The Movie that Made Oppenheimer (Even More) Famous
Christopher Nolan’s epic film Oppenheimer shows flashes of Oppenheimer’s life from his student days to 1963 when he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. He is shown dabbling in faculty labor organization, hanging out with Communists, his relationship with Communist and psychologist Jean Tatlock and botanist wife Kitty, and how he got wrapped up in the politicization of quantum physics. While Nolan offers glimpses of Oppenheimer’s life in short bursts, it mainly focuses on his time at Los Alamos, his fraught relationship with US Atomic Energy commissioner Lewis Strauss and the nightmare hearings around his security clearance revocation. Central to the film is the development of the atomic bombs that decimated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his emotional turmoil in seeing how his team’s scientific innovation became a weapon of death and sparked a Cold War.