents itself as a departure from the Nolan norm. He’s never done a biopic. He’s only directed two period films, both more explicitly in his wheelhouse. And he’s not usually one to tell a story based on real events. (The exception, Dunkirk , has close personal ties to Nolan’s British upbringing.) But upon closer inspection, the film is a culmination of Nolan’s most prominent interests.

Nolan is principally a materialist. In The Dark Knight trilogy, he envisions Batman as empowered by military technology and Gotham as simply Chicago. In Interstellar , his sci-fi is simply an expansion of what the world’s top theoretical physicists are discussing. In The Prestige , the fantastical takes a backseat and the big twist is that — spoilers! — there was simply a twin brother. In that lens, it only makes sense that Nolan would make a film about the man who made the most powerful object in human history.

Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer (2023)

Nuclear weapons, in particular, have been present in Nolan films for over a decade. The Dark Knight Rises revolves around a neutron bomb. When promoting Interstellar , the director told The Daily Beast that such weapons are one of his greatest fears. And Tenet even namedrops Oppenheimer. When Oppenheimer producer Charles Roven (The Dark Knight trilogy) suggested the book to Nolan, it’s easy to see why the director signed on so quickly.

And while this is Nolan’s first biopic, the director nearly made one about Howard Hughes two decades ago. Jim Carrey was to star and Nolan calls it “the best script I’ve ever written,” but it was scrapped once Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator went into production. Nolan put many of those thematic interests into Bruce Wayne. And if certain lines in the IMAX exclusive trailer are any indication — “You’re a dilettante, you’re a womanizer, unstable, theatrical, neurotic” — some may have also found a place in Oppenheimer .

IMAX and Explosions

Oppenheimer will feature footage in color and in black-and-white, harkening back to the director’s breakout film, Memento . But the IMAX-obsessed Nolan encountered an immediate technical hurdle: no one had ever shot on IMAX film in black-and-white before .

“So we challenged the people at Kodak and Fotokem to make this work for us,” Nolan told Total Film. “And they stepped up. For the first time ever, we were able to shoot IMAX film in black-and-white. And the results were thrilling and extraordinary.”

However, no hurdle would be greater for the practical-forward director than simulating the Trinity Test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. Details are sparse, but Nolan confirmed to Total Film that his team accomplished it without CGI. Given how unprecedented even a tiny fraction of an atomic explosion would be for a film production, one must ask if miniatures and/or forced perspective were used. But as with all Nolan movies, only time will tell.

Oppenheimer opens in theaters on July 21, 2023. Get your tickets now .

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Oppenheimer: Everything we know about the atomic bomb creator's epic new biopic

Christopher Nolan’s next movie will study the man who developed the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Here’s the release date, plot, trailers & more.

A promotional image for the Oppenheimer movie. Cillian Murphy (playing J. Robert Oppenheimer) stands in front of an explosion.

Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer?

What was the manhattan project, oppenheimer release date, what is the plot of oppenheimer, oppenheimer trailers, oppenheimer cast, oppenheimer director, writer, and crew.

This summer, renowned filmmaker Christopher Nolan returns to the big screen with "Oppenheimer," his second movie based on real wartime events — the first was "Dunkirk" (2017). This time around, however, he's not taking us to the frontlines of World War II, but instead dealing with the complicated process behind the creation of the first nuclear weapons .

The biopic follows the "father of the atomic bomb," J. Robert Oppenheimer. It's being marketed as a cautionary tale of sorts and may be a good reminder of the astounding destructive power of nuclear weapons .

A black-and-white photograph of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist. During World War II, he became the first director of the Los Alamos Laboratory — established by the Manhattan Project — and led the team that created the atomic bomb. He was among those who observed the Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb successfully detonated.

Oppenheimer later became the chairman of the U.S. government's General Atomic Commission and leading advisor on the future of nuclear weapons, according to the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory . He advised against the accelerated development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon that's even more powerful than the atomic bomb .

In 1954, the U.S. government's Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance with accusations surrounding his loyalty and associations with communist sympathizers. However, in 2022, five decades after his death, the U.S. formally nullified that decision and affirmed Oppenheimer's loyalty , The New York Times reported.

The Manhattan Project was established in World War II with the objective of producing the first nuclear weapons before Nazi Germany did. While the project was spread across several different locations, the name "Manhattan Project" stuck after an early component of the work began at the U.S. Army's Manhattan District.

The project led to the detonation of an implosion-type bomb during the Trinity test, conducted at New Mexico's Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on July 16, 1945. A month later, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . These are still the only times nuclear weapons have been used in war.

A behind the scenes photograph of the Trinity bomb from the movie Oppenheimer.

"Oppenheimer" is scheduled to be released on July 21, 2023, in IMAX 70 mm, vertical 70 mm, and 35 mm.

Christopher Nolan's Syncopy Inc. co-produced the movie alongside Atlas Entertainment and Universal Pictures. Unless plans change, the film will hit movie theaters on the same day as Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" — from Warner Bros. Pictures.

A photograph of Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss in the movie Oppenheimer.

The movie follows the life and biggest achievements of J. Robert Oppenheimer, putting the main focus on the creation of the atomic bomb and his pivotal role in spearheading the Manhattan Project.

Rumours suggest that the movie will also deal with his personal life during those events and his connections to civilians linked to the Communist Party. Other crucial figures in the development of nuclear weapons for the U.S., such as Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, are also expected to heavily feature.

Oppenheimer | Official Trailer - YouTube

Universal Pictures released an online trailer for "Oppenheimer" on Dec. 19, 2022, which amps up the wonder behind the scientific breakthrough. A second, more ominous trailer played exclusively in front of IMAX screenings of "Avatar: The Way of Water."

We got a longer, more detailed trailer on May 8. This three-minute long trailer gives us a better look at the cast and storyline, starting with the race against the Nazis to build the bomb, before hinting at the ramifications of success.

"Oppenheimer" may have one of the most star-studded casts in recent memory. Actors have been lining up to work with Christopher Nolan for years, but the prospect of making a biopic that could earn numerous awards made this project even more attractive for Hollywood's finest.

The cast is led by Cillian Murphy (J. Robert Oppenheimer), Emily Blunt (Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer), Matt Damon (Leslie Groves), Robert Downey Jr. (Lewis Strauss), Florence Pugh (Jean Tatlock), and Rami Malek in an unknown role.

The supporting cast includes Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Modine, Jack Quaid, David Dastmalchian, Jason Clarke, Josh Peck, James D'Arcy, Gary Oldman, Olivia Thirlby, and Casey Affleck, among others.

A photograph from the set of the movie Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan wrote and directed "Oppenheimer." The script is based on "American Prometheus," (Knopf, 2005), a biography of the real-life Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Nolan produced the film alongside longtime partners Emma Thomas and Charles Roven. He also reteamed with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema ("Interstellar," "Tenet"), editor Jennifer Lame ("Tenet"), and composer Ludwig Göransson ("Tenet") to cook up the movie's audiovisual feel.

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Fran Ruiz is an entertainment freelancer and massive dinosaur nerd. He has a BA of English Studies, focusing on English Literature, from the University of Malaga, in Spain, as well as a Master's Degree in English Studies, Multilingual and Intercultural Communication. On top of writing features and other longform articles for Live Science & Space.com since 2021, he is a frequent collaborator of VG247 and other gaming sites. He also serves as associate editor over at Star Wars News Net and its sister site, Movie News Net.

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Oppenheimer

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Watch Oppenheimer with a subscription on Peacock, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Oppenheimer marks another engrossing achievement from Christopher Nolan that benefits from Murphy's tour-de-force performance and stunning visuals.

Oppenheimer is an intelligent movie about an important topic that's never less than powerfully acted and incredibly entertaining.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Christopher Nolan

Cillian Murphy

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt

Kitty Oppenheimer

Robert Downey Jr.

Lewis Strauss

Leslie Groves Jr.

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J. Robert Oppenheimer

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is often called the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the first nuclear weapon during World War II.

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Latest News: Oppenheimer Movie Wins 2024 Golden Globe for Best Drama Motion Picture

On January 7, producer Emma Thomas accepted the 2024 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Drama for Oppenheimer , the 2023 biopic which explores the life of famed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb through the Manhattan Project.

The summer blockbuster put the little-known yet highly influential scientist on the map as it grossed more than $950 million at the global box office. You can rent or purchase Oppenheimer on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV+ , the Google Play store , Vudu , or YouTube . It’s expected to eventually stream on Peacock , though no plans have been announced.

Watch Oppenheimer on Amazon Prime Video , Apple TV+ , or Vudu .

Quick Facts

Early life, education, and professorships, the manhattan project, life after the atomic bomb, relationship with jean tatlock, wife and children, oppenheimer in movies and tv, who was j. robert oppenheimer.

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer served as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the development of the atomic bomb. After the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer was selected to administer a laboratory to carry out the Manhattan Project, the program that developed the first nuclear weapon during World War II. After resigning from his post in 1945, he became the chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. Prior to John F. Kennedy ’s assassination in 1963, the president announced Oppenheimer would receive the Enrico Fermi Award for his achievements in physics. President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him the award that December. The “Father of the Atomic Bomb” died from cancer at the age of 62 in 1967.

FULL NAME: Julius Robert Oppenheimer BORN: April 22, 1904 DIED: February 18, 1967 BIRTHPLACE: New York, New York SPOUSE: Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer (1940-1967) CHILDREN: Peter and Katherine ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus

a man in a suit and tie kneels next to his son, who wears a white outfit and holds a bucket

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, in New York City. His German Jewish parents were Julius Oppenheimer, a rich textile importer, and Ella (née Friedman), a painter. Both were immigrants.

After graduating from Harvard University, Oppenheimer sailed to England and enrolled at the University of Cambridge, where he began his atomic research at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1925. Oppenheimer experienced bouts of depression throughout his life, telling his brother Frank: “It is occasionally true that I need physics more than friends.”

