Before Nolan shot a frame he made the decision that settles the film: he adapted a book called American Prometheus. Everything else follows from agreeing with that title.
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, 2023, with Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. It took seven Academy Awards from thirteen nominations, including Picture, Director and Actor, and made over $950 million — an almost unreasonable outcome for a three-hour film about a security clearance hearing.
Where it came from
The source is American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, published in 2005 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2006. Sherwin worked on it for roughly twenty-five years before Bird joined him to finish it.
The subtitle is doing as much work as the title. Triumph and tragedy — not one then the other, but both at once, which is the structure Nolan builds the film out of.
The choice in the title
Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to people, and was chained to a rock for eternity while a bird ate his liver. Reaching for that story commits you to three things before the film starts.
It commits you to the gift being real. Fire is good. The physics was right, the science was extraordinary, and Prometheus does not work as a story if what he handed over was worthless.
It commits you to the punishment being disproportionate and permanent. Which turns the 1954 security hearing — a bureaucratic proceeding about a man’s clearance — into the eagle at the liver. That is why a film about a bomb spends so much of its running time in a small room with lawyers.
And it commits you to the theft. Prometheus took something that was not his to give. That is the moral weight the film carries without ever having to argue for it.
None of this is available if you adapt a different book, and it is worth noticing how much of the film’s argument is inherited rather than invented. Nolan’s most consequential decision as an author was made in a bookshop.
The one thing to keep straight
Because this project reads films as made things rather than as history, I am mostly not interested in grading Oppenheimer against the record. But one line deserves care, because it is the most quoted thing in the film and people take it out of the cinema believing it happened.
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” is Oppenheimer’s own translation from the Bhagavad Gita, and he is documented saying it — in an NBC documentary in 1965, twenty years after the Trinity test. There is no contemporaneous record of him saying it at the test itself, and by his own later account he thought it rather than said it. His brother Frank, who was there, remembered him saying something closer to “I guess it worked.”
That is not a criticism of the film. A man reaching for scripture two decades later to explain what he felt is arguably more revealing than a man saying it on the spot. But the line is a retrospective self-mythologisation, and a project about purpose should know the difference between what someone felt and what someone later decided they had felt.
If you want the contemporaneous version, it exists and it is bleaker. Accepting an award from the Army and Navy on 16 November 1945, he said that if atomic bombs were added to the arsenals of a warring world, “the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”
Why it belongs in this project
Because it is the one where the purpose is fulfilled exactly as specified and the result is catastrophe. Andrew Neiman pays for his own ambition. Kanye’s is paid for by the people around him. Oppenheimer solved the physics he was asked to solve, brilliantly, on time — and the bill went to two cities full of strangers.
It is also the only one of the five where the man himself spent the rest of his life arguing about what he had done. Within seven months of Hiroshima he was the principal author of a proposal for international control of atomic energy. Whatever else that is, it is not a man who failed to notice.
Where this comes from
- Oppenheimer (2023) — Wikipedia — credits, awards, box office
- Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus (2005) — the source, and the Pulitzer citation
- Robert Oppenheimer — Wikiquote — sourcing for the Gita line and the 1945 Army-Navy speech
- Oppenheimer and Truman, and the trouble with quotes — Washington Post
- The Acheson–Lilienthal Report, 16 March 1946 — the international-control proposal he led
- J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Physics in the Contemporary World,” MIT, 25 November 1947 — the “physicists have known sin” lecture, in its actual context