I just came back from watching Oppenheimer with my parents and I really enjoyed it. I wanted to write a bit about it, just some first thoughts, to help me process it and to practice writing. I feel like it would be a bit of a waste to just go to sleep feeling like this.
The first thing that really struck me is how atemporal it is. There's a constant back and forth from the beginning of the movie between three different time periods. First, a story of how Oppenheimer led the creation of the atomic bomb from when he studied physics at Cambridge until a bit after the bomb explodes. Second, what looks like an interrogation, or like Oppenheimer has been called to declare about his past creating the bomb and some concerning events. Third, a different person being called to declare about different topics on a different occasion, seemingly in the future even if it's in black and white, but who is really worried that he will be asked about his relationship with Oppenheimer.
One of the first things that we see in the movie, is how this person, who we learn is called Admiral Strauss, first met Oppenheimer when he selected him as the new president of the CAE (Council of Atomic Energy?). Apparently he showed him the place, and through the window they saw Albert Einstein looking at the lake. Strauss offered introducing Oppenheimer to Einstein but Oppie said that they already knew each other and went to talk to him on his own. When Strauss approached them, he found Einstein walking back, with a sad look and unwilling to look at him. He asked Oppie what they had talked about but he didn't disclose it. We then cut back to Strauss declaring and stating his belief that Oppenheimer had said something about Strauss to Einstein, something so bad that Einstein didn't want to look or speak to him again.
Really I'm realising now that the story works the following way: we are seeing at the same time two interrogations/declarations that are separated by several years. In each declaration, the person being interrogated is telling a story, and we also follow each of those stories independently, thus jumping between 4 storylines in general.
However, the movie can be divided in two halves. In the first half, we follow mainly the storyline of Oppenheimer's early career, his relationships, his connections to the US Communist Party (and a lot of surprising references to the Spanish Civil War that make me want to research!), and finally the creation of the atomic bomb. Once the bomb created and detonated at Hiroshima, we see a bit more of his guilt afterwards, but we start seeing more predominantly the storyline where Oppenheimer is being interrogated and the storyline related by Strauss, with some bits of Strauss' present storyline too.
That's when we learn about Oppenheimer's increasing political involvement after the war, his worries about the Cold War, and how he started falling out of grace with the US government by advocating for peace and due to his early connections to the US communists. One of my favourite lines in the movie is here, where Oppenheimer remarks that the atomic bomb may have been less about ending WW2 and more about starting the Cold War. Finally, in Strauss' timeline we learn that they had a couple of disagreements in these political matters, and towards the end of the movie it is revealed to us that it was actually Strauss' fault that Oppenheimer faced that interrogation in which the government ended up deciding to remove his security permissions and effectively his political power.
Those final scenes, where the storylines in the past are dropped and we basically see the two declarations come toe to toe had me at the edge of my seat. It's a bit hard to tell whether the climax of the movie was when the bomb was being tested for the first time or in those final scenes. I've heard other opinions (my parents mostly) that at that point they were tired and just wanted it to be over, but that was not my case. I was thrilled when Strauss quotes his earlier line "they don't condemn, just deny", effectively showcasing the parallelism between Oppenheimer's interrogation and his.
A final bit that I wanted to mention is that the movie also takes several creative choices, like fast jumps to really brief flashbacks and the use of loud noises and shiny lights to transmit the internal state of Oppenheimer with great effectiveness. Particularly there's a scene where Oppenheimer is shown naked and having sex with one of his lovers in the middle of the interrogation, which made me empathise deeply with his own vulnerability, humiliation and the jealousy of his wife. There's also more subtle details, like how we're never told or shown anything that the narrators didn't know or experience themselves, which help a lot with putting the audience in their shoes. I noticed this specially in situations like when Oppenheimer didn't learn about whether the bomb had been detonated in Japan or not, and whether it worked, until he heard it through the radio, or when they learn about discoveries or Germany invading Poland through the newspaper's front page – things that feel striking to someone like me, who has grown up in an era where coverage of most events is instant and often recorded.
In general, I found the movie an amazing reconstruction of a person's story, which allows the viewer to empathise and understand the main character while also illustrating all their complexities and ambiguities. What I find even more fascinating is that this was all told through two interrogations that have their own parallelism going on between them and manage to tell a more general story about politics, vengeance and ideals. At the end of the movie, as Strauss faces the reporters after he was denied a role in the US government, we see again the scene where Oppenheimer and Einstein chatted at the beginning of the movie, but this time from the point of view of Oppenheimer. Here we see how in that first instance where Strauss thought that Oppenheimer was poisoning Einstein against him, they were actually talking about fame, fighting for your country and worries over a potential nuclear war. Nothing related to Strauss at all, and all with arguably more importance than he gives himself.