“Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown,”Jesus said in Luke 4:24
That can certainly be said of J. Robert Oppenheimer, too. The theoretical physicist is called a prophet among physicists in the field. But despite his advancements in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, very few people in America seem to like him.
In fact, when Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves comes to Oppenheimer’s classroom, looking to recruit him for a secret experiment called the Manhattan Project, Groves tells him as much: People around him see Oppenheimer as a “dilettante, womanizer, suspected communist.”
“Oppenheimer couldn’t run a hamburger stand,” Grove quotes.
Oppenheimer smirks. “I couldn’t,” he admits. “But I can run the Manhattan Project.”
From a technical standpoint, Oppenheimer’s selection as the director of the Project was an obvious choice. His awards and accolades made him the perfect man for the job.
But from a political standpoint, Oppenheimer garners a lot of suspicion.
That’s because while Oppenheimer might never say that he’s a Communist sympathizer, he’s sure got a lot of friends and family who are. And sure, maybe the Russians are technically fighting on the same side of World War II as the Americans, but that doesn’t mean the two superpowers truly see each other as allies.
So when someone leaks information to the communist-dominated country, it’s not long until the finger points at Oppenheimer. And that’s only the tip on an iceberg of evidence against the man.
And those accusations about his character and conduct will threaten to sink the father of the atomic bomb professionally in the years to come.
The dropping of an atomic bomb is not an easy topic. Characters debate the morality of such an action. Someone warns that the creation of the atomic bomb will result in the deaths of many innocent people. “You drop a bomb,” he says, “and it falls on the just and the unjust.”
In one scene, officials argue about whether the bomb would result in fewer deaths on both sides of the conflict than a ground invasion of Japan. And so those involved continue to press forward with their grim “gadget” because they believe an invasion would be deadlier for all.
Characters furthermore debate the morality of creating a bomb itself. Some feel that such a weapon will force countries to get along, since people will finally realize that a future war could now end the human race with a single button push. And when physicists theorize that the bomb could ignite the world’s atmosphere in a chain reaction, some push to share the findings with Russia and the Nazis in order to warn them about that potentially world-ending consequence.
Though the film’s depiction of Oppenheimer tends to sit more towards the middle of the political spectrum, unwilling to fully commit one way or another, such a mentality makes him a prime suspect during the Red Scare. Indeed, many of Oppenheimer’s family members and friends sympathized with the Communist party, and the government fears that Oppenheimer might leak information to the Russians. But when Oppenheimer comes under fire for his alleged beliefs, many people, including those who disagree with him, stick up for him, expressing that they believe he’s loyal to the country.
Early in the movie, Oppenheimer and many of the scientists he recruits to his team seem particularly motivated by the plight of the Jews in Germany. Oppenheimer himself is Jewish, though not particularly devout. But he and many of his peers are primarily motivated not just by the desire to beat Germany in the production of the atomic bomb, but to save Jews and to keep Hitler from potentially using the invention upon them should his scientists succeed first (which they don’t).
Not all of those German scientists, we learn, want to serve Hitler’s research, and at least one of them is liberated from Nazi-held territory and then encourages Oppenheimer’s team.
Oppenheimer is compared to an Old Testament prophet by another Jewish man, and the man warns Oppenheimer that such a title means he can’t be wrong—not once. He’s also compared to Prometheus, a Greek deity who stole fire from the gods to give it to humanity.
Oppenheimer also has a few visions or hallucinations. While some of these visions are depicted as something like traumatic moments of PTSD for the physicist, others show Oppenheimer seemingly looking into the cosmos to divine deeper meaning.
We additionally hear some other brief mentions of spirituality. Oppenheimer’s famous quote, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” comes from the Hindu sacred writing the Bhagavad Gita and is spoken there by the Hindu god Vishnu.
A passing comment references Albert Einstein’s objection to quantum physics: “God does not play dice.” A man is described as the “son of a Russian Orthodox priest.” When thinking about the code name for the nuclear test, Oppenheimer offers “Trinity,” referencing a poem by John Donne. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” Oppenheimer recites.
After Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, learns of one of her husband’s affair, she tells him that he doesn’t “get to commit a sin and have us all feel sorry” for him. A thermonuclear reaction is described as “a terrible revelation of divine power.”
Oppenheimer is described as a “womanizer,” and we endure some scenes of his escapades. In several scenes, Oppenheimer has sex with a woman. They’re both naked, and her breasts are visible, as are sexual movements. There’s also post-coital conversation afterward in which the woman’s breasts are again visible.
In one case, when a board questions Oppenheimer’s visits to a woman who was a known member of the Communist party, he suddenly appears naked in the room as the woman has sex with him there in front of everyone. The scene is meant to artistically symbolize how Kitty feels betrayed while she listens to Oppenheimer discuss the moment.
