Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer has finally
arrived in theatres and there's a lot to break down in the auteur filmmaker's latest film. Whether it's the subjective colour scenes
including Oppenheimer's early life, the development
of the bomb and the later trial, or the objective black and white sequences from the point of
view of Robert Downey Jr's Lewis Strauss. So I'm
going to be breaking down the plot and explaining the ending for Oppenheimer, to help guys put
together a much greater picture of the overall story. This video will be especially useful
for those who havent read the book, because there's a lot of historical details that expand
on J. Robert Oppenheimer's life. I will also be making much more content in
the coming days including a biggest questions video, so stay
tuned for all of it on my channel over the coming weeks. But as a last warning, this analysis will
contain spoilers, so if you do happen to be someone who hasn't seen the film yet, then
I would recommend watching this upload after you've seen it. Before I get into it though, if you want to
keep up to date on any of my upcoming content for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer,
then don't forget to support this video by giving it a like rating, subscribing to the
channel and turning on your notifications. But without further a do, lets dive into Christopher
Nolan's Oppenheimer explained. So Oppenheimer has everything you'd want from
a Christopher Nolan film, and that includes cutting between different narrative threads
to tell a more compelling picture of this real-life
story. It's almost like two films combined to really
examine not just the build-up and aftermath of the atomic bomb's creation at Los Alamos,
but also the effects it had on its creator towards the world that he forever changed. In the subjective colour scenes we see everything
from Oppenheimer's perspective, focusing on his early life, the development of the bomb
in New Mexico and the trial afterwards. While the objective black and white is from
the point of view of Robert Downey Jr after the trinity test, and he eventually built
a personal vendetta against Oppenheimer which resulted in a somewhat
parralel hearing at the end. I have read the American Prometheus book that
this film is based on and the history that's detailed there is
presented in a unique way in the movie through structure and how Nolan integrates the black
and white and colour. And because there's a lot of jumping between
different sequences, the best way to break it down is to go through
the story from start to finish chronologically. So lets get straight into it and discuss the
history from beginning to end that is shown in
Nolan's film. The movie opens with text referencing the
myth of prometheus, a titan who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity. And we know that it ended with horrible consequences. This is the perfect table setter for a 3 hour
biopic thriller about a US tragedy that has all of the mythic realism and scope that this
story demands. The story is not linear and we
actually start where the story ends, with a moment that is sure to be expanded upon
by the time we revisit it. Lewis Stauss oversees Oppenheimer and Einstein
speaking at the lake near the Institude For Advanced Study, a place
where Oppenheimer would later be in a moment of exile and where he would struggle with
inner trauma. Strauss doesn't hear what the two of them
talk about but it's clear in the many scenes that follow that he has suspicions over Oppenheimer
surrounding his links to communism and believes he has poisoned Einstein against him. They are friendly to begin with and it's Strauss
that introduces Oppie to the institute, but years later the relationship breaks down after
Oppenheimer publicly humiliates him resulting in Strauss bearing a lifelong grudge against
him. We get the introduction of both Oppenheimer
and Strauss's trials, and these are woven into numerous moments throughout the film. Oppenheimer's trial is about deciding whether
his security clearance should be revoked and Strauss's hearing in black and white is regarding
his motives and involvement in the period of
McCarthyism. I will come back to these trials towards the
end of this breakdown. So following our introduction to the different
narrative threads, we start to follow Oppenheimer during his early life in university and learning
about the worrying yet scientific evolution that was going on during that period
of time. While he was gifted in academic theory, at
Cambridge he was struggling to find his voice, he was bad at practical work, which was
pointed out by his proffessor, who he later attempts to poison by injecting an apple with
Potassium Cyanide. However, after being inspired by a lecture
given by Kenneth Branaugh's Niels Bohr, he had a change of heart and removed
the apple from his professor's office. In the book Bohr is a sort of prophet for
Oppie and his idea of wanting openess that is argued
throughout the film is a shared ideology by Bohr and Oppie. On the advice of Bohr, Oppenheimer leaves
Cambridge for the University of Gottingen in Germany, which is the heart of
theoretical physics in Europe. We soon learn that developments are made in
quantum physics, and at Gottingen this was especially exciting for bright minds like