Oppenheimer was miserable at Cambridge and found laboratory work uninteresting, preferring theoretical physics rather than experimental, according to American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Oppenheimer had such a poor relationship with his Cambridge tutor, Patrick Blackett, that at one point Oppenheimer left an apple doused with noxious chemicals on Blackett’s desk, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life by Abraham Pais and ‎Robert P. Crease. Blackett wasn’t harmed, and Oppenheimer avoided discipline only with the intervention of his parents.

j robert oppenheimer wears a suit and tie and stands in front of a chalkboard with scientific problems written on it

In 1926, he teamed with Max Born at Göttingen University, where he met a host of prominent physicists, including Niels Bohr . He received his doctorate at Göttingen while also developing what became known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, an important contribution to quantum molecular theory.

Oppenheimer held teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology, and did important research in such fields at theoretical astronomy, nuclear physics, quantum electrodynamics, and more, according to A Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists and Inventors in American Film and TV Since 1930 by A. Bowdoin Van Riper.

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Oppenheimer became politically active in the 1930s and agreed with Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard that the Nazis could develop a nuclear weapon. Following the 1939 invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer was selected to administer a laboratory to carry out the Manhattan Project, a U.S. Army experiment aimed at harnessing atomic energy for military purposes.

The choice of Oppenheimer surprised some due to his left-wing politics, lack of leadership experience, and the fact he had never won a Nobel Prize. However, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project, felt Oppenheimer had an “overweening ambition” that would serve him well in the position, according to Life and Times of the Atomic Bomb by Albert Berger.

Oppenheimer led the scientific end of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, beginning in 1942. The project, which grew from a few hundred people to more than 6,000 by 1945, was populated by many scientists who had escaped fascist regimes in Europe, according to American Prometheus . Their mission was to explore a newly documented fission process involving uranium-235, with which they hoped to make a nuclear bomb before Adolf Hitler could develop one. The project was initially allotted $6,000 by the U.S. government, but by the time the work culminated in 1945, the budget had grown to $2 billion.

a man in a military uniform and a man in a suit and tie listen as j robert oppenheimer, also wearing a suit and tie, points at a photo of the atomic bomb detonation

The work of Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists led to the world’s first nuclear explosion in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The detonation was given the code name “Trinity,” inspired by a poem by John Donne . While witnessing the explosion, Oppenheimer recalled a verse from the Bhagavad Gita that read, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one,” according to the book Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists by Robert Jungk. More famously, he later said he also reflected upon another Bhagavad Gita verse: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer was initially pleased with the atomic bomb, with physicist Isidor Rabi saying of him: “I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car. His walk was like High Noon… This kind of strut. He had done it,” according to Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray Monk.

But Oppenheimer’s feelings of elation following Trinity and the bombing of Hiroshima three weeks later changed after the bombing of Nagasaki, which he found unnecessary from a military perspective. During a White House meeting with Harry S. Truman , Oppenheimer famously claimed to have “blood on his hands,” a comment that infuriated the president . Although the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings effectively ended World War II, the weapons’s devastation prompted Oppenheimer to argue against its further development, and he resigned from his post that same year. Ultimately, his work for the Manhattan Project earned him the enduring nickname “father of the atomic bomb.”

j robert oppenheimer wearings a suit and tie, and holds a pipe in his mouth

The Manhattan Project was top secret until after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Oppenheimer became a household name. He returned to the California Institute of Technology but found he had little desire to each anymore. He went on to become chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb test in 1949 came earlier than Americans had expected, increasing pressure for the United States to develop the more powerful hydrogen bomb, but Oppenheimer opposed this for practical and ethnical reasons, according to American Prometheus . Truman, however, decided to press forward with the weapon’s development anyway.

Oppenheimer’s shocking opposition to the bomb led to accusations that he was a Communist supporter. In 1954, the AEC held a security hearing regarding Oppenheimer, during which he was suspended from secret nuclear research and stripped of his security clearance. This served as a personal and professional humiliation for Oppenheimer, effectively ending his role in government and policy.

However, his reputation was partially rehabilitated in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy announced Oppenheimer would receive the Enrico Fermi Award, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century by David Cassidy. After Kennedy’s assassination , President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the award to Oppenheimer that December.

Oppenheimer continued to support international control of atomic energy in his later years.

preview for Jean Tatlock: The Woman Oppenheimer Loved

Oppenheimer was known for his romantic relationship with Jean Tatlock , a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, while Oppenheimer was a young physics professor there. Tatlock is credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical communist politics, something that haunted him later in his career. Although Oppenheimer felt passionately toward Tatlock and reportedly proposed to her twice, they broke up before Oppenheimer joined the Manhattan Project, and Tatlock died by suicide in January 1944.

katherine oppeneimer stands next to daughter, katherine, and overlooks an atrium where son, peter, points something of interest out

In 1939, Oppenheimer met Katherine “Kitty” Puening, a Berkeley student who also had communist ties. The two married in 1940, and they had two children: Peter, who was born in 1941, and Katherine “Toni,” who was born in 1944.

Working as a biologist and botanist, Kitty became an alcoholic after her husband became a celebrity for his role in the Manhattan Project, according to American Prometheus . Kitty died of an embolism in 1972 years after Oppenheimer’s own death.

A chain smoker, Oppenheimer died of throat cancer on February 18, 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey.

In December 2022, 55 years after Oppenheimer’s death, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm nullified the 1954 decision to revoke his national security clearance.

Oppenheimer has been portrayed in several films, plays, and other works of media. A BBC television serial Oppenheimer was released in 1980, starring Sam Waterston as the famed physicist. It won three BAFTA Television Awards. That year also saw the release of The Day After Trinity , a documentary about Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and won a Peabody Award.

Dwight Schultz portrayed Oppenheimer in the film Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), and David Strathairn played him in the television movie Day One , also released in 1989. Filmmaker Christopher Nolan directs 2023’s Oppenheimer movie, in which Cillian Murphy plays the famed physicist.

I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.
Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.

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Colin McEvoy joined the Biography.com staff in 2023, and before that had spent 16 years as a journalist, writer, and communications professional. He is the author of two true crime books: Love Me or Else and Fatal Jealousy . He is also an avid film buff, reader, and lover of great stories.

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“Oppenheimer” Is Ultimately a History Channel Movie with Fancy Editing

By Richard Brody

Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Leaving the theatre after seeing “ Oppenheimer ,” I was tempted to call it a movie-length Wikipedia article. But, after a look online, I realized I was giving Wikipedia too little credit—or Christopher Nolan, the movie’s writer and director, too much. A simple fact-heavy article about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist whose leadership of the Manhattan Project, during the Second World War, produced the atom bomb , turns out to offer more complexity and more enticing detail than Nolan’s script does. And it has more to say about the movie’s essential themes—the ironies and perils that arise when science, ambition, and political power mix—than the movie itself does.

Nolan’s bio-pic, three hours long and based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning biography “ American Prometheus ,” charts the two main strands of Oppenheimer’s life: the scientific work that made his career and the leftist sympathies that, thanks to the country’s postwar anti-Communist crusade, were to prove his undoing . We meet Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) as a student making the grand tour of European science capitals, in the nineteen-twenties—Cambridge, Göttingen, Leiden—before returning to the United States and taking up joint appointments at Caltech and Berkeley. At Berkeley, he becomes a union organizer and donates to the anti-Fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War. (The money is conveyed via a Communist-affiliated group.) He hangs out with Communist Party members, including his brother Frank (Dylan Arnold), also a physicist, and Frank’s wife, Jackie (Emma Dumont). Although not himself a Party member, he is spied on by the F.B.I. He meets a Communist medical student named Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and they begin an ill-fated relationship.

In 1942, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), who is in charge of the Army’s effort to develop a nuclear bomb, taps Oppenheimer to oversee the program. Political suspicion clouds Oppenheimer’s name, but Groves vouches for him. Now Oppenheimer’s scientific life and his political one collide. He proves himself a master not only of the scientific aspects of his assignment but also of its administrative and political dimensions. But, once the Red Scare takes hold, his eminence, his proximity to known Communists, and his postwar efforts to prevent a nuclear-arms race make him an easy target. (He was stripped of his security clearance in 1954.)

The movie is structured as a sort of mosaic. Deftly edited by Jennifer Lame, it intercuts the various periods of Oppenheimer’s life—rise, struggle, fall, aftermath—continually connecting the early leftism and later pacifism with the tribulations during the McCarthy era. It’s natural to figure that such a fractured chronology would have a destabilizing effect—Nolan directed “Memento,” after all—but, in fact, the temporal scheme makes “Oppenheimer” less complex rather than more. The insistence on correlation means that events get reduced to their function within a larger morality tale. Nolan cuts his scenes to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and details that don’t fit—contradictions, subtleties, even little random peculiarities—get left out, and, with them, the feeling of experience, whether the protagonist’s or the viewer’s. What remains is a movie to be solved rather than lived.

The crux of “Oppenheimer” is, of course, the tension between the abstractions of physics and the brutal exigencies of war, between the freewheeling researcher and the project manager pursuing worldly goals, between the man of principle and the man whose work is directly responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. Oppenheimer, who is Jewish as well as a leftist, fervently devotes himself to the creation of an atomic bomb because he knows that Nazi Germany is far ahead in developing one and he assumes that Hitler won’t hesitate to use it. Once Germany surrenders—in May, 1945—he gets a shock: work on the bomb not only continues but accelerates. This mission drift poses a moral crisis for Oppenheimer that determines the course of the rest of the film, and of his life. It becomes clear that joining the Manhattan Project has left him tragically compromised, committed to creating a weapon of unparalleled destructiveness while having no say in how it will be used.