And on the subject of Kitty, the two initially meet at a party, and Oppenheimer continues to flirt with her despite discovering that she’s already married. The two engage in an affair (something we’ll hear is a relatively common thing for Oppenheimer). Kitty soon reveals that she’s pregnant, and she resolves to divorce her husband and marry Oppenheimer before the pregnancy begins to show. And even after Oppenheimer marries Kitty, we see him have an affair with another woman, and we hear of another that is spoken about during the testimony against him.
Someone crudely and sarcastically references doing violence to a man’s male anatomy. When a male scientist argues with a female scientist regarding how radiation exposure might affect her reproductive system, she quips, “Your reproductive system is more exposed than mine.” Two people kiss in celebration of the bomb’s success. Oppenheimer and Kitty kiss as well.
As Oppenheimer and his team cheerfully celebrate the successful dropping of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer has a disturbing vision of sorts in which he imagines the people in the audience suffering the effects of the bomb: One woman’s skin begins peeling from her face, and Oppenheimer accidentally steps into the chest cavity of a charred corpse. We later hear reports of the bomb’s gruesome effect on the Japanese people. We’re also told of a firebombing which killed an estimated 100,000 people, “mostly civilians.”
The number of casualties ultimately reported by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are perhaps bigger than what had been estimated, and we have the sense that at least some of the Manhattan Project team members are struggling to come to grips with the violence that they they’ve unleashed.
When Oppenheimer tries to articulate a sense of responsibility for those deaths in a conversation with President Harry Truman, Truman himself chides the scientists and says that he was the one who’ll be remembered as responsible for those casualties, not Oppenheimer.
A woman is briefly seen dead, her head submerged in a bathtub. She’s overdosed on pills and committed suicide by drowning herself. A man suggests torturing someone to death. Oppenheimer injects someone’s apple with potassium cyanide, but he intercepts it before a victim could eat it.
And, of course, we watch the test of the bomb go off.
The f-word is used eight times, and the s-word is heard four times. We also hear the occasional uses of “a–,” “d–n,” “h—” and “crap.” God’s name is used in vain six times, three of which take the form of “g-dd–n.” Jesus’ name is abused three times.
People drink an assortment of alcoholic beverages. Oppenheimer smokes cigarettes almost continually, and there’s smoking by him and others throughout the movie. Someone notes that the bar at Los Alamos is “always running.”
A man vomits. In a couple of scenes, Kitty and Oppenheimer neglect their children, who always seem to be crying. Both would say that they’re lousy parents; in fact, they ask a set of friends to care for their firstborn for several months so that Oppenheimer can focus exclusively on the Manhattan Project.
Robert Oppenheimer is a theoretical physicist. But, he admits, the problem with theory is that, until it’s tested, that’s all it’ll be.
The problem with actually testing an atomic weapon is that it risks the end of the world. Physicist Edward Teller suggested that such a weapon could (once again, in theory) cause a chain reaction that might destroy the world. His concern was that the bomb could produce temperatures so hot that it would cause the world’s hydrogen to fuse together into helium in an explosive way—similar to how our sun creates energy. This chain reaction would quickly envelop the whole world and end life as we know it.
Of course, we’re still here. Obviously, that theory didn’t immediately bear fruit. But Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan suggests that when the first atomic bomb exploded, it did ignite a chain reaction—but not the one Teller theorized. The movie grimly suggests that nuclear annihilation is still a possible outcome, and perhaps even an inescapable one. It just hasn’t come to pass … yet.
That chain reaction is illustrated by some early scenes that show Oppenheimer averting a tragic outcome at the last possible moment. In a moment of wrath, Oppenheimer poisons his professor’s apple, only snatching it away once he realizes what he’s done.
But Oppenheimer cannot snatch away the atomic bomb. Because, as one character explains, the bomb “isn’t a new weapon. It’s a new world.”
Oppenheimer paints a bleak picture of the future of humanity. But let’s be clear: A bleak worldview isn’t why Nolan’s latest drama has an R-rating. That’s where the content comes in.
For a film set primarily during World War II, the violence of the bomb is only hauntingly hinted at here. Jean Tatlock’s suicide by drowning should also be noted.
But Oppenheimer’s biggest content issues arise from its sexual content and crude language, the latter of which is due to the film’s many uses of the f-word. A couple of scenes contain explicit sex and nudity—most prominently when Oppenheimer has a nude conversation with his ex-lover, the camera showing off the woman’s breasts and barely hiding the two’s lower bits.
That’s not to say that Oppenheimer doesn’t provide some interesting and important perspective into a monumentous moment in American history. It definitely does. But prospective viewers will need to prepare themselves for a film that, while not world-ending, certainly leans into content that easily could have been suggested far less graphically.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
