The gains and losses of the movie "Oppenheimer"

At the end of Oppenheimer, he and Einstein have this brief conversation:

Oppenheimer: When I brought the calculations to you, we were worried that [the detonation of the atomic bomb] would cause a chain reaction that would destroy the whole world.

Einstein: I remember it well, so what?

Oppenheimer: We did.

The film ends abruptly here, leaving the audience with a punchline with pun semantics: Oppenheimer once discussed with Einstein the physical reaction after the atomic bombing, but at the end of the film, when Oppenheimer brings up the past again, he goes beyond the realm of physics and science, extending the shock after the atomic bomb to the social and political spheres: in his time, the Cold War confrontation based on nuclear deterrence could drag mankind into the abyss of total destruction at any time.

The movie Oppenheimer (2023)

Many viewers see the end of the film as a wonderful white space, and this is the final foothold of director Christopher Nolan in shooting this film: his interest in this character focuses on the moral dilemma of the latter inventing a deadly weapon of mass destruction but feeling guilty and self-blamed for it.

This inner entanglement was combined with the harsh ideological struggle of the time. The latter forced a scientist with humanistic tendencies to remain silent for a long time in the political maelstrom, torn between concerns about the fate of humanity and loyal obedience under statist principles.

The biography of Oppenheimer, Prometheus of America, fully embodies the complexity and multifaceted nature of this character. The text here seems to be able to penetrate more directly into the inner spiritual world of the characters, and through the narration surrounding Oppenheimer's relatives, friends, and even "enemies", it repeatedly examines the heart of the scientist who changed the fate of mankind in the twentieth century.

Nolan's play is derived from this 700-page biography, but commercial cinema seems to be a more difficult medium to "use" for Oppenheimer's experience. It is limited in duration and expressed in images and sounds, and is not a good vehicle for a large number of reasoning, narration and inner descriptions. Compared with words, it needs a thrilling storyline and a rhythm full of suspense and tension to attract and drive the audience's attention.

The challenge of "non-linear storytelling"

Since his debut novel, "Follow", Nolan has been known for creating unexpected plot suspense and plot flips. He designed a rather unique non-linear narrative system, using multiple narratives that break the chronological order of crossing, parallelism, bifurcation, and even retrograde to enhance the already mysterious dramatic tension.

This has been vividly demonstrated in his second work "Memory Fragments": the two timelines of flashbacks and positive narratives appear staggered, and finally meet at the midpoint of the chronological order, while the contrast of details and confusing character attitudes in the two narrative lines tightly attract the audience's attention, leading the judgment of the plot and characters to continuous changes and unpredictable endings. Nolan's commercial film works also have the characteristics of typical "mental games" brain-burning genre films because of such a special time structure.

Movie "Fragments of Memory" (2000)

In Nolan's subsequent films, iconic non-linear narratives appeared in various forms in Deadly Magic, Inception, Creed, and even the Batman film series, becoming his most prominent label. Even when he has full creative freedom and no longer relies heavily on the routine skills of commercial dramas, the special time structure is still a weapon for the film to get rid of ordinary redundancy and have a distinctive style. Just as he juxtaposes the time measurement of a week, a day and an hour in Dunkirk, ignoring the connotation of its length of time and giving it the sublime value of the moment, these all flash eternal spiritual values in a film about the battlefield experience of ordinary soldiers.

The fragmentation of time also brings another effect in Dunkirk, that is, events and characters begin to juxtapose like collage crystals, which may not directly relate to each other, but often map and connect with each other in the virtual, changing the meaning of each other's existence. This is the idea of getting rid of linear logic and constructing the whole in another way.

However, all these means are very dependent on the evolution of the course of events and the corresponding actions of the characters, which are the source of the rich meaning of the film. It was at this point that Oppenheimer's subject matter challenged Nolan's established creative approach.

The weakest key part of the movie

As a talented scientist, Oppenheimer did stand at the most important juncture of human destiny at the highlight of his life, especially under his guidance, the atomic bomb was successfully detonated in the desert in an unprecedented and dazzling way. But beyond that, as a physicist and researcher, he spent most of his life in scientific research that repeated processes and behaved in almost the same way.