Then again, the film is so intent on making Oppenheimer an icon of conflicted conscience that it pays little attention to his character over all. He was a renowned aesthete with a bearing so charismatic that his students would try to emulate it, but we get little more than a couple of artsy name-drops to suggest that he has any cultural life at all. The “overweening ambition” that Groves saw in Oppenheimer is never in evidence, nor is there any mention of his chilling readiness to go along with a plan (one that was never put into action) to poison German food supplies with radioactive strontium. There’s no glimpse of the ailing Oppenheimer, who was suffering from tuberculosis and joint pain even while running Los Alamos. It doesn’t help that Murphy portrays Oppenheimer as wraithlike and haunted, a cipher, a black hole of experience who bears his burdens blankly as he’s buffeted by his circumstances but gives off no energy of his own. The performance, no less than the script, reduces the protagonist to an abstraction created to be analyzed. “Oppenheimer” reveals itself to be, in essence, a History Channel movie. Detached from the rich particulars of personality and thought, the moral dilemmas and historical stakes that Oppenheimer faces are reduced to an interconnected set of trolley problems—with the historical context flattened to green-screen backgrounds.

This moral reckoning is oddly underplayed in the dramatic action of the film, largely because of one specific aesthetic conceit of Nolan’s. After the bombing of Hiroshima , Oppenheimer is brought to speak to a raucously triumphal assembly of Los Alamos employees. His speech betrays no misgivings, but, while he’s at the podium, Nolan shows what Oppenheimer imagines: overwhelming flashes of destruction, conflagrations that burn his audience to cinders. Representing conscience in this way, wordlessly, enables Nolan to fill the screen with visual fizz, but it doesn’t convey the presence, the inner experience, of a true moral reckoning. That’s because images alone—at least, those which Nolan offers here—can’t suggest the interior debates that must be pulsing through such a conflicted mind at this ghastly moment. Perhaps, in a movie that told its story while ranging further into the realm of visual imagination, the decision would come off as an aesthetic commitment. But, given the plethora of dialogue in “Oppenheimer,” Nolan’s choice to convey Oppenheimer’s inner life solely in images comes off as merely a cinematic prejudice. In “Memento,” Nolan was sufficiently interested in his protagonist’s thoughts to let us hear them, as voice-over; all the more puzzling, then, that we are granted no such access to the inner monologue of someone as literate, reflective, and fascinating as Oppenheimer. Although the movie is unusually and even gratifyingly talky, moving most of its action ahead by way of dialogue, we almost never hear Oppenheimer speak about his guilt—not even in intimate discussions with his wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt). The key moment in which he does verbalize misgivings is an encounter with Harry S. Truman, after the end of the war: Oppenheimer admits to feeling as if he has blood on his hands; Truman derisively offers him a handkerchief and then dismisses him as a “crybaby.” The scene is powerful, but its power is limited by Nolan’s failure to convey Oppenheimer’s opinion of the Commander-in-Chief who’d ordered the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The extended scenes of the closed-door security-committee hearing in which Oppenheimer’s political record and personal life are subjected to cruelly intrusive scrutiny come off as a scourging that he endures with a sense of self-punishment. Other scenes, of his persecutor Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), a Cabinet nominee, facing his own intrusive inquiries at a Senate committee hearing, evoke the Machiavellian realm of power into which Oppenheimer, naïvely confident in the wisdom of his mission, has ventured. Yet these notions, too, are unexplored from Oppenheimer’s own perspective. Rather than illuminating him or his times, the scenes seem pitched to spark post-screening debate, to seek an importance beyond the experiences and ideas of the characters.

A hallmark of Nolan’s method—as in such auteur-defining big-budget works as “Inception” and “ Interstellar ”—is to take the complexities of science, turn them into sensationalist science fiction, and then reinfuse the result with brow-furrowing seriousness. The last step is often achieved by means of chronological or visual intricacies that render objectivity as deep subjective strangeness; strip away such effects, however, and one sees characters conceived in simplistically sentimental terms that are pure melodrama. In “Oppenheimer,” sentimentality and melodrama are in plentiful supply, but visuals less so, with the exception of Oppenheimer’s visions of conflagration. Even these are strangely subdued, generic images of churning fire standing in for the destructive power of atomic weapons—and it is tempting to imagine that Nolan is, in spite of himself, admitting to the incommensurability of cinematic representation for the historic catastrophe of nuclear devastation. For long stretches of the film, Nolan’s direction is a merely literal depiction of actors dispensing dialogue with efficiency but without flair; if his name weren’t attached, the direction might well be ascribed to a serial-television journeyman.

What’s missing, above all, from Nolan’s connect-the-dots version of Oppenheimer’s life is the kind of utterly outlandish detail in which that life abounded. For instance, Nolan shows Oppenheimer, as a student at Cambridge, injecting potassium cyanide into an apple belonging to a professor who humiliates and punishes him for poor laboratory technique—apparently to no consequence. Later, Oppenheimer lets on, in a quick aside, that he was forced into psychoanalysis as a result. In fact, he was threatened with criminal charges and with expulsion, and only the pleas of his father, a prosperous businessman, spared him. In the movie, this reckless, potentially deadly whim comes out of nowhere, but there are plenty of other episodes in Oppenheimer’s life to suggest that a truly violent personality lurked within, as when he physically attacked a friend who announced plans to marry. Nolan shows Oppenheimer to be an eager class participant in his physics tour of Europe; in fact, he was an obnoxiously aggressive one, whose fellow-students signed a petition demanding that the professor silence him. Throughout his life, he was highly mercurial—expansive and sociable and whimsical when the occasion demanded it, as at Los Alamos, where he took a comic role in a play and was an enthusiastic party host.

It wouldn’t have taken a six-hour miniseries to show Oppenheimer from more angles and do justice to his range of character: the movie is as sluggish as if Nolan were underlining the script’s most salient passages onscreen, and, with a more vigorous pace, it could have amplified the script without adding a minute of screen time. As it is, the paucity of teeming, loose-ended details is rendered all the more dismaying by contrast with the movie’s finest touches—particularly one involving Oppenheimer’s brief meeting with the elderly Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). Oppenheimer has come to head up the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, where Einstein has been seemingly put out to pasture, and the pair discuss guilt and fame, faded glory and the passing of time. In terms of the film’s plot, the scene is insignificant, but the lightning flash of worldly wisdom it offers is exactly what most of the movie fails to give us. Unfortunately, Nolan parsimoniously withholds it to the end—like a banknote that, thanks to the inflation of the rest of the movie, has lost most of its value by the time it’s used. “Oppenheimer” sacrifices much of its dramatic force to the importance of its subject, and to Nolan’s pride at having tackled it—which is to say, to his own self-importance. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the affiliation of the Institute for Advanced Study.

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'Oppenheimer' fact v. fiction: What the movie got right and wrong according to a nuclear historian

Warning: Minor spoilers ahead for Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer", which has 13 Oscar nominations .
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an immensely complex figure, and the movie's based on a biography of him.
While the movie is historically accurate in many ways, there are a few bits of fiction mixed in.

Christopher Nolan's movie "Oppenheimer" tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer . As the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in the 1940s, the physicist is known as the "father of the atomic bomb ."

Though mainly focused on a handful of years of his life, the film packs in a good deal of science, politics, and romantic relationships .

"Historians sometimes call him a complicated figure," Alex Wellerstein , a historian of science and nuclear technology and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, said of Oppenheimer. "You cannot come up with a simple version of him."

Heavily based on " American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer " by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, the movie stays pretty faithful to the man's eventful, unusual life.

But that doesn't mean there aren't some exaggerations or inconsistencies. Wellerstein helped us separate fact from fiction in "Oppenheimer."

Fact: Oppenheimer did try to poison his tutor (but Niels Bohr wasn't there)

While studying at Cambridge in the mid-1920s, Oppenheimer was able to meet many important physicists, including Patrick Blackett, "whom I liked very much," he later wrote.

In "American Prometheus," Bird and Sherwin write that Oppenheimer admired Blackett, who would become his tutor. But the future Nobel Prize winner was a practical, hands-on physicist who pushed his student to do lab work that Oppenheimer found difficult. He preferred going to lectures and reading.

During his time in England, Oppenheimer was living in a "miserable hole" of an apartment and would roll around on the floor in agony some days. Finally, he got so fed up that he put chemicals in Blackett's apple. Oppenheimer's grandson has disputed the incident, saying there's no record of it.

In the movie, Niels Bohr nearly takes a bite out of the apple, but that scene was invented for dramatic effect. (It was Ernest Rutherford who introduced Oppenheimer to Bohr.)

One of Oppenheimer's biographers wrote that Cambridge officials learned of the incident, and Oppenheimer's father convinced them not to press charges. Instead, Oppenheimer was put on probation and had to see a psychiatrist .

Fact: Oppenheimer did deliver a lecture in Dutch

According to "American Prometheus," "Oppenheimer astonished his peers by giving a lecture in Dutch," only six weeks after he arrived in Leiden, Holland.

"I don't think it was very good Dutch, but it was appreciated," Oppenheimer said .

He had a short-lived relationship with a woman there, who may have helped him learn the language, biographer and physicist Abraham Pais wrote.

In the movie, it only takes Oppenheimer six weeks to learn Dutch. But Wellerstein points out that he could have spent time learning the language ahead of time. That summer, Oppenheimer spent a couple of weeks in New Mexico recuperating from tuberculosis.

In between reading Baudelaire and e.e. cummings, who's to say he wasn't brushing up on his Dutch?

Fact: The Oppenheimers had Haakon Chevalier raise their son, Peter, for a while

In 1941, when Peter Oppenheimer was just two months old, Robert and Kitty left him with Haakon and Barbara Chevalier for two months, according to "American Prometheus." Robert explained that his wife was exhausted, and the two went to the family's ranch, Perro Caliente, near Los Pinos, New Mexico.

But the movie links the arrangement with Kitty's drinking by showing Robert dropping Peter off after a scene in which Kitty is drunk and frustrated with having to care for the baby all day, alone.

