9/12/2023 0 Comments Life as we know it synopsisBut he was also aware that it would be mostly civilian victims of this weapon if it was ever used, because it would be used on a city.’ Photograph: Universal Pictures Cillian Murphy with the first A-bomb in ‘Oppenheimer’ Did the ‘poisoned apple’ incident in the movie actually happen? His motivation was that he believed his counterparts in Germany were capable of bringing Hitler the bomb and he understood what a terrible outcome that would be. ‘He’d worked very hard to produce this “gadget”. ‘His wife called him Robert.’ How did Oppenheimer feel about the bomb?Ĭonflicted, in a word. He was in Holland and someone started calling him “Opje” and it slowly translated into “Oppie”.’ Not everyone used the nickname, notes the biographer. ‘It originated after he moved from Cambridge to go study in Germany. ‘I think he did,’ says Bird of the nickname used by Oppenheimer’s closest friends and students. captures the complexity of the man.’ Photograph: Life Magazine Oppenheimer was a Life