The Ambivalent Destroyer

Christopher Nolan’s new biopic shows J. Robert Oppenheimer as he really was—an American Prometheus divided at his core

BY

DAVID MIKICS

JULY 25, 2023

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” These dreadful words are by now familiar to many. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb, said he thought of this line from the Bhagavad Gita during Trinity, the first atomic test in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945. Vishnu assumes his many-armed form to convince Prince Arjuna to enter battle, and the image of a thousand suns occurs as well, a spectacle to rival the atomic fireball.

Christopher Nolan

How Christopher Nolan Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI

The Oppenheimer director says AI is not the bomb. His new movie might still scare you shitless.

BY
BACKCHANNEL

JUN 20, 2023 6:00 AM

WHEN WIRED HEARD that Christopher Nolan and his producer—and wife—Emma Thomas were coming out with a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, we were perplexed. At least for a moment. It is hard for WIRED to resist a Nolan–Thomas film. Nolan has a real love of science, just like us. (We know this because, well, it's pretty obvious in some of his movies, but also because Nolan guest­-edited an issue of WIRED back in 2014 when his film Interstellar came out and we got him to geek out over physics.) Add to that, the duo like to bend their audience's minds. And their eyeballs. They make superhero movies! It's so much chum for WIRED.

Cillian Murphy: enigmatic, intense … and now he plays a real blinder in Oppenheimer

Having nailed it as a Batman baddie and a Brummie gangster, the actor is tipped for an Oscar for his raging turn in Oppenheimer

Miranda Collinge

Saturday 22 July 2023

It is possible that somewhere, in a parallel universe, Cillian Murphy was Batman. The 47-year-old Irish actor auditioned for the role when the British director Christopher Nolan was casting Batman Begins, the 2005 film that would become the first in the Dark Knight trilogy. In this universe, however, Murphy lost out to Christian Bale.

 

Oppenheimer review – Nolan’s atom bomb epic is flawed but extraordinary

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 19 July 2023

Christopher Nolan’s account of the physicist who led the Manhattan Project captures the most agonising of success stories

The wartime Soviet intelligence services had a codename for the Manhattan Project, the US’s plan to build an atom bomb: Enormoz. Christopher Nolan’s new film about it is absolutely Enormoz, maybe his most enormoz so far: a gigantic, post-detonation study, a PTSD narrative procedure filling the giant screen with a million agonised fragments that are the shattered dreams and memories of the project’s haunted, complex driving force, J Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant physicist with the temperament of an artist who gave humanity the means of its own destruction.

Oppenheimer / A film by Christopher Nolan

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Oppenheimer

A film by Christopher Nolan