Fact: Germany wasn't ready to build an atomic bomb

In September 1943, Niels Bohr made a narrow escape from Nazi-occupied Denmark via Sweden. A few months later, Bohr arrived in Los Alamos, ready to tell Oppenheimer and the rest about his 1941 meeting with German physicist Werner Heisenberg .

In the movie, after peppering Bohr with questions, Oppenheimer is satisfied that Heisenberg took a "wrong turn" somewhere, and the Germans were sufficiently far enough behind the Americans if they were indeed making an atomic bomb .

It's a simplified version of reality, but it's mainly correct, Wellerstein said. "They do have a very small-scale nuclear reactor project, which is never going to make a bomb at its present size," he said.

But it wouldn't be until nearly a year later, in November 1944 , that the Allies would find definitive proof that the Germans were still in the early stages of development.

Fact: Oppenheimer mocked Strauss about isotopes

Physicist David Hill testified at a Senate hearing for Lewis Strauss' nomination to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Cabinet. He said that most scientists would prefer Strauss no longer be in government, as "Oppenheimer" depicts.

But it was David Inglis, chairman of the Federation of American Scientists, who said Strauss, out of "personal vindictiveness," had targeted Oppenheimer, Time magazine reported. Inglis also discussed Strauss' opposition to shipping isotopes to Europe for medical purposes.

Much is made in the film about Oppenheimer mocking Strauss' concerns, saying that "you can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy " and that isotopes were less important than electronic devices but "more important than a sandwich." The line comes from an Atomic Energy Committee joint committee session in 1949.

What Oppenheimer actually said was isotopes were "less important than, let us say, vitamins, somewhere in between." The line did get laughs.

Likely fact: Oppenheimer estimated only 20,000 people would die from an atomic bomb

When discussing the potential effects of the atomic bomb in the movie, Oppenheimer estimates the number of dead at 20,000 to 30,000.

"I've never seen anything that suggested they had any real methodology," Wellerstein said. He notes that it's hard to find references to that number beyond physicist Arthur Compton saying that Oppenheimer told him he thought the number would be around 20,000.

Fact: A big thunderstorm delayed the Trinity Test

It wasn't just for dramatics that "Oppenheimer" depicted a heavy thunderstorm as the scientists and military rushed to prep the bomb for the Trinity Test .

It was initially scheduled for 4 a.m. and was pushed an hour and a half because of the weather .

Oppenheimer makes an oracle-like prediction in the film that the storm will pass, but there was a meteorology team, led by Jack Hubbard, who said the same thing in real life.

Army Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves apparently threatened to hang Hubbard if his weather predictions were wrong, but the skies did clear.

Fact: Feynman did watch the Trinity Test from behind a windshield

Physicist Richard Feynman recalled getting into a truck to watch the atomic bomb test from behind a windshield because he said it would protect him from the ultraviolet radiation.

"I'm probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye," he said, while everyone else watched through dark glasses.

Fact: Oppenheimer never said publicly he regretted dropping the bomb

Strauss rages in the film that Oppenheimer would "do it all over" and never said he regretted dropping the atomic bomb.

"That's 100% true" that Oppenheimer never said anything like that publicly, Wellerstein said. But he wishes the film depicted someone else saying it, instead of "the guy who you're painting as a totally unreliable snake."

Fact: Oppenheimer was a dilettante

When listing the concerns fellow scientists raised about Oppenheimer being named director of the Los Alamos lab in the movie, Groves calls Oppenheimer a "dilettante" who " couldn't run a hamburger stand ".

Wellerstein calls that a fair assessment. Oppenheimer would often jump from topic to topic, depending on what his students were working on.

"Oppenheimer was interested in everything," Robert Serber, one of his students, said. A single session might include a discussion of electrodynamics, cosmic rays , and nuclear physics.

If it weren't for the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer would likely be best known for bolstering theoretical physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of his students went on to do important work, including David Bohm, Philip Morrison, and Willis Lamb.

"That's a big legacy," Wellerstein said.

Fact: Oppenheimer was ahead of his time on black holes

The day Hitler invaded Poland, Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder published an important paper about "heavy stars" running out of fuel and collapsing. The paper followed up on the work of several other scientists , but Oppenheimer didn't publish on the topic again.

Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne describes how "truly strange" other scientists found this concept at the time. Even John Wheeler , who popularized the term " black hole " in 1967, fought against the idea in the 1950s.

Roger Penrose described black holes in 1964, for which he would win the Nobel Prize in 2020. After his win, Penrose cited Oppenheimer and Snyder's paper as one of the inspirations for his research.

Fact: The sound of the bomb came long after the explosion during the Trinity Test

The film recreates the Trinity Test with a ball of fire and plumes of smoke and Cillian Murphy reciting Oppenheimer's famously quoting the Bhagavad Gita , "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

It's eerily silent. Then comes the blast wave that knocks some onlookers over and a tremendous, startling boom.

There really was quiet after the bomb exploded. "Finally, after about a minute and a half, there's suddenly a tremendous noise — BANG — and then a rumble, like thunder," Feynman remembered later .

Fiction: People didn't notice an explosion in the middle of the desert

"Oppenheimer" doesn't zoom out beyond the scientists and military members who watch the Trinity Test at various distances, but the brightness of the flame, the sound of the explosion, and the shaking caused by the blast wave didn't go unnoticed.

The force blew out windows in nearby cities. Amarillo, Texas, residents could see the flash from over 280 miles away.

The government planted a story that an ammunition magazine had exploded but that no one was hurt.

Fiction: They knew the bomb was going to end the war

"In the movie, they make it seem like that the reason they're using the bomb is because they don't want to invade Japan, and that is just not actually how it was discussed at the time," Wellerstein said. "That's an after-the-fact rationalization that was created later."

In December 1946, physicist Karl T. Compton wrote in The Atlantic that dropping the bombs was a "calculated gamble" and that Secretary of War Stimson and others hoped it would end the war.

Fiction: Stimson spared Kyoto because he honeymooned there

Selecting the targets for the atomic bombs was a complicated process that involved many people, including Oppenheimer and Secretary of War Henry Stimson. "Stimson is a very interesting character, and he gets turned into a sort of caricature" in the movie, Wellerstein said.

During the meeting depicted in "Oppenheimer," Stimson says they shouldn't bomb Kyoto because of its cultural significance and because he and his wife went there after they got married. "He visited Kyoto, that's for sure, but I don't think he took a honeymoon there," Wellerstein said.

The decision was more nuanced and complicated, he said, and had far-reaching consequences for the cities that were bombed.

Fiction: Oppenheimer was sidelined because he was thinking about the long-term implications of nuclear weapons

"Oppenheimer" also sets up its main character as a bit of a lone wolf, the only one in the meetings with Groves and Stimson asking questions about the long-term implications of nuclear weapons.

"This was not some sort of fringe position that only Oppenheimer had," Wellerstein said. "He definitely played a role in advocating it, but it was very well received and other people had the same idea and lots of people took it really seriously at the highest levels of government."

That included Stimson, who brought those concerns to President Harry Truman, Wallenstein said.

Fiction: Oppenheimer consulted Einstein about Teller's calculations

Edward Teller, who went on to invent the hydrogen bomb , certainly did raise concerns that a nuclear weapon could ignite the Earth's atmosphere with devastating consequences.

"I didn't believe it from the first minute," Hans Bethe later said .

But it wasn't Albert Einstein who Oppenheimer went to. "Einstein wouldn't have been any good for that anyway," said Wellerstein. "It's the wrong kind of science."

Instead, Oppenheimer consulted Compton, according to "American Prometheus."

Bethe's calculations did show there was a "near-zero" possibility of such a catastrophe happening. And Enrico Fermi really did take bets on Teller's theory before the Trinity Test, according to Bethe .

Fiction: Oppenheimer remained anti-H-bomb

In the movie, Roger Robb, the special counsel at Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing, shouts at Oppenheimer over his contradictory positions on the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer did support Teller's research and later changed his mind.

There were a few reasons why Oppenheimer was hesitant about an H-bomb, including that there were limited resources for weapons development after the war. "He's not saying don't make weapons," Wellerstein said. "He's saying, 'Let's make more of the weapons we already have and not waste material on weapons that might not work.'"

But then, Teller and Stanislaw Ulam made a breakthrough on their hydrogen bomb research, and Oppenheimer was "almost thrilled," according to AEC commissioner Gordon Dean.

"When he is in favor again, it's already sort of a fait accompli," Wellerstein said. At that point, Oppenheimer felt it was better to be the first once again.

Fiction: Charlotte Serber was Oppenheimer's secretary

At one point in the film, Oppenheimer asks Charlotte Serber to make a call for him, implying she's his secretary. But Serber worked as a librarian for Los Alamos' " secret library ."

In real life, Oppenheimer recruited the wife of physicist Robert Serber because she wasn't a professional librarian and therefore wouldn't mind cutting "the necessary corners." While Charlotte Serber spent a brief time working with Oppenheimer's secretary, she eventually became busy enough with the library and classified files to have a staff of 12.

Because of Charlotte's political leanings and that of her family, the FBI kept a file on her and her husband and wiretapped the couple. It was actually Oppenheimer who told Groves that she might have been a communist, though he didn't think she was affiliated with the party any longer.

"It's one of the things that makes him a complicated guy," Wellerstein said, "is he's ratting out all the people around him to try and look reliable to the security people."

Watch: How real is 'Oppenheimer'? A nuclear-weapons expert rates the movie.

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Oppenheimer Is a Mind-Blower, but How Is It as History?

Christopher nolan’s biopic is a complex movie about a complex subject. here’s what you need to know..

The tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer ranks among the most haunting and consequential of the modern era, yet all but its barest outlines are largely forgotten. This makes Christopher Nolan’s eponymous film both vital and challenging: It’s a complicated story, as world-altering sagas tend to be, so who knows whether—even aside from its three-hour length—many moviegoers will stick with it.

