Originally Sinned
During the Cuban missile crisis, the crew onboard B-59, one of the four Foxtrot-class Soviet submarines sent to waters around Cuba, had been out of contact with Moscow for days. Infrequently picking up civilian radio transmissions, the nuclear-armed submarine was too deep to be in sync with the outside world, to know if war had already been broke out, as it’s been busy hiding from American naval pursuers. Captain Savitsky and the Political Officer Maslennikov, risking the chance that a war had already begun, decided to launch a nuclear torpedo, the authorization of which normally requires only the confirmations from the two officers. The launch, according to military estimates, would have caused a chain reaction, resulting in a thermonuclear conflict destroying the better parts of the northern hemisphere. With reputations preceding him, Executive Officer Vasily Arkhipov utilized the special circumstance requiring the confirmations of all three officers, objected to the launch, preventing the onset of nuclear war. Roughly 20 years later, a similar fate was averted when officer Stanislav Petrov at the command center of the Soviet early warning system Oko decided that the multiple reports of intercontinental ballistic missile launch were false alarms, disobeying military protocols requiring him to relay the alarms up the chain of command (at the likely cost of his entire life and career), otherwise leading to a retaliatory attack with unimaginable consequences.
These incidents were the closest that the world has ever been to annihilation. If not for them, we might as well be simply nonexistent. They also weren’t what this film was about. But, upon learning them, one should have a different understanding of what it was trying to say.
What critics of this movie won’t recognize, is that the hundred-million dollar project that puts us in the shoes of a man who can only be likened to either Prometheus, the one who brought life to humanity, or Vishnu‘s “death”, the one who would bring it to its demise, was destined to be flawed from the get go. Christopher Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, had a hefty burden of balancing the different aspects of the theoretical physicist’s life: by design, it’s bound to overemphasize the science and the politics (somewhat more so for the latter given the nature of his role in the Manhattan Project), because one simply can not exist on its own without delving deep into the other, thereby stretching the runtime even further. Art is not about capturing and recreating the different faces of a three-dimensional solid body on a two-dimensional plane (to plagiarize Descartes’ Discourse). In fact, it can’t. The film wasn’t trying to be a biopic, laying out that special someone’s life story, dramatizes his achievements and downplays the parts that don’t contribute to them. Nor is it trying to be a political documentary that confronts the horrendous and grotesque realities behind these doomsday gadgets (as a matter of fact, it barely touched upon them, unlike Mick Jackson’s nightmarishly-realistic Threads, a film literally everyone must see). It’s only a few peeks into certain fragments of Oppenheimer’s life, those that when taken together help us define his ego, his resolve, and his ordeal.
It comes as little surprise, in a three-hour long picture with seldom time to breath, with scenes literally bereaved of an opening and a closing, and with imageries and sounds designed either like a ticking time bomb or a chain reaction (the real Oppenheimer suffered from schizophrenia, to Nolan’s creative advantage), that the two female supports never got the chance to develop into coherent personalities and make a lasting impression, that the experiences of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities were almost completely glossed over, that the covert trials against Oppenheimer himself was prioritized over the public ones against the nuclear arms race and the responsible parties. These are less flaws than byproducts of this sort of structural arrangement. Like the man himself, whose legacy is as self-contradictory as peace and armageddon, the distance between which now becomes the pluck of a single lower-rank officer, the film ipso facto fails to do justice to the humanitarian consequences of the Trinity Test (just like how its subject, the author behind the first atomic bomb, did). Likewise, the picture, being about something with implications that only a few could fully comprehend (much less deal with), can pay no more respect to Oppenheimer’s personal life than the field equations can to Albert Einstein’s acquaintance with Kurt Gödel.
Given these confines that came with the material, Nolan and his team did the absolute best they could. Writing for the New Yorker in 1968, Pauline Kael defended Godard in her review of La Chinoise: “Since Godard’s tempo is too fast for many people — perhaps most people — they have some ground for anger and confusion. But I think he is driven to ignore the difficulties that audiences may experience — not because he wants to assault them or to be deliberately ‘uncommercial,’ not out of pretentiousness or arrogance, but out of the nature of his material and his talent.” I think the same could be said here. If Memento was the proof of his editing talent, and Inception was that of his creative talent, and Dunkirk was that of his directing talent, this picture should be the proof of Nolan’s audacity.
★★★★½
Originally published at https://letterboxd.com/redmoonrising/film/oppenheimer-2023/
Directed and written by Christopher Nolan, based on American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin;
Produced by Nolan, his wife Emma Thomas, and Charles Roven (collaborations on The Dark Knight Trilogy);
The cinematography is Hoyte van Hoytema, who has done every Nolan picture starting with Interstellar, also known for Let the Right One In, Her, Nope, Ad Astra;
Edited by Jennifer Lame, previously collaborated on Tenet, also known for Marriage Story, Manchester by the Sea, Hereditary, Frances Ha; the runtime was so long, the cuts were so numerous and temporally all-over-the-place, that she had to ‘tighten the lug nuts’ of the picture for its characters not to get lost in the shuffling process, and maintain the sense of continuity;
Music by Ludwig Göransson, known for frequent collaborations with Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther), advised by Nolan to utilize violin for the central theme, going from “the most romantic, beautiful tone in a split second to neurotic and heart wrenching, horror sounds”;
The thunderous sounds were designed and edited by Richard King, a longtime collaborator with Nolan ever since all the way back in The Prestige, otherwise known for his work in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and Spielberg’s War of the Worlds;
Visual effects done by DNEG, supervised by Andrew Jackson (Mad Max: Fury Road, Dunkirk, Tenet); it is claimed that there weren’t any computer-generated effects, which, if true, should render the detonation scene all the more mind-boggling;
The production set designed by Ruth De Jong; the art direction supervised by Jake Cavallo, Samantha Englender, Anthony D. Parrillo; the set decoration by Claire Kaufman, Olivia Peebles, Adam Willis; the costumes were designed by Ellen Mirojnick (Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, The Greatest Showman); the make-up department headed by Luisa Abel;
The casting director is John Papsidera, who has been with Nolan from the very beginning starting with Memento; the result speaks for itself.
*Nolan’s daughter, Flora, made a close-up cameo in one of the incendiary imageries where she was seen disintegrated by an imagined nuclear explosion; a direct sign of Nolan’s own worries about the future.
