Oppenheimer Movie Review

[DavidAlfa]

It's a great movie, but being the history of the damn atomic bomb, I was expecting more action and deeper technical details about the process, not so much moral objection and politics!

It was a little like The Martian (Matt Damon), absolute great movie but would have reached perfection without the "6 months later" thing, not just planting potatoes and ta-da!.
Anyways, easy fix ! 
 

[Veteran68]

The wife and I just got back from seeing it today.

While there were a few moments where the dialog was quiet and hard to hear, I didn't notice such an overwhelming soundtrack as Dave points out.

For someone who isn't a history buff, at 3 hours it's probably not an enjoyable movie. My wife lost interest pretty quickly and struggled to keep up. While I enjoyed it myself, I would have liked to see more focus on the engineering and less of the political/commie/railroad aspects.

[vk6zgo]

And I mentioned annoying. Holy crap, almost the entire film has constant background music that drowns out the dialog. Dialog that should be important and focussed gets downed up.
And not just light background music, BLOODY LOUD, pulsating annoying crap.
Literally floor shaking stuff, I didn’t know my local cinema could go that low in frequency. And I’m, not talking the explosions, I’m talking about important dialog!
You just want to shout at the screen to shut the F up! And for the entire 3 hours.
It does go dead silent in a few places, but not where it needs to, and not even close to enough.
It’s like Nolan is trying to put you inside Oppenheimers head, and he’s got constant migraine headaches, so you have to experience that too.

I have a dad that is deaf in one side and he struggles with these films. Even I do when they insist on "acting" so whisper stuff that would usually be spoken.

I'm not surprised that it is not a film about the science, that would require writers that care about source material. There have been many films that turned me off as soon as I realised it wasn't about the subject of the film but some random shoehorned need to have a love interest or some sort of conspiracy for example "Imitation Game". The only program in recent years that I really enjoyed for the information and background it provided was the Chernobyl TV series, it wasn't exact on the science but it gave enough that I felt better informed while also being entertained with some great stories. By the way, I enjoy tales of WW2 and I really disliked the Dunkirk film as well as that Peal Harbour one.

If you want a fairly good film about Pearl Harbour, you can't go much past "Tora!Tora!Tora!".
It fairly closely followed the various historical accounts.

Of course, it did have one blooper which was immediately obvious to 1960's radio people.
As the Japanese aircraft formation swept across the Hawaiian landscape, a microwave comms site was clearly visible on one of the hilltops!

[VK3DRB]

This is a tough call... Barbie or Oppenheimer?

On second thoughts, I'll leave the Barbie movie to the Apple fanboys

[Bud]

Watch "Blackberry". In the final scene the CEO goes through a load of defective blackberry devices received from China factory and tweaks each device with a screwdriver 

[.RC.]

Probably just that for the vast majority of people, they are not that interested in technical stuff and why movies are what they are. 

I found this entertaining though. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYu7z3I8tdEnTQMXpP6gYN9DVm_DjXza9

[EEVblog]

This is a tough call... Barbie or Oppenheimer?

[EEVblog]

Ben Heck nails it.

[BrianHG]

Ben Heck nails it.

  And I was getting ready to go into town where we have a real IMAX dome to see this with an old engineering buddy.  I'm getting the feeling that the documentaries I have on the subject from a site called MVGroup would be a superior use of our time.

[BrianHG]

Everything Oppenheimer Gets Right And Wrong About The True Story

[JPortici]

seriously, what did you expect from a nolan flick?
I have no plan to pay to see this movie on a cinema, as i expect many of the memes to be accurate (all the greentexts with holliwood dialogue cliché)
after the dark knight all his movies have been the same, half fine half a huge disappointment

[dietert1]

Let the sun shine on some weed.
As a boy i learned about Oppenheimer at school and it was about responsability.
- Heinar Kipphardt: In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer
- Max Frisch: Die Physiker
Some days ago i listened to a 1968 interview of Werner Heisenberg on Youtube. The science work to establish nuclear fission as an energy source was done by Otto Hahn and his fellows. There were some sentences about how german physicists escaped from doing what Oppenheimer and his fellows did.

Regards, Dieter

[fourfathom]

The film is titled "Oppenheimer", not "How We Made The Bomb".  It is based on the book "American Prometheus", which is a biography of Oppenheimer.  I plan to watch it, and expect that it will be mostly about the man.  BTW, the saga of Oppenheimer and his reputation has seen much evolution.  I recall, back in the year 1969, seeing a play "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (I was 14 or 15).  It's tied into the whole McCarthy era which has also undergone many changes in interpretation over the years.

[mengfei]

Movies/ Film are made to Entertain the masses & rake in a lot of Moola for the producers

that's all there is to it.   

[dietert1]

The saga of Barbie and her reputation has seen much evolution, too. That's why it needs the movie.
By the way: "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer" is the english translation of "In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer". It's the play by Heinar Kipphardt i mentioned before.

Regards, Dieter

[David Hess]

Movies/ Film are made to Entertain the masses & rake in a lot of Moola for the producers

For an example, Dredd wasn't, and it failed because its intended audience was too small for its budget.

[Stray Electron]

Stray Electron thank you for such an excellent post, and right on the mark. As ex comm bloc (CZ) this has been an interest of mine since I could read

Even though Oppenheimer does appear on the Venona list (as one might expect) Venona still contains many agents who were never identified. Pity the programme was shut c. 1980 because today's computers are so much more powerful and better able to look for patterns in the "duplicate OTP" traffic. I wonder why not the whole lot has been declassified.

Fuchs gets the "credit" for giving the USSR the bomb and while he gave them the dimensioned drawings they were sure to have got other details from other sources.