You should. It’s a mind-blower, not just for Nolan’s artistic innovations, but also because the story itself is disturbing, tragic, even shocking, and the fact that most of its details will be new to most viewers might make them probe it more deeply. Some are already probing. The magisterial Oppenheimer biography on which the film is based, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus , published in 2005, recently hit the list of paperback bestsellers for the first time ever .

As someone who has read a lot (and written two books ) about nuclear history, I can say that, for the most part and as far as it goes (important qualifiers, which I’ll soon get to), the film is a faithful portrait of what really happened—especially, perhaps, in the scenes that some might assume are made-up or exaggerated.

Oppenheimer was 38 when he was appointed director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the centerpiece of the Manhattan Project, the $2 billion, top-secret World War II program to build the atomic bomb.* Though a brilliant theoretical physicist and a pioneer in the newfangled field of quantum mechanics, he had never managed any project, was inept at experimental (i.e., practical, bricks-and-mortar) physics, and wasn’t even the most talented scientist of any sort among the hundreds who worked around him. But he was enormously charismatic, grasped concepts with preternatural speed, and saw how progress in one department could jolt progress in another department, so he made it work in ways that possibly no one else could have.

After the war, he became the most famous scientist in the world, appearing on the cover of Time magazine and hailed as “the father of the atomic bomb.” A few years later, he raised doubts about his work, opposed production of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, called for international controls on all weapons of mass destruction, and as a result, got blackballed by key figures in the nuclear establishment—his security clearance revoked by a tribunal as rigged and vindictive as any of the Cold War’s various other Red-baiting panels.

Yet as absurd as it was to tarnish Oppenheimer as a Soviet spy, it is equally mistaken to sanctify him—as many of his defenders have done—as a peace-loving martyr. The film avoids that trap, painting a complex portrait: a tortured soul, enthralled by the science, then racked by guilt over the hellscape it unleashed. He’s insistent on his independence as a scientist, but also pliant in his role as mere adviser to authority. He’s certain of his convictions, but ambivalent about almost everything.

Witnessing the A-bomb’s first test in the desert far outside Los Alamos, the New Mexico town where much of the bomb-building took place, he really did (as the film depicts) recite the line from the Bhagavad-Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” At his meeting with President Harry Truman, after the bombs he helped build incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he really did say “I have blood on my hands.” And Truman, who lost no sleep over his decision to drop the bombs, really said to an aide afterward (though not within earshot of Oppenheimer, as he does in the film), “Don’t let that crybaby in here again.”

Yet Oppenheimer was also gung-ho about the bomb, waving his fist at a rally of the scientists after they heard the news of Hiroshima, bellowing—to applause and laughter—that he was sure the Japanese didn’t like it, and expressing regret only that he and his colleagues hadn’t built the bomb in time to use it on the Germans.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt instigated the Manhattan Project in 1942, after Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, two of the most prominent physicists of the day, wrote him a letter warning that German scientists had figured out how to split an atom, that they could turn this discovery into a very powerful bomb, and that we needed to beat them to it or risk losing the war. As it happened, the Allied armies defeated the Nazis in the spring of 1945, before the German scientists succeeded. But Japan fought on, so Truman—who became president after FDR died—shifted the plans to drop the bomb on Japan.

Some of the Manhattan Project’s scientists—including Szilard—petitioned Truman to drop the bomb on an unpopulated island as a demonstration of its power, giving the Japanese a chance to surrender before it was unleashed on their cities. Oppenheimer urged his colleagues not to sign Szilard’s letter, saying such matters should be left to political leaders and endorsing the official view that if we didn’t drop the bomb, thousands of American soldiers would die in an invasion of the Japanese mainland. (The debate over this question is still unsettled.) The film is clear on all of this. It points out, as well, that Oppenheimer served on the official commission that selected the bomb’s targets.

Oppenheimer fell into a funk after the war, perhaps as a result of viewing footage of the atrocities that his bombs inflicted on tens of thousands of civilians. But many military officers and some scientists, foreseeing a possible war with Russia, pushed to build a hydrogen bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II. Oppenheimer opposed the H-bomb project, but not entirely for moral reasons. At first, he thought it was infeasible. Then, when the math proved it feasible, he dropped his resistance, admitting that it was too “technically sweet” not to develop. (The film does not quote this rather famous line of his.) Still, he remained unenthusiastic, worrying that the H-bomb would divert money from Hiroshima-type A-bombs, which he thought the Army should continue building as weapons to be used on the battlefield if the Soviets invaded Western Europe. He argued that H-bombs were too powerful for battlefield targets—they could destroy only big cities—and, if the Russians built them, as they would if we did, a war would devastate American cities, too. He did eventually come to the view, as portrayed in the film, that this mutual vulnerability might deter both sides from using the weapons or even from going to war at all. But he was not opposed to nuclear weapons in general.

At this point, in the early 1950s, Oppenheimer was still very influential—among fellow scientists, legislators, and the public. He was chairman of the advisory council to the Atomic Energy Commission and director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Einstein still served.* His hedged attitude toward the H-bomb threatened the project’s funding. And so its leading advocates set out to destroy him.

They created a tribunal to investigate whether his security clearance should be revoked. (Without a Q security clearance, he could play no role in setting, or even learning about, atomic policy.) Oppenheimer left himself open to attack. In the 1930s and early ’40s, he had been a “fellow traveler”—probably not a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, but an active supporter of some of its causes, which in the day included racial integration, a minimum wage, and aiding the anti-fascist soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. Not only that, his wife, Kitty (played by Emily Blunt), had once been a party member, as had his brother and several of his close friends, and he attended several meetings of the party’s chapter in Berkeley, where he was teaching physics. Even after he was appointed director of Los Alamos in 1943, his security clearance was held up because of these connections.* The project’s military director, Gen. Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon), had to force the clearance through.

It was one thing to hold left-wing ideas in the ’30s, during the Depression, or even in the early ’40s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies in the war against Nazi Germany. But by 1954, when the tribunal held its hearings, we were in the thick of the Cold War. Distinctions between a fellow traveler, a Communist, and a Soviet spy were waved away as trivial.

The FBI had been tapping Oppenheimer’s phone for years. The tribunal obtained transcripts of the taps, and because the hearings weren’t a trial, they didn’t feel the need to share the material with Oppenheimer or his lawyers. They even had phone taps of his calls with his lawyers. They also deliberately humiliated Oppenheimer, catching him on discrepancies between his memory and the record of the phone taps, and at one point—while his wife was in the hearing room—asked about an affair he’d had with a former girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, played in the movie by Florence Pugh. (Kitty knew about it, but was mortified that her husband’s tormentors did too.)

Much of the film is devoted to these hearings. His interrogators are portrayed as so brazenly hostile, you may wonder if the scenes are accurate—and they are. They’re taken, almost verbatim, from the hearing’s transcripts , which were published many years ago.

Nolan is also accurate in depicting the tribunal as an instrument of personal revenge—the creation of Lewis Strauss, a shrewd, self-made financier and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Not only was Strauss (cannily played by Robert Downey Jr.) an ardent advocate of the H-bomb, he had also been humiliated by Oppenheimer, first at a public congressional hearing, then repeatedly at AEC meetings—and Strauss never forgot this.

Oppenheimer’s tendency to badger or ridicule those who weren’t as smart as he was (which included almost everyone) earned him several enemies. And he made a mistake in alienating Strauss, whose capacity for holding grudges was limitless. (One of Strauss’ colleagues later said, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor .”)

Further damage was done by Edward Teller (played by Benny Safdie), one of the Los Alamos scientists. Teller had been bored by the A-bomb project, even while it was going on, and wanted to move ahead with an H-bomb. He and Oppenheimer quarreled about this. After the war, Teller pushed to create a separate lab dedicated to building H-bombs. Oppenheimer opposed the idea, so Teller defanged him by testifying against him at the hearing.

The tribunal voted 2–1 to revoke Oppenheimer’s clearance. Teller got his money for a new lab in Livermore, California. (Both Los Alamos and Livermore are still in operation.) The episode unleashed a scandal and created schisms within the scientific community—the Teller hawks vs. the Oppenheimer doves, a divide that pushed both sets of partisans to harden their positions. It also drove a rift between scientists and the government. Many scientists doubted they could offer advice without compromising their principles. The loss to the public was incalculable.

Oppenheimer was eventually vindicated, in two stages. In 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower nominated Strauss to be secretary of commerce. But one of the Manhattan Project’s scientists, David Hill (rivetingly played by Rami Malek), testified that Strauss had organized the campaign against Oppenheimer as an act of petty vengeance. As a result, the Senate voted down the nomination, the first time a Cabinet nominee had been rejected since 1925. (This scene is drawn from the Senate hearing’s transcript, which, by the way, was not in Bird and Sherwin’s biography. Nolan dug it up on his own.)

Then, in December 1963, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Oppenheimer the Fermi Award, one of the most prestigious in American science, carrying a cash award of $50,000 (the equivalent of almost $500,000 today). Teller, who was at the White House ceremony, offered his hand to Oppenheimer, who shook it. Kitty did not; she scowled, properly. The film accurately depicts both moments of triumph. (Their marriage was even more tempestuous than the film depicts, though it’s accurate in showing her as repeatedly—and wisely—urging her husband to fight back against his foes.)

Even clocking in at three hours, there are several aspects of this story that go untouched. Don’t expect a group portrait of scientists in collaboration. The Manhattan Project was a vast team effort, but the film won’t show you much of that. Except for Teller, and to some extent Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) and Isidor Rabi (David Krumholtz), all the other scientists—such brilliant, colorful figures as Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, George Kistiakowsky, and many others—are presented as ciphers in walk-on cameos. For a fuller view of the project, watch (if you can find it) the BBC’s 1980 seven-part drama, also called Oppenheimer , with Sam Waterston in the starring role. Or, better yet, read American Prometheus or Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb .

Nor will this film teach you much about fission, fusion, or quantum physics, though that may be asking too much of any movie. Nolan creates split-second images of starbursts, black holes, and galaxy-like explosions, and they have a dramatic effect. His re-creation of the first atom-bomb test is awesomely immersive.

The entire film is an experiment in immersion, an attempt to make us feel what it’s like to be Robert Oppenheimer, and it succeeds to a remarkable degree. Cillian Murphy, in the title role, helps: His lanky frame, awkward gait, and wide eyes convey the impression of an ethereal being, a creature from another dimension, which Oppenheimer sometimes seemed to be. He not only grasped the most arcane new concepts in physics, but also read deeply in history, philosophy, and literature, in several languages, which he mastered with absurd alacrity. (The film is accurate in showing him give a lecture on quantum mechanics to an audience in the Netherlands in Dutch , based on having studied the language for six weeks ahead of time.) We do get a sense of Oppenheimer’s magnetism, his arrogance, and his touch of craziness—and it may be that a man had to have all three to absorb so fully and instinctively the crazy-quilt eeriness of quantum physics. (It is also true, by the way, that as a grad student, he left a poison apple for one of his teachers.)

The film ends with a flashback to soon after the war, Oppenheimer talking with Einstein (charmingly played by Tom Conti) by a lake in Princeton, the two of them wondering whether their joint invention might someday engulf the world in flames. This scene never happened, or at least it’s not in Bird and Sherwin’s biography. But it’s an effective bit of dramatic license, capturing the guilt felt by many of the scientists who worked on the bomb. Some, led by Szilard and to some extent joined by Oppenheimer, became ardent activists for nuclear arms control.

Nolan means for Oppenheimer to be more than a mere biopic or historical drama. At a panel after a screening of the film on Saturday, he said that scientists today are facing their own “Oppenheimer moment,” especially in the development of artificial intelligence, another new technology that seems too technically sweet to resist but may wind up reshaping humanity more than humanity can shape it.

But he also reminded the audience that the hydrogen bomb is still with us, and that just because it has helped deter a war between the major powers for the 78 years since Hiroshima, our luck might not last forever. We are all still living in Oppenheimer’s era.

Correction, July 19, 2023: This article originally described Oppenheimer as the director of the Manhattan Project. He was the director of the Manhattan Project’s central laboratory in Los Alamos.

Correction, July 20, 2023: This article originally described Oppenheimer as the president of the Institute for Advanced Study and suggested that the institute was previously led by Einstein. Oppenheimer was the director, and while Einstein was a leading figure, he wasn’t its director.

Oppenheimer Continues to Be a Smash Hit for IMAX Thanks to Latest Milestone

Oppenheimer continues to surge in theaters nine months after its release, reaching a new milestone during its IMAX run.

Oppenheimer keeps exploding at the box office nine months after its initial release. The Best Picture Oscar-winning film earns another major commercial milestone thanks to its latest IMAX haul.

Per Collider , Oppenheimer reached the $190 million mark at the IMAX box office this past weekend , continuing its run as one of the highest-grossing films ever for the large-format cinema chain. Oppenheimer was beaten to the top spot last weekend by chart-topper Civil War ($1.9 million) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ($1.1 million). The biographical thriller has also been contending with the similarly successful Dune: Part Two .

Christopher Nolan's Massive Oppenheimer Payday Revealed After Oscar Win Bonus

Released last July, Oppenheimer is the highest-grossing biopic and second biggest-earning R-rated movie of all time, with the Universal pic making $970.5 million against its $100 million budget. Shot exclusively with IMAX cameras, Oppenheimer became a big hit for the theater chain immediately after its premiere, getting subsequent encore runs throughout the U.S. due to its performance. Oppenheimer became a big profit maker for IMAX last year , giving the outlet its biggest post-pandemic boost. The film has also seen strong IMAX success in China and was recently released in Japan to elevate its box-office performance further.

Oppenheimer Has Been a Tremendous Success

Oppenheimer is one of the biggest success stories in film since the pandemic, helping Hollywood to its best summer revenue haul since 2019 thanks to its much-touted box-office rivalry with Barbie . Critically, Oppenheimer is regarded as one of director Christopher Nolan's best films, with the movie winning seven Academy Awards, including Best Director for Nolan , Best Actor for lead star Cillian Murphy and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr ., the first Oscar for each man. Additionally, Oppenheimer won multiple Golden Globes and British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs).

Oppenheimer Stars Reveal Fallout From Movie Premiere Walkout During Actors' Strike

Also starring the Oscar-nominated Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh and David Dastmalchian, Oppenheimer chronicles the eponymous theoretical physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his role in creating the first-ever atomic bomb during World War II. Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's novel, American Prometheus , Oppenheimer was praised for its performance, use of practical effects and emotional depth, with some suggesting it resembles a horror film .

Along with its theatrical success, Oppenheimer has also been a hit on video-on-demand (VOD), outdoing Barbie on that forum . Oppenheimer also landed on Peacock earlier this year.

Oppenheimer is now available to stream via Peacock and watch on home video.

Source: Collider

Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

The Oppenheimer Hype May Not Have Happened Without Barbie

Robert Pattinson's push, stellar cast, and bold production led to Oppenheimer's box-office success.
Oppenheimer's positive Rotten Tomatoes reviews align with the film's historical significance and cinematic scale.
The friendly rivalry with Barbie, marketing strategies, and legendary cast contributed to Oppenheimer's monumental success.

Christopher Nolan ’s Oppenheimer not only took years of meticulous planning to bring the 2023 blockbuster to screens, but Nolan also got a nudge from Robert Pattinson to greenlight the movie . What came from taking a bold step to produce Oppenheimer led to a stellar cast, a box-office hit, and accolades.

Oppenheimer , chronicling the days of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by the brilliant Cillian Murphy) made close to a billion at the box office, becoming one of the summer hits of 2023 alongside Margot Robbie ’s Barbie .

While the movie was a box office hit, the reviews agree alongside public sentiments that Oppenheimer is a history-making movie. Reviews on Rotten Tomatoes agree that Oppenheimer is worth what it claims to be and more. Moreover, the silent competition with its summer counterpart Barbie and a great marketing strategy helped the film reach great heights. And with the fine cast, Oppenheimer was a success.

Hollywood And Fans Are Already Buzzing Over Christopher Nolan's Next Film

Oppenheimer received positive reviews on rotten tomatoes and more, oppenheimer's reviews were positive with an undertone of "could have been more," but still enjoyable.

It’s rare to see a Rotten Tomato review with both critics' and audience ratings of over 90 percent. It is usually contrasting, with one higher than the other or both hanging in the middle.

A Rotten Tomatoes critic review described the star-studded Christopher Nolan biopic as an "Epic in scale and substance. " Other critics called the notion of Nolan’s impeccable interpretation of the source material, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book American Prometheus , and the use of dramatic license in creating a thrilling story about atomic bombs — the most devastating creation of humankind.

The film thrived by balancing the heavy topic with character development through portrayed nuances (thanks to the cast’s performances).

Cillian Murphy Has Some Stalker-Like Fans In These Obsessed Celebrities And Co-Stars

Variety described Oppenheimer as a film with a mesmerizing first half, encompassing everything about the troubled physicist , showing the parts of his life in their accuracy. While some choices by Nolan were new, people can still identify his signature style in directing and use of effects, including camera shots, visual effects, and music score.

However, unlike the many reviews Rotten Tomatoes critics heap on the story, some reviews found some chinks in Oppenheimer 's plot armor.

The film had an undertone of "could have been more," according to Variety. The New Yorker’s review of Oppenheimer centered on, "the tension between the abstractions of physics and the brutal exigencies of war," thereby making it a high-class History Channel movie with expensive editing. Nothing wrong with that, but the running time of three hours could have been concisely used.

The reviews do, however, not shadow that Oppenheimer became a phenomenon in 2023, making $82 million in its opening weekend, and $970.5 million at the box office, certifying it a success.

Barbenheimer Competition May Have Improved Oppenheimer’s Success At The Box Office

Barbenheimer was not the fierce competition everyone expected, rather, a great partnership of 2023's heavyweights.

"Barbenheimer" was coined during the promotions of the 2023 hits Barbie and Oppenheimer . The movies were not only scheduled to be released in the summer, but coincidentally were released on the same day, July 21, 2023.

Barbenhiemer was a cultural phenomenon and was poised to be a fierce competition between Barbie and Oppenheimer. Both movies were trendsetters in their own right, but having the two go head-to-head at the box office roused public interest — with increasing media focus as the theatrical release drew closer.

To shake off the possible clash at the box office, Margot Robbie revealed she was advised to push back the Barbie release , by none other than the Oppenheimer production team, so that it wouldn't conflict with the Oppenheimer release date. Good thing she stuck to her plan because it birthed one of the most creative phenomena of film marketing.

Barbenheimer can easily be said to have also pushed interest in Oppenheimer and Barbie . Rather than push fierce competition, the films' marketing strategies played on the symbiotic relationship the films had, especially with the different genres they fell into.

While one was a biopic about the birth of the atomic bomb and the man behind it, the other was a story of the excellent iconic doll franchise. However, the very opposite-spectrum films did have something in common: anticipation and excitement about what was to come.

Despite what looked like the films’ fans holding pitchforks in opposing tents, it was a friendly rivalry that cinema had been missing for a while. Margot Robbie may have found Barbenheimer weird , she recognized that fans could enjoy both without having loyalty to one alone.

The marketing approach to selling the films, not as competition but as complements of each other, helped boost interest because fans saw that the movies were not exclusively challenging the other's run.

Although Barbie made hundreds of millions more than Oppenheimer , the latter swept up almost every award category during the 2024 award season. The Barbenheimer phenomenon is seen as a success the film industry has not witnessed for a long time.

The Cast Of Oppenheimer Also Played A Part In The Success Of The Movie

The star-studded cast of oppenheimer trusted nolan, and they were rewarded with great characters in a phenomenal creative work.