Oppenheimer. He was able
to work under people like Matthias Schweighöfer' Werner Heisenberg and Enrico Fermi and he
quickly becomes well respected in the laboratory. Oppenheimer learns much from the scientist
Heisenberg, with whom he would later be in a somewhat race as he was responsible for
the German bomb effort, which never fully came to fruition. So after becoming an important member of
the physics community, Oppenheimer returned to America, with the goal of bringing quantum
innovations with him. At Berkeley University, he became a professor
and built and developed a department for physics. After initially struggling to engage with
students and construct lectures, over time, he would deliver eloquent lectures that many
students attended. Working
with Josh Hartnett's Ernest Lawrence, he forms a class which in the book is known as Oppie's
boys and using his platform, he's determined to push forward the quantum physics that was
introduced to him in Germany. Berkeley was the fresh start that Oppenheimer
needed but things began to take a turn when it came to his involvement with politics,
and this was a result of what was going on in World War 2 with the
Nazis and although it wasn't common knowledge, Oppenheimer was also Jewish. Oppenheimer's invovolvment with communism
really all kicked off after a radical woman known as Jean Tatlock, who is played by Florence
Pugh greets him at a communist party gathering. We
get a steamy scene between them where Oppie even recites the Baghavad Gita, a Hindu scripture,
that he famously quotes during the trinity test later on in the film. Jean is a Psychology
student at Berkeley, but she's also a member of the Communist Party. Being a part of the communist party during
this time was not out of the ordinary given the situation aurrounding the
war against Hitler and the Nazis. At the time, the communist party worked for
fairer wages, and helping refugees, which Oppenheimer also contributed to, with giving
money to the Spanish war effort. So the communists stood against fascism and
it was Jean who really introduced him to the cause, which he was happy to help with. He was not a fully fledged member of the
communist party but he did subscribe to a lot of their ideas. He was in love with Jean and through her he
became friends with Chevalier and both of these relationships would eventually
become some of the biggest obstacles for Oppenheimer during his later trial. His brother Frank was also apart of the Communist
Party, creating yet more fuel for the US government to use
against him. And as he became more involved, Ernest Lawrence
scolded him for bringing left wing political views into the classroom, believing that they
should be kept separate from the science. Although Oppenheimer had become more connected
to communists, it's learned that his connections were not too radical or extensive from his
perspective. And his actions really
highlighted that. He broke up with Jean and met Emily Blunt's
Kitty, who also left the communist party, and it was clear that this was the woman he
was destined to be with. Kitty has
previoualy been married three times, but after meeting Oppie and spending time together both
in the US and in new Mexico, they soon got married. So this brings us to the formation of the
Manhattan Project. Due to World War 2, and the looming threat
of the Nazis completing their bomb first, it was time to progress from using
theory alone. As Oppie says in the film, "theory will only
take you so far". And after a new revelation in physics, it
became clear to Oppie that he had to get involved in the war effort. On the day his paper on Black Holes is published,
that groundbreaking work was overshadowed by Hitler invading Poland, which is exactly
how it plays out in the book and I'm really Happy
that Nolan included that detail in the film. On top of this though, a scientific discovery
was made. It was made known that when you bombard a
uranium nucleus with neutrons, the nucleus can be split and a huge amount of
energy can be released. This led to there being a recognition that
a chain reaction could be created with lots of neutrons. So essentially
nuclear fission could be utilised to create a very powerful bomb and the fear was that
the nazis with a lot of the greatest german scientists could harness that and be the first
to develop an atomic bomb. This is when Oppenheimer is visited by Matt
Damon's Leslie Groves, head of the nuclear development project by the National Defense
Research Council, and he is tasked with appointing the head of the Manhattan
Project. So with Oppenheimer desperately wanting to
get involved in helping the war effort and Groves being the only one who saw that
this man could do it, he was choosen by Groves. We learn that the government wasn't interested
in approaching Oppenheimer because they knew of his potential radical ties and they didn't
want to expose top secrets to someone they thought was a potential security risk. But after some pushing from Groves, Oppie
is eventually placed in charge of the project to design the
bomb itself. Groves was adament that the project be kept
a complete secret, but Oppenheimer advised that that this secrecy would hurt the scientists
work and slow down the overall progress of the
project. So an extension of the openess that Niels
