Oppenheimer : The man who gave them the power to destroy themselves
Oppenheimer is an adaptation of the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book is being adapted into a movie described as, “An IMAX-shot epic thriller that thrusts the audience into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.”
Oppenheimer was a scientist most famous for leading The Manhattan Project—the team that developed the atomic bomb for the United States of America in World War II. He later served as chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission where he worked to slow the developing nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
In 1954, Oppenheimer was branded a communist for his affiliation with multiple groups. He was relieved of service from the federal government and would continue his contributions to science as a teacher and groundbreaking theoretical physicist during his exile. He received three Nobel Prize nominations in physics from 1946 to 1967, though he never won one before his death in 1967.
The film re-creates the first-ever nuclear-weapon detonation without the use of computer graphics for filming purposes. Visual-effects supervisor Andrew Jackson had to rack his brain on how to film the effects “practically, from representing quantum dynamics and quantum physics to the Trinity test itself, to re-creating, with my team, Los Alamos up on a mesa in New Mexico in extraordinary weather, a lot of which was needed for the film, in terms of the very harsh conditions out there — there were huge practical challenges,” he told Total Film. We still don’t know how exactly he created the look-alike bomb, but we will soon.
What Fat Man and Little Boy lacked, however, was a wider sense of Oppenheimer's reputation as the war came to an end. His identity was a closely-guarded secret while the bomb was being developed, but after it was successfully used, Oppenheimer became a household name — his picture was featured on the front cover of Time magazine, and he was feted by President Truman. This rosy picture, however, was clouded in the early 1950s, as Oppenheimer and many other physicists and scientists with left-wing sympathies fell under suspicion from McCarthyite politicians.The film blasts into theaters July 21, 2023.
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