In the history of ensemble casts, Oppenheimer sets itself apart with the number of noteworthy casts it packed on. Even Gary Oldman’s unbilled appearance as President Harry S. Truman was not missed.

Cillian Murphy Worried His Oppenheimer Co-Stars After Going On The 'Yolanda Hadid Diet' For His Role

Leading them was Cillian Murphy playing J. Robert Oppenheimer, the titular character. Murphy underwent serious changes from his Peaky Blinders days to portray the wariness of his character . However, playing the character was more than just changing the body. The level of trust he had in Christopher Nolan, whom Murphy has worked with countless times, made him confident that the film would be one to remember.

Murphy had even signed on to play Oppenheimer before reading the script of the movie . Murphy said: "It's always paid off for me, you know, in every film that I worked with him on." And when he read the script, he knew he had hit a miracle. "I did genuinely think it's one of the greatest screenplays I'd ever read... It's a miracle, upon miracle, upon miracle to have a film like Oppenheimer ," he said.

Supporting actor Robert Downey Jr. may not have come cheap for his appearance in Oppenheimer , but it was a no-brainer to accept a role in the film.

"He [Christopher Nolan] asked if I’d like to come over to his house and read a script. There is no version of an answer to that question that doesn’t start with a "y," and I don’t mean "why" with a question mark," Downey said.

Co-star Emily Blunt, who played Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer, the wife of Robert Oppenheimer's wife, told Rolling Stone : "I just love the anomalies of life. I mean, no one expected a three-hour, super-intense drama about the life of the father of the atomic bomb to do what it did or make the impact it had. So, for me, it’s like: If we keep making anomalies, we keep making rare movies."

The ensemble cast drew people's interest in the movie — it being one of the largest star-studded cast Nolan has ever worked with. Oppenheimer also won seven awards at the 96th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor, among others.

The critical and commercial success of Oppenheimer proved that the right film can change the industry given the right cast, production, and buzz.

The Oppenheimer Hype May Not Have Happened Without Barbie

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An unusual outbreak of the disease has spread to dairy herds in multiple u.s. states..

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The outbreak of bird flu that is tearing through the nation’s poultry farms is the worst in US history. But scientists say it’s now starting to spread into places and species it’s never been before.

Today, my colleague, Emily Anthes, explains.

It’s Monday, April 22.

Emily, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

So, Emily, we’ve been talking here on “The Daily” about prices of things and how they’ve gotten so high, mostly in the context of inflation episodes. And one of the items that keeps coming up is eggs. Egg prices were through the roof last year, and we learned it was related to this. Avian flu has been surging in the United States. You’ve been covering this. Tell us what’s happening.

Yes, so I have been covering this virus for the last few years. And the bird flu is absolutely tearing through poultry flocks, and that is affecting egg prices. That’s a concern for everyone, for me and for my family. But when it comes to scientists, egg prices are pretty low on their list of concerns. Because they see this bird flu virus behaving differently than previous versions have. And they’re getting nervous, in particular, about the fact that this virus is reaching places and species where it’s never been before.

OK, so bird flu, though, isn’t new. I mean I remember hearing about cases in Asia in the ‘90s. Remind us how it began.

Bird flu refers to a bunch of different viruses that are adapted to spread best in birds. Wild water birds, in particular, are known for carrying these viruses. And flu viruses are famous for also being shapeshifters. So they’re constantly swapping genes around and evolving into new strains. And as you mentioned back in the ‘90s, a new version of bird flu, a virus known as H5N1, emerged in Asia. And it has been spreading on and off around the world since then, causing periodic outbreaks.

And how are these outbreaks caused?

So wild birds are the reservoir for the virus, which means they carry it in their bodies with them around the world as they fly and travel and migrate. And most of the time, these wild birds, like ducks and geese, don’t even get very sick from this virus. But they shed it. So as they’re traveling over a poultry farm maybe, if they happen to go to the bathroom in a pond that the chickens on the farm are using or eat some of the feed that chickens on the farm are eating, they can leave the virus behind.

And the virus can get into chickens. In some cases, it causes mild illness. It’s what’s known as low pathogenic avian influenza. But sometimes the virus mutates and evolves, and it can become extremely contagious and extremely fatal in poultry.

OK, so the virus comes through wild birds, but gets into farms like this, as you’re describing. How have farms traditionally handled outbreaks, when they do happen?

Well, because this threat isn’t new, there is a pretty well-established playbook for containing outbreaks. It’s sometimes known as stamping out. And brutally, what it means is killing the birds. So the virus is so deadly in this highly pathogenic form that it’s sort of destined to kill all the birds on a farm anyway once it gets in. So the response has traditionally been to proactively depopulate or cull all the birds, so it doesn’t have a chance to spread.

So that’s pretty costly for farmers.

It is. Although the US has a program where it will reimburse farmers for their losses. And the way these reimbursements work is they will reimburse farmers only for the birds that are proactively culled, and not for those who die naturally from the virus. And the thinking behind that is it’s a way to incentivize farmers to report outbreaks early.

So, OK, lots of chickens are killed in a way to manage these outbreaks. So we know how to deal with them. But what about now? Tell me about this new strain.

So this new version of the virus, it emerged in 2020.

After the deadly outbreak of the novel coronavirus, authorities have now confirmed an outbreak of the H5N1 strain of influenza, a kind of bird flu.

And pretty quickly it became clear that a couple things set it apart.

A bald eagle found dead at Carvins Cove has tested positive for the highly contagious bird flu.

This virus, for whatever reason, seemed very good at infecting all sorts of wild birds that we don’t normally associate with bird flu.

[BIRD CRYING]

He was kind of stepping, and then falling over, and using its wing to right itself.

Things like eagles and condors and pelicans.

We just lost a parliament of owls in Minneapolis.

Yeah, a couple of high profile nests.

And also in the past, wild birds have not traditionally gotten very sick from this virus. And this version of the virus not only spread widely through the wild bird population, but it proved to be devastating.

The washing up along the East Coast of the country from Scotland down to Suffolk.

We were hearing about mass die-offs of seabirds in Europe by the hundreds and the thousands.

And the bodies of the dead dot the island wherever you look.

Wow. OK. So then as we know, this strain, like previous ones, makes its way from wild animals to farmed animals, namely to chickens. But it’s even more deadly.

Absolutely. And in fact, it has already caused the worst bird flu outbreak in US history. So more than 90 million birds in the US have died as a result of this virus.

90 million birds.

Yes, and I should be clear that represents two things. So some of those birds are birds who naturally got infected and died from the virus. But the vast majority of them are birds that were proactively culled. What it adds up to is, is 90 million farmed birds in the US have died since this virus emerged. And it’s not just a chicken problem. Another thing that has been weird about this virus is it has jumped into other kinds of farms. It is the first time we’ve seen a bird flu virus jump into US livestock.

And it’s now been reported on a number of dairy farms across eight US states. And that’s just something that’s totally unprecedented.

So it’s showing up at Dairy farms now. You’re saying that bird flu has now spread to cows. How did that happen?

So we don’t know exactly how cows were first infected, but most scientists’ best guess is that maybe an infected wild bird that was migrating shed the virus into some cattle feed or a pasture or a pond, and cattle picked it up. The good news is they don’t seem to get nearly as sick as chickens do. They are generally making full recoveries on their own in a couple of weeks.

OK, so no mass culling of cows?

No, that doesn’t seem to be necessary at this point. But the bad news is that it’s starting to look like we’re seeing this virus spread from cow to cow. We don’t know exactly how that’s happening yet. But anytime you see cow-to-cow or mammal-to-mammal transmission, that’s a big concern.

And why is that exactly?

Well, there are a bunch of reasons. First, it could allow the outbreak to get much bigger, much faster, which might increase the risk to the food supply. And we might also expect it to increase the risk to farm workers, people who might be in contact with these sick cows.

Right now, the likelihood that a farmer who gets this virus passes it on is pretty low. But any time you see mammal-to-mammal transmission, it increases the chance that the virus will adapt and possibly, maybe one day get good at spreading between humans. To be clear, that’s not something that there’s any evidence happening in cows right now. But the fact that there’s any cow-to-cow transmission happening at all is enough to have scientists a bit concerned.

And then if we think more expansively beyond what’s happening on farms, there’s another big danger lurking out there. And that’s what happens when this virus gets into wild animals, vast populations that we can’t control.

We’ll be right back.

So, Emily, you said that another threat was the threat of flu in wild animal populations. Clearly, of course, it’s already in wild birds. Where else has it gone?

Well, the reason it’s become such a threat is because of how widespread it’s become in wild birds. So they keep reintroducing it to wild animal populations pretty much anywhere they go. So we’ve seen the virus repeatedly pop up in all sorts of animals that you might figure would eat a wild bird, so foxes, bobcats, bears. We actually saw it in a polar bear, raccoons. So a lot of carnivores and scavengers.

The thinking is that these animals might stumble across a sick or dead bird, eat it, and contract the virus that way. But we’re also seeing it show up in some more surprising places, too. We’ve seen the virus in a bottle-nosed dolphin, of all places.

And most devastatingly, we’ve seen enormous outbreaks in other sorts of marine mammals, especially sea lions and seals.

So elephant seals, in particular in South America, were just devastated by this virus last fall. My colleague Apoorva Mandavilli and I were talking to some scientists in South America who described to us what they called a scene from hell, of walking out onto a beach in Argentina that is normally crowded with chaotic, living, breathing, breeding, elephant seals — and the beach just being covered by carcass, after carcass, after carcass.

Mostly carcasses of young newborn pups. The virus seemed to have a mortality rate of 95 percent in these elephant seal pups, and they estimated that it might have killed more than 17,000 of the pups that were born last year. So almost the entire new generation of this colony. These are scientists that have studied these seals for decades. And they said they’ve never seen anything like it before.