Bohr inspired during the earlier moments in Oppenheimer's life comes into practice. Both Groves and Oppie picked out the perfect
location for the manhattan project, an isolated mesa in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The top scientists could work together here,
bring their families and live there. Oppenheimer recruited
some of his own students but mainly some of the world's leading physicians, which included
Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Isidor Rabi and Ernest Lawrence. While there were poor conditions
here they were all able to thrive in this location with a shared noble goal in mind:
create an atomic bomb before the Nazis do. However, there were issues during the bomb
project and the main one links into that issue of secrecy
that I discussed before. There were complaints from the scientists
about the excessive security measures conducted by the military and as we
learn later on in the film, the military had tapped Oppenheimer's phone and kept him under
constant surveillance. Additionally, Oppenheimer had to resolve disputes
between scientists and the military, striving to keep their focus. Edward Teller proposed that they use Hydrogen
to construct the bomb as it would result in a blast equating to megatons. Oppenheimer believed
that this was excessive and dismissed the idea. There's a moment where Teller becomes frustrated
and threatens to leave Los Alamos but Oppie convinces him to stay by promising that
they'll have an hour in the lab together once a week. He kept the scientists and the military happy
and after multiple implosion tests and design work, they had all accomplished what
once seemed impossible. Detonating an atomic weapon. While it was difficult to construct the bomb
and create a nuclear chain reaction that they could control, what remained unclear was what
would happen afterwards as a result of the blast. There was the tiniest possibility that an
explosion could ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on earth. While this was huge risk, they formulated
two bomb designs, one named Fat Man and another named Little Boy. The latter, which was eventually dropped over
Hiroshima, used a gun-assembly method, where U-235 is fired at another mass of U-235. When they
combine they form a critical mass, starting a nuclear reaction. On the other hand, Fat Man, the bomb used
in Nagasaki, was a plutonium bomb using implosion. With this method, plutonium
is surrounded by explosives, and once activated, it's compressed and another nuclear reaction
is set off. They were less sure that this method would
work and that's why we see them carry out more implosion tests. While the production of the bombs was a big
issue they got around, some of the other issues that are excellently conveyed in the film
surround the political and moral implications of using the weapon,
especially when they find out that Hitler is dead and the Germans have surrenderred. Oppenheimer starts holding discussions among
the scientists at Los Alamos, continuing the idea
of openess that he and Bohr wanted to push for, to on one hand discuss the dangers of
nuclear power and two, debate the justifications of
using the bomb on Japan. While the japanese were close to surrendering
as well, they felt to protect the United States and to sustain a future where there would
be no more war, using this weapon was necessary to ensure this. In the midst of deciding what they were going
to do, Oppenheimer was met with a tragedy. His once lover Jean Tatlock had died after
drowning in her bathtub and as detailed in the trials
later on, it's not clear whether she drowned herself or whether someone had killed her. She was desperate for company after quitting
the communist party and Oppie promised he'd be
there for her, but during the Los Alamos project he only met with her once in an intimate encounter. He cut ties with her and his relationship
with her would come back to haunt him in the trials, which again, I'll go into at the end. And this brings us to the trinity test that
this whole project has been building up to. They selected an area isolated in the middle
of the desert code-named Trinity, a reference to a John Donne poem who Oppenheimer
and his former lover Jean Tatlock admired. In the scene itself, we get hours cut down
into just a few minutes showcasing the risk and rising tension involved. We also learn of the storm that delays the
test. Oppie tells Kitty that she can bring in the
sheets if it works and the many scientists gather at
the trinity site to perform the test. Ludwig Gorannson's horror like score builds
and builds until the countdown runs out, the flash of light is shown and we see it from
the multiple perspectives around the bunker. It's exactly like it is in the book, with
Oppenheimer reciting the I am become death, the destoyer of worlds scripture and many
of those at the site describing the colours and silence of the
moment before the massive shock wave hits. It ends with the scientists beginning to cheer
and there's this sense of relief that the mission had
payed off with the gadget succeeding. But the reaction to atomic weapons quickly
began to change. Some of the scientists had realised that their
hard work had created the most destructive killing machine, and this was
