INDEX
The Audience’s Observation: The Disappeared Alternate Reality
Chain reaction is a keyword that appears symbolically in the middle of ‘Oppenheimer’ as well, and is used by Einstein, who fears the possibility of an infinite chain reaction burning up the world before the “Trinity Experiment” to commercialize a nuclear bomb that uses plutonium fission. He discusses his fears with Einstein.
This scene is directly connected to Oppenheimer’s final line “We did it,” which is refrained from a different point of view at the end of the film and delivered with a haunted expression on his face.
In light of the vision suggested in ‘Tenet,’ the significance of Nolan’s setting the “Trinity Experiment” as the climax of the first half of the film and placing this line at the end seems to emerge. In other words, the world in this film has already been burned up by the “chain reaction” of nuclear fission.
As mentioned earlier, Nolan is a writer who likes to depict “another world behind reality” in films such as ‘Inception’ and ‘Tenet.’
The world depicted in the film ‘Oppenheimer’ is also “another reality” that was destroyed by the “Trinity Experiment,” and the burning people* that Oppenheimer saw in his vision were what actually happened in that world. And the subsequent appearance of Los Alamos, the hearings, and Oppenheimer’s group may have been nothing more than a kind of ghost, a kind of residual thought – the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not depicted makes more sense if you think of it that way.
This is only my personal impression, but I think that this film is not intended to be a documentary or biopic with a social theme, but a film that visualizes Nolan’s “physiological fear of nuclear weapons,” a thought-provoking experiment that is directly related to ‘Inception’ and ‘Tenet.’
*Editor’s note: It is known that among the people envisioned by Oppenheimer, the woman whose flesh was stripped from her face by the heat rays of the nuclear explosion was portrayed by the director’s daughter, Flora Nolan. In an interview with The Telegraph, the director stated, “Honestly, I try not to analyze my intentions. But what’s important is that if you create the ultimate destructive power, it will destroy even those close to you. Casting my daughter was, for me, the strongest way to express that.” (opens external site ).
▼ Notes and Reference Source Articles
Note 1: HuffPost Japan, “”Ignore Asian-Americans?” Robert Downey Jr.’s Controversial Behavior on the Oscars Stage” See also (Opens external site)
Note 2: See Real Sound, “Why is ‘Barbenheimer,’ a controversial film in Japan, so popular in North America? Barbie’ Aims for Over $1 Billion” (Opens external site)
Note 3: Before the announcement of the Japanese release of “Oppenheimer”, Toho Towa had responded, “We have not received any instructions from the U.S. company at this time, so we are not sure if we will release it or not. Why it has not been released in Japan” (Opens external site)
Note 4: See NiEW, “Biographical film of atomic bomb developer ‘Oppenheimer’ to be released in Japan in 2024 after much discussion and consideration” (Opens external site)
Note 5: The article draws on the words of a second-generation Japanese American who is the director of “Asian American Studies” at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Fijian native who is a professor at San Francisco State University–. See KQED, “Who ‘Oppenheimer’ Erases” (Opens external site)
Note 6: The article discusses the work of Wu Chengshun, the first female faculty member in the history of the physics department to be employed at Princeton University and a Chinese-American who also participated in the “Manhattan Project”–Business Insider, “Chien- Shiung Wu, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, spent her career fighting for gender equality in science” (Opens external site)
Note 7: See Business Insider, “The Black scientists behind the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb program that inspired the movie ‘Oppenheimer'” (Opens external site)
Note 8: Spike Lee, for example, said, “I would have loved to have the end of the film maybe show what it did, dropping those two I would have loved to have the end of the film maybe show what it did, dropping those two nuclear bombs on Japan,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post (Opens external site).
Note 9: THE RIVER: “‘Oppenheimer’ will not depict the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – ‘This film is not a documentary,’ Nolan says” (Opens external site)
Note 10: Typical celebrity comments on the film’s official website (Opens external site)
Note 11: Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer, 3 volumes (edited by Shiro Yamazaki, translated by Toshihiko Kawabe, Hayakawa Shobo, 2024) (Opens external site)
Note 12: Shigeru Fujinaga, Robert Oppenheimer: A Scientist as a Fool (Chikuma Shobo, 2022) discusses Oppenheimer’s political activities after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in detail (Opens external site)
Note 13: From Shigeru Fujinaga, “Robert Oppenheimer: Scientist as a Fool” (Chikuma Shobo, 2022), p. 429
Oppenheimer
Friday, March 29, 2024
Director/Screenplay/Producer: Christopher Nolan
Producers: Emma Thomas, Charles Roven
Based on the novel by: Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin
Starring:
Killian Murphy
Emily Blunt
Matt Damon
Robert Downey Jr.
Florence Pugh
Josh Hartnett
Casey Affleck
Rami Malek
Kenneth Branagh
oppenheimermovie.com
