American Prometheus

Trinity Test is front and center in trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer

“We’re in a race against the Nazis, and I know what it means if the Nazis have a bomb.”

Jennifer Ouellette – May 8, 2023 12:02 pm | 178

Cillian Murphy gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the "father of the atomic bomb" in Oppenheimer. Credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures

Cillian Murphy plays the “father of the atomic bomb” in Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer.

Universal Studios has released another trailer for Christopher Nolan‘s forthcoming film Oppenheimer, which is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Cillian Murphy stars as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, marking the sixth time Murphy has worked with Nolan. Universal Pictures describes the film as “an epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.”

Industry watchers will note that this is the first film Nolan has made without partnering with Warner Bros. since 2002’s Insomnia. Chalk up the falling out to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Hollywood, notably Warner Bros.’s controversial decision to release all its 2021 films simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. The studio followed this strategy for Nolan’s 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet, which grossed just $365 million worldwide against its $200 million budget. While this technically made Tenet the fifth biggest film of 2020, by industry standards, it was a box office failure.

Nolan was deeply unhappy with this arrangement, particularly since the studio hadn’t conferred with him prior to making the decision about Tenet. So when he decided to write and direct Oppenheimer, the director approached several other studios about partnering with him on the project, eventually signing on with Universal.

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer Credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures

The cast includes Matt Damon as Major General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project; Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer; Robert Downey Jr. as Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chair Lewis Strauss; Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer’s mistress, Jean Tatlock; Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence; Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush; Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg; Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs; Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman; David Krumholtz as I.I. Rabi; Devon Bostick as Seth Neddermeyer; Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge; Danny Deferrari as Enrico Fermi; Benny Safdie as Edward Teller; Gustaf Skarsgård as Hans Bethe; and Tom Conti as Albert Einstein. In addition, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Jack Quaid, David Dastmalchian, Alex Wolff, Scott Grimes, James D’Arcy, and Casey Affleck will appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

It’s not hard to fathom why Nolan would be drawn to this material. As we’ve previously reported, Groves chose Oppenheimer to lead the secret weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Groves felt the physicist had the breadth of knowledge to bring together physicists, chemists, engineers, and metallurgists (among other disciplines) whose expertise would be crucial to the success of the project.

Just before sunrise on July 16, 1945, at the secluded Alamogordo Bombing Range in the Central New Mexican desert, a prototype nuclear bomb nicknamed “Gadget” was hoisted to the top of a 100-foot tower and detonated. The blast vaporized the steel tower and produced a mushroom cloud rising to more than 38,000 feet. The heat from the explosion melted the sandy soil around the tower into a mildly radioactive, glassy crust now known as trinitite. The shock wave was powerful enough to break windows 120 miles away. Oppenheimer later recalled that it reminded him of a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

Physicists assembly the Gadget for the Trinity Test. Credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures

On August 6, 1945, a gun-triggered fission bomb dubbed “Little Boy” fell on Hiroshima, killing an estimated 70,000 to 130,000 people. Three days later, the implosion-triggered “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki, adding another 45,000 human casualties. The United States won the war, but at a horrific cost.

Nolan’s film—and this latest trailer—naturally focuses on the drama surrounding the birth of the atomic bomb. Damon’s Grove features prominently as he and Oppenheimer set about getting the future laboratory in Los Alamos off the ground. They need to recruit scientists and quickly build a town to house those scientists and their families.

And, of course, there are many glimpses of preparations for the Trinity Test as Oppenheimer wrestles with the moral quandary that creating such a weapon imposes. At one point, Groves questions Oppenheimer about the possible risk of destroying the world when they push the detonator button. “Chances are near zero,” Oppie responds, like a typical physicist. “What do you want from theory alone?” Groves responds, “Zero would be nice.”

This is a story that has been told many times in film and television, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Nolan (and Murphy as Oppenheimer) sets this latest iteration apart. We know the entire film was shot with a combination of IMAX 65 mm film and 65 mm large format film, and there are scenes shot in IMAX black-and-white analog photography. Real explosives were used to re-create the Trinity Test rather than relying on CGI.

Scene shot in IMAX black and white — Director Christopher Nolan shot some scenes in IMAX black-and-white analog photography. Credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures

But if the film follows the book’s arc, Oppenheimer’s subsequent fall from grace should also feature prominently. I hope it does because it’s quite a dramatic story in its own right. It’s promising that Downey Jr. has been cast as Lewis Strauss, who chaired the AEC during the 1950s and was openly hostile to Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer served as chairman of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC) after the war. But suspicion over his communist ties grew stronger, culminating in the infamous 1954 security hearings to determine whether he was guilty of treason. Oppenheimer had several communist acquaintances dating back to the 1930s, including his mistress, Jean Tatlock, who committed suicide in January 1944. His outspoken opposition to the hydrogen bomb did little to allay suspicion.

The AEC found Oppenheimer innocent of treason but ruled he was “not reliable or trustworthy” and thus should not have access to military secrets. His security clearance was revoked on the grounds of “fundamental defects of character” and for communist associations “far beyond the tolerable limits of prudence and self-restraint” expected of those holding high government positions. The lone dissenting opinion came from Commissioner Henry DeWolf Smyth, who found no evidence that Oppenheimer had ever divulged secret information during nearly 11 years of constant surveillance. The black mark against Oppenheimer’s name wasn’t fully cleared until December 2022.

Oppenheimer hits theaters on July 21, 2023.

Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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