His left-leaning political beliefs, his pacifist ideals with humanitarian feelings, and his opposition to the development of a hydrogen bomb in reality gave McCarthyists a pretext to keep them away from postwar scientific research positions related to national security. But all of these are just a few moments in Oppenheimer's life, lacking the evolutionary processes of Nolan's previous films that lead to multiple consequences.

The cover of the biography "American Prometheus"

As a biography, "American Prometheus" collects a large number of textual materials, oral interviews and reports related to Oppenheimer, which can clearly and completely speculate, outline and judge the evolution of Oppenheimer's inner activities from the perspective of various bystanders, and the relationship between these changes and his scientific research and social activities.

However, Nolan made more challenging choices about the play. He chose Oppenheimer's first perspective as the main angle, and the comments and narratives of others took a back seat, but at the same time did not give the protagonist too many opportunities to show his inner activities and corresponding behaviors, but relied on dazzling audio-visual means to depict his psychological state - such as the trance drifting crowd cheers and the illusions of atomic bomb victims constantly flashing in front of his eyes, all of which reflected Oppenheimer's inner confusion and anxiety.

At the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico, scientists and other crews are assembling the world's first atomic bomb and raising it to a tower.

But as mentioned above, the characters themselves lack dramatic action and the flat and straightforward nature of the course of events leave the characters in a state of mental suspension for a long time.

In the life experience of a scientist like Oppenheimer, it is difficult to find those tight and sometimes dramatic narrative processes, because his ideas, values, and outlook on life are hidden in the brain, not in the actions of the genre film characters.

Symbolic audiovisual images—flames, explosions, white light, and detached sounds—do not truly convey a thinker's complex ideas. This became the weakest key part of the central structure of Oppenheimer.

The gains and losses of Oppenheimer

Nolan's ambitions to portray Oppenheimer's character didn't stop there. As the father of the atomic bomb, the biggest setback in the second half of his life was that he was cut out of the inner circle by Washington politicians because of his left-leaning pacifist ideas, and lost the opportunity to go further to the apex of his career.

The self-blame for the catastrophic consequences of the nuclear explosion, the McCarthyist political persecution, and Oppenheimer's silent concession complicate his thinking and paradox, which is also the dramatic starting point of the contradictions and conflicts at the heart of the film.

But Nolan intended to use a panoramic breadth to encompass all the important events and people in Oppenheimer's life: from the poisoned apple that sat on the Cambridge mentor's desk, to his communist-believing companions, and even his lingering time with his lover in Sanskrit poetry.

The crystalline narrative mode under the non-linear time structure deeply affects Nolan's creation, making him habitually use fragmented plot elements to collage an overall image, even in a biopic of limited duration, quickly skimming the cause and effect of events and the origin of the event in a dragonfly way.

In the end, in the forward jump and backward of time, with two hearings on Oppenheimer's career and reputation as the backbone structure, Oppenheimer's personal image is collaged in a divergent way. It covers almost every aspect of Oppenheimer's important life milestones, but it is also a bird's overlook.

We see on screen a large number of flashes of events in staggered time, their textual meanings carefully written like the cannon-like Punchlines (which also includes the dialogue with Einstein at the end), and their dramatic tension is abundantly presented by the tense and neurotic performances of the characters. But at the end of three hours, we don't necessarily see the coherence of Oppenheimer's own thoughts, emotions and values in the vast amount of information. We only see what happens around the characters, but we don't know anything about the psychological transmutations of the characters. Like Oppenheimer's wife in the film, he is puzzled by why he does not act to fight back in the face of misunderstanding of rumors and political oppression.

This makes us start to recall the theme Nolan set for the film. Did Oppenheimer's scientific research and the value of his life be elevated in the atomic bombing, or was he remorseful for taking a crucial step in the process of destroying the world? Can such a paradoxical life be regained through declaratory pacifist gestures and prophetic apocalyptic warnings?

Or, from Nolan's point of view, he is not satisfied with the portrayal of the critical state of fate ups and downs and the humanitarian/pacifist posture that has been half-soaked, but is more obsessed with using familiar cinematic means of expression, successfully collaging the image of a controversial character in messy and trivial, without missing any important details.

This may be the gain and loss of the movie "Oppenheimer".

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Written by: Kaiyin

Image from Visual China and the official stills of the movie

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