And why is it so far reaching, Emily? I mean, what explains these mass die-offs?

There are probably a few explanations. One is just how much virus is out there in the environment being shed by wild birds into water and onto beaches. These are also places that viruses like this haven’t been before. So it’s reaching elephant seals and sea lions in South America that have no prior immunity.

There’s also the fact that these particular species, these sea lions and seals, tend to breed in these huge colonies all crowded together on beaches. And so what that means is if a virus makes its way into the colony, it’s very conducive conditions for it to spread. And scientists think that that’s actually what’s happening now. That it’s not just that all these seals are picking up the virus from individual birds, but that they’re actually passing it to each other.

So basically, this virus is spreading to places it’s never been before, kind of virgin snow territory, where animals just don’t have the immunity against it. And once it gets into a population packed on a beach, say, of elephant seals, it’s just like a knife through butter.

Absolutely. And an even more extreme example of that is what we’re starting to see happen in Antarctica, where there’s never been a bird flu outbreak before until last fall, for the first time, this virus reached the Antarctic mainland. And we are now seeing the virus move through colonies of not only seabirds and seals, but penguin colonies, which have not been exposed to these viruses before.

And it’s too soon to say what the toll will be. But penguins also, of course, are known for breeding in these large colonies.

Probably. don’t have many immune defenses against this virus, and of course, are facing all these other environmental threats. And so there’s a lot of fear that you add on the stress of a bird flu virus, and it could just be a tipping point for penguins.

Emily, at this point, I’m kind of wondering why more people aren’t talking about this. I mean, I didn’t know any of this before having this conversation with you, and it feels pretty worrying.

Well, a lot of experts and scientists are talking about this with rising alarm and in terms that are quite stark. They’re talking about the virus spreading through wild animal populations so quickly and so ferociously that they’re calling it an ecological disaster.

But that’s a disaster that sometimes seems distant from us, both geographically, we’re talking about things that are happening maybe at the tip of Argentina or in Antarctica. And also from our concerns of our everyday lives, what’s happening in Penguins might not seem like it has a lot to do with the price of a carton of eggs at the grocery store. But I think that we should be paying a lot of attention to how this virus is moving through animal populations, how quickly it’s moving through animal populations, and the opportunities that it is giving the virus to evolve into something that poses a much bigger threat to human health.

So the way it’s spreading in wild animals, even in remote places like Antarctica, that’s important to watch, at least in part because there’s a real danger to people here.

So we know that the virus can infect humans, and that generally it’s not very good at spreading between humans. But the concern all along has been that if this virus has more opportunities to spread between mammals, it will get better at spreading between them. And that seems to be what is happening in seals and sea lions. Scientists are already seeing evidence that the virus is adapting as it passes from marine mammal to marine mammal. And that could turn it into a virus that’s also better at spreading between people.

And if somebody walks out onto a beach and touches a dead sea lion, if their dog starts playing with a sea lion carcass, you could imagine that this virus could make its way out of marine mammals and into the human population. And if it’s this mammalian adapted version of the virus that makes its way out, that could be a bigger threat to human health.

So the sheer number of hosts that this disease has, the more opportunity it has to mutate, and the more chance it has to mutate in a way that would actually be dangerous for people.

Yes, and in particular, the more mammalian hosts. So that gives the virus many more opportunities to become a specialist in mammals instead of a specialist in birds, which is what it is right now.

Right. I like that, a specialist in mammals. So what can we do to contain this virus?

Well, scientists are exploring new options. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether we should start vaccinating chickens in the US. The government, USDA labs, have been testing some poultry vaccines. It’s probably scientifically feasible. There are challenges there, both in terms of logistics — just how would you go about vaccinating billions of chickens every year. There are also trade questions. Traditionally, a lot of countries have not been willing to accept poultry products from countries that vaccinate their poultry.

And there’s concern about whether the virus might spread undetected in flocks that are vaccinated. So as we saw with COVID, the vaccine can sometimes stop you from getting sick, but it doesn’t necessarily stop infection. And so countries are worried they might unknowingly import products that are harboring the virus.

And what about among wild animals? I mean, how do you even begin to get your head around that?

Yeah, I mean, thinking about vaccinating wild animals maybe makes vaccinating all the chickens in the US look easy. There has been some discussion of limited vaccination campaigns, but that’s not feasible on a global scale. So unfortunately, the bottom line is there isn’t a good way to stop spread in wild animals. We can try to protect some vulnerable populations, but we’re not going to stop the circulation of this virus.

So, Emily, we started this conversation with a kind of curiosity that “The Daily” had about the price of eggs. And then you explained the bird flu to us. And then somehow we ended up learning about an ecological disaster that’s unfolding all around us, and potentially the source of the next human pandemic. That is pretty scary.

It is scary, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by it. And I feel like I should take a step back and say none of this is inevitable. None of this is necessarily happening tomorrow. But this is why scientists are concerned and why they think it’s really important to keep a very close eye on what’s happening both on farms and off farms, as this virus spreads through all sorts of animal populations.

One thing that comes up again and again and again in my interviews with people who have been studying bird flu for decades, is how this virus never stops surprising them. And sometimes those are bad surprises, like these elephant seal die-offs, the incursions into dairy cattle. But there are some encouraging signs that have emerged recently. We’re starting to see some early evidence that some of the bird populations that survived early brushes with this virus might be developing some immunity. So that’s something that maybe could help slow the spread of this virus in animal populations.

We just don’t entirely know how this is going to play out. Flu is a very difficult, wily foe. And so that’s one reason scientists are trying to keep such a close, attentive eye on what’s happening.

Emily, thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Here’s what else you should know today.

On this vote, the yeas are 366 and the nays are 58. The bill is passed.

On Saturday, in four back-to-back votes, the House voted resoundingly to approve a long-stalled package of aid to Ukraine, Israel and other American allies, delivering a major victory to President Biden, who made aid to Ukraine one of his top priorities.

On this vote, the yeas are 385, and the no’s are 34 with one answering present. The bill is passed without objection.

The House passed the component parts of the $95 billion package, which included a bill that could result in a nationwide ban of TikTok.

On this vote, the yeas are 311 and the nays are 112. The bill is passed.

Oh, one voting present. I missed it, but thank you.

In a remarkable breach of custom, Democrats stepped in to supply the crucial votes to push the legislation past hard-line Republican opposition and bring it to the floor.

The House will be in order.

The Senate is expected to pass the legislation as early as Tuesday.

Today’s episode was produced by Rikki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Eric Krupke, and Alex Stern. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Patricia Willens; contains original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Niemisto, and Sophia Lanman; and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Andrew Jacobs.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.

April 24, 2024 • 32:18 Is $60 Billion Enough to Save Ukraine?
April 23, 2024 • 30:30 A Salacious Conspiracy or Just 34 Pieces of Paper?
April 22, 2024 • 24:30 The Evolving Danger of the New Bird Flu
April 19, 2024 • 30:42 The Supreme Court Takes Up Homelessness
April 18, 2024 • 30:07 The Opening Days of Trump’s First Criminal Trial
April 17, 2024 • 24:52 Are ‘Forever Chemicals’ a Forever Problem?
April 16, 2024 • 29:29 A.I.’s Original Sin
April 15, 2024 • 24:07 Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel
April 14, 2024 • 46:17 The Sunday Read: ‘What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise’
April 12, 2024 • 34:23 How One Family Lost $900,000 in a Timeshare Scam
April 11, 2024 • 28:39 The Staggering Success of Trump’s Trial Delay Tactics
April 10, 2024 • 22:49 Trump’s Abortion Dilemma

Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Produced by Rikki Novetsky , Nina Feldman , Eric Krupke and Alex Stern

Edited by Lisa Chow and Patricia Willens

Original music by Marion Lozano , Dan Powell , Rowan Niemisto and Sophia Lanman

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

The outbreak of bird flu currently tearing through the nation’s poultry is the worst in U.S. history. Scientists say it is now spreading beyond farms into places and species it has never been before.

Emily Anthes, a science reporter for The Times, explains.

On today’s episode

Emily Anthes , a science reporter for The New York Times.

Two dead pelicans are pictured from above lying on the shore where the water meets a rocky beach.

Background reading

Scientists have faulted the federal response to bird flu outbreaks on dairy farms .

Here’s what to know about the outbreak.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Special thanks to Andrew Jacobs .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

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J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Grandson on What the Movie Gets Right and the One Scene He Would Have Changed

TIME: How was your grandparents' story told to you when you were growing up?

So there was ongoing, open communication about who your grandfather was.

Do you feel there are misconceptions about your grandfather?

You saw the movie. Were there parts that hit you the hardest, emotionally?

Were there parts that struck you as historically or emotionally inaccurate?

What was your role, if any, in the movie?

Is there anything you would have advised them to do differently, had you been asked?

Did the movie help you come to any kind of deeper understanding of your grandfather?

You started the Oppenheimer Project to continue your grandfather's work today. Can you tell me a little bit about what the organization does?

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Fact: Oppenheimer did try to poison his tutor (but Niels Bohr wasn't there)

Fact: Oppenheimer did deliver a lecture in Dutch

Fact: The Oppenheimers had Haakon Chevalier raise their son, Peter, for a while

Fact: Germany wasn't ready to build an atomic bomb

Fact: Oppenheimer mocked Strauss about isotopes

Likely fact: Oppenheimer estimated only 20,000 people would die from an atomic bomb

Fact: A big thunderstorm delayed the Trinity Test

Fact: Feynman did watch the Trinity Test from behind a windshield

Fact: Oppenheimer never said publicly he regretted dropping the bomb

Fact: Oppenheimer was a dilettante

Fact: Oppenheimer was ahead of his time on black holes

Fact: The sound of the bomb came long after the explosion during the Trinity Test

Fiction: People didn't notice an explosion in the middle of the desert

Fiction: They knew the bomb was going to end the war