especially the case when they were used in Japan, after the targets of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki had been selected by the Government. The majority of the US supported the bombs
use in Japan, and a majority of the scientists who worked
at Los Alamos supported it too. And while Oppenheimer was initially pleased
to hear that the gadget worked, their usage on civilians made him
fear the consequences of a nuclear world. Like in the book, Hiroshima is only heard
on the radio by Oppenheimer and others and you get their reactions to it and not a visualisation
of the moment it went off. However what Nolan does highlight is the brutal
consequences of the weapon, and that takes form in one of the most powerful moments in
the film, during Oppenheimer's victory speech at Los Alamos. He congratulates the effort of those involved
on the project, but in that very speech, we go inside of his mind to visualise the trauma
that he now has to live with. He pictures people burnt and children incinerated
in the blast all around the hall where people are celebrating. It's a striking scene that really communicates
the horror that these weapons can cause. And that really translates into how Oppenheimer
feels and his stance from that moment on surrounding the development of more bombs, and more
specifically the Hydrogen bomb in an accelerating arms race. While Oppenheimer was not against nuclear
weapons, he felt responsible for introducing them and he felt like it was his duty
to try and influence how they were used in the future. After being appointed as the chairman of the
General Advisory Committee and beginning to have dissagreements with members of
government including Lewis Strauss, he argued that the US should tell the Soviets about
the Manhattan project, in the hopes of avoiding a future arms race. The government rejected this,
kept the bomb program a secret and charged ahead for control of power. Oppenheimer meets with the then president
in the Oval Office, which is a fantastic and only scene with Gary
oldman's Harry Truman. He crumbles in front of the president revealing
to him that he feels he has blood on his hands and once the meeting ends and Oppie makes
his way to the door, Truman calls him a cry baby scientist. WHile Oppenheimer was intent on stopping the
development of more bombs, something that just wasn't working in that toxic political
sphere, it's key to note that Edward Teller had stayed
at Los Alamos to work on the hydrogen bomb, which is hundreds of times more powerful than
the ones dropped in Japan. So even after serving
his country as well as he did and trying to make a better future for the world as a whole,
Oppenheimer failed to stand up to the government and eventually, his stance towards the
Hydrogen bomb was enough to destroy his celebrity scientist persona and give fuel for the US
government to destroy him too. And that brings us to the trials of Oppenheimer. They are intercut throughout the movie and
work in tandem with all the other moments in the film which I've described up until
this point. One for Oppenheimer's security clearance and
the other for a hearing with Lewis Strauss. Starting with Oppie's trial, we learn that
a lot of the evidence put against him comes from unnamed individuals and from
illegal wiretaps, which had not been disclosed to the scientist or his lawayer. Plus, if this trial had taken place
in an actual courtroom, the evidence wouldn't have been allowed to be used or considered
as evidence. So that's just one element of this trial that
was sketchy and as we soon find out, a lot of it was under the hands of Lewis Strauss. The trial was actually intended to bring him
down using his communist connections more than it was surrounding his attitude towards
the Hydrogen bomb. And that again screamed of relations to the
personal vendetta that Strauss built against him after facing his own humiliation earlier
on. The trial scenes involved those
coming forward to defend Oppie but it only served to give Jason Clarke's Roger Robb and
the other individuals in the room more evidence to destroy him. Leslie Groves, Matthew Modine's
Vannevar Bush, Isador Rabi and Kitty were involved, with the latter being one of the
only people to convincingly defend him. And that's because she was really the only
person who truly understood him. Edward Teller testified against him having
been outraged towards Oppenheimer's feelings on the hydrogen bomb. Even with many people speaking in his defence,
the prosecutors were able to contruct evidence
that would hurt him and that identified the event from the 40s where Oppenheimer's friend
Chevalier tried to get him to pass information about
the bomb project to the Soviets. Oppenheimer had refused at the time, but in
the years after, we learn that he chose not to mention anything about the incident nor
Chevalier to the government. And when he eventually did, he still never
mentioned Chevalier's name as he was protecting his friend. This, combined with knowledge of his affair
with Jean tatlock and all the other connections he had to members of
the party, was all the prosecution needed. There's an effective moment in the trial where
kitty imagines Oppenheimer having sex with Jean at
the trial and after the proceeding ends she says to Robert that she's fed up with the
