Since so much is and will be written on this movie, I'm gonna make it all about me (just kidding). Like I can vouch for the Institute for Advanced Study scenes, with Einstein and Godel in the forest, and faculty housing in idyllic proximity.
All true. I was there. Not as connected with said institute but as an undergrad at nearby Princeton Inn, once a country club with adjoining golf course, and by my time (arriving 1976) already converted to a mostly freshman dorm, or residential college. I'd jog in the forest with my fellow mutant ninja tigers.
We didn't meet Einstein, by then passed, but at least one guy I know met the Beautiful Mind guy, John Nash.
I'm circling the whole aesthetics of that time frame, coming in through the lens of Wes Anderson and Asteroid City. That place of atmospheric testing, confidant futurism, science fiction, comic books, UFOs. Oppenheimer takes us to that same place.
"Give it back to the Indians" said Oppie, of Los Alamos. That grated on the ears of the Manifest Destiny types (e.g. Truman), who now saw a chance to "go Frodo" with the nuclear weapons thing (or should we call it "going Gollum"?). Bagdad Cafe is nearby in this space. The Atomic Cafe is ground zero. Dr. Strangelove.
Speaking of Asteroid City, there's that scene in the gym or whatever, with the writer, where he wants them (the actors in his play) to all fall asleep at once, act it out. That seems where Oppenheimer goes when he gets to take the podium at his chief apex of popularity.
The stomping of feet and delirious shouts of hysterical joy was semi-deafening (haunting in retrospect) and my new Apple Watch logged a sustained 90 decibels period, I found out later. These were Walt Whitman's sleepers, giddy with their own sense of spacetime (history). Not especially sober or grounded.
Were such people ready for real WMDs? Would they survive them?
I'm an "all out of order" guy like Nolan, the director, meaning I like getting the story as an asynchronous non-chronological bag of events I then get to assemble, like life itself. Because chronology is not always so important.
We're still adding pieces today.
We have other action connectors besides calendar chronologies.
In vouching for the authenticity of the Princeton impressions, I'm mostly saying they match my own, as one who lived there. I'm suggesting that by extension we might trust the storytelling. The medium of film is akin to that of the imagination, such that a Narnia movie reminds readers of where they went in their own minds' eyes. "Yep, this is the place" is a hoped for reaction.
As a resident of Portland, Oregon, I'm also not far from Hanford, Washington, the campus, mentioned briefly in the film, where the Nagasaki bomb was made, or so I'm told. They did that same insta-village thing with the layer of secrecy and paranoia. It's not like Los Alamos delivered all of those bombs on its own.
I got close to Los Alamos once on a trip to New Mexico with Dawn and Tara, got some feel for the place.
Yes, egghead intellectuals like Einstein oft tend to be on the left. Why is that? Because they tend to be idealists and think lifting living standards for all makes life better even for those at the top. Why settle for Ghetto Planet?
They're impatient with the status quo, these idealizers. "Left" seems to mean "boat rocker". Intellectuals, visionaries, see the positive possibilities, one could say that's their job. Quakernomics.
Oppenheimer is a valuable contribution to the literature, reminiscent of some Oliver Stone films in that sense.