   You really should read David Greenglass' book!  David was only a machinist on the atomic bomb program and most of the security people and upper management didn't think that he had disclosed anything of any great importance to the Soviets. But years later David reproduced the hand made drawings that he delivered to the soviets via the Rosenbergs and when the reproduced drawings were shown to some of the atomic scientists, they were SHOCKED by what he knew and was able to disclose.  Fuchs was able to give the Soviets a lot of the theory of the Bomb but Greenglass  was able to give them drawing for the implosion design that made the bomb possible. David and other low level employees provided many details about many of the other parts that made the bomb a practical device.

[coppice]

Stray Electron thank you for such an excellent post, and right on the mark. As ex comm bloc (CZ) this has been an interest of mine since I could read

Even though Oppenheimer does appear on the Venona list (as one might expect) Venona still contains many agents who were never identified. Pity the programme was shut c. 1980 because today's computers are so much more powerful and better able to look for patterns in the "duplicate OTP" traffic. I wonder why not the whole lot has been declassified.

Fuchs gets the "credit" for giving the USSR the bomb and while he gave them the dimensioned drawings they were sure to have got other details from other sources.

   You really should read David Greenglass' book!  David was only a machinist on the atomic bomb program and most of the security people and upper management didn't think that he had disclosed anything of any great importance to the Soviets. But years later David reproduced the hand made drawings that he delivered to the soviets via the Rosenbergs and when the reproduced drawings were shown to some of the atomic scientists, they were SHOCKED by what he knew and was able to disclose.  Fuchs was able to give the Soviets a lot of the theory of the Bomb but Greenglass  was able to give them drawing for the implosion design that made the bomb possible. David and other low level employees provided many details about many of the other parts that made the bomb a practical device.

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

[mendip_discovery]

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

I get regularly left in rooms where if I wanted to I could walk away with some protected stuff. Though just going onto a site where anything American military is made I have to do some security checks but once past that it's fairly open. I have been left in rooms with scaled detailed drawings of things. I did have to ask a customer once if they wanted to clean the whiteboard before I work in a room.

People who are good at social engineering can get into some amazing spaces with just a bit of charm and high vis and clipboard.

[Stray Electron]

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

   I really don't think that the Americans were that bad at security but you have to remember that there were MANY tens of thousands of people working on the various parts of the atomic and hydrogen bomb projects and you can't watch everybody all of the time.  Also the agents didn't have to deliver actual Secret Documents. Some like Greenglass simply sketched out the shape of the nuclear pits and explosive lens segments that he had fabricated and that was enough to lead the Soviet scientists down the right path about what it took to make an implosion type device. That one disclosure alone probably saved the Soviets over a year of development time on their own bomb.

  What surprises me is that the Greenglasses and the Resenbergs and many others had been born in the US and of European parents who had come to the US as refugees (not immigrants but laterally refugees) from Russia and other despotic European countries, but yet they choose to commit espionage against the country to had taken them in and sheltered them. And, quite often, on behalf of the same country that their parents had fled in the first place!

[David Hess]

What surprises me is that the Greenglasses and the Resenbergs and many others had been born in the US and of European parents who had come to the US as refugees (not immigrants but laterally refugees) from Russia and other despotic European countries, but yet they choose to commit espionage against the country to had taken them in and sheltered them. And, quite often, on behalf of the same country that their parents had fled in the first place!

MICE - A mnemonic device used in counterintelligence training to remind trainees of the four general motivations that could lead someone to commit treason, become an insider threat, or collaborate with a hostile agency or organization. It stands for Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego.

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

At some point you have to trust someone or suffer limiting progress.  The film Fat Man and Little Boy touches on this with the conflict between Groves and Oppenheimer.

There are also advantages to less security, or at least less classification.  UK industries were held back compared to US ones after World War 2 because the UK kept so much more wartime development classified.

[langwadt]

It takes some major arrogance to be that bad at security. Its commonplace, though, whether its national security issues, or industrial espionage.

   I really don't think that the Americans were that bad at security but you have to remember that there were MANY tens of thousands of people working on the various parts of the atomic and hydrogen bomb projects and you can't watch everybody all of the time.  Also the agents didn't have to deliver actual Secret Documents. Some like Greenglass simply sketched out the shape of the nuclear pits and explosive lens segments that he had fabricated and that was enough to lead the Soviet scientists down the right path about what it took to make an implosion type device. That one disclosure alone probably saved the Soviets over a year of development time on their own bomb.

  What surprises me is that the Greenglasses and the Resenbergs and many others had been born in the US and of European parents who had come to the US as refugees (not immigrants but laterally refugees) from Russia and other despotic European countries, but yet they choose to commit espionage against the country to had taken them in and sheltered them. And, quite often, on behalf of the same country that their parents had fled in the first place!

maybe they considered that a single country with the nuclear bomb and no possible opposition could end really bad

[David Hess]

maybe they considered that a single country with the nuclear bomb and no possible opposition could end really bad

Some individuals thought that, or claimed to, but US leadership sure did not.

Now if the Soviets had been the only country to have an atomic bomb, they would have used it after the war.  There is a story illustrating why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Article

[magic]

  What surprises me is that the Greenglasses and the Resenbergs and many others had been born in the US and of European parents who had come to the US as refugees (not immigrants but laterally refugees) from Russia and other despotic European countries, but yet they choose to commit espionage against the country to had taken them in and sheltered them. And, quite often, on behalf of the same country that their parents had fled in the first place!

I presume they fled from tsarist Russia and spied for the commies, so it sorta makes sense. Doubly so if you know that their names aren't exactly Russian names and have enough familiarity with early 20th cerntury realities and/or prejudice to know what it means

[DavidAlfa]

The film is titled "Oppenheimer", not "How We Made The Bomb".

Touché. We can close the thread now, there's no argument against that