prosecution analysing every part of their lives and Oppenheimer's seeming lack of desire
to defend himself. It makes you only imagine how they must have
been feeling and it really taps into the damage that it did to them even after this trial
ended. With the exhausting hearing over,
the security Board voted against Oppenheimer maintaining his security clearance and while
they stated that there was no evidence that he was ever a Communist himself, they claimed
that his behavior had shown bad judgement. If you know the story, Oppenheimer went into
exile and while it was humiliating for him then, McCarthyism had eventually died out
and the US was embarrassed by their treatment of
the man. In fact, the AEC awarded him the Enrico Fermi
Award for Excellence in the field of nuclear research and we see this in the film with
Cillian Murphy as an aged Oppenheimer. Kitty refuses to shake the hand of Edward
Teller, who won the same award the year before, showing that she would never forget the ordeal
that they were put through. And this
brings us to the other hearing in the movie, one that again we return to throughout the
film in black and white. With the hearing focussing on his appointment
as the U.S Secretary of Commerce, Strauss goes into detail about why
he had problems with Oppenheimer. Ultimately, it came down to a few reasons. The initial one was the humiliation that
he sufffered at the hands of Oppenheimer in a public hearing, and the other stemmed from
his own paranoia surrounding a conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein at the lake. He thought that Oppie had poisoned Einstein
against him and his hatred towards Oppie would become his own professional downfall. In Strauss's hearing, he was refused a higher
position because many scientists and key figures, including Rami Malek's David Hill shed light
on his involvement in Oppenheimer’s humiliating trails. It was science vs politics and
loyalty had been thrown out the window. The movie questions what it means to be loyal
to your country how you react when that loyalty is questioned. But it was a vendetta for Strauss
and a case of not understanding Oppenheimer's stance on nuclear energy nor what he said
to Einstein at that lake. And the final scene reveals exactly what was
said, ending very close to where the film began. At the beginning we saw Strauss watching Oppie
and Einstein's conversation from a distance, but here, we see the discussion from the perspective
of Oppenheimer. Einstein gives him some wisdom about his life
and the bleak future that he will face. He says that while the world
has gotten what they wanted from him, the medals and praise he recieves will eventually
lead to the world shunning him. This leads into a conversation about the atomic
bomb itself, and specifically, how the blast of the bomb
might have triggered a chain reaction and ignited the atmosphere. Oppenheimer and Einstein's conversation ends
with the former questioning whether his invention has destroyed the world
anyway, because its very existance and the bigger bombs that were going to be built,
could result in complete annihilation. And after a
brief visual of a nuclear silo, Oppenheimer stares deeply at the pond and we aree presented
with his mind's final image. The film leaves us with a horrifying vision
of Earth from space being destroyed in a nuclear war and blasts
spreading across the planet. It's the perfect way to end the film, making
the underlying fear that runs throughout even clearer to the
audience and we wonder whether today's issues could eventually lead to this. Of course, Oppenheimer's tale has a lot of
conundrums, as they initially had to develop nuclear weapons and
the use of them in Japan will hopefully mean they are never used again. But the hand on the doomsday clock has inched
closer to midnight and the film absolutely serves as a cautionary
tale, not just for questioning loyalty but also for the potential consequences of using
these missiles as a tool for genocide and even wiping out life on earth entirely. But that was my video explaining the plot
and ending for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. Like I said in my spoiler free review, this
film is a spectacular cinematic achievement and
there's going to be plenty to discussion about it in the coming weeks surrounding the questions
raised by the ending, the movie's overall quality, the adaptation of the book and the
narrative's central themes. But I do hope this breakdown did help some
of you guys understand the events and smaller details a bit better, and overall, I'm looking
forward to hearing your thoughts on the film, so don't forget
to let me know down below in the comments section. Again, I will also be doing lots of Oppenheimer
videos during release week including a biggest questions upload, where I go into
more that I haven't talked about here, and a spoiler-filled essay discussing why I think
Christopher Nolan's lastest feature is a masterpiece. So keep a look out for whenever I post and
make sure you don't miss any of it. For much more on Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer,
then subscribe to the channel and turn on your notifications. Also if you enjoyed this video remember to
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been Cortex and as always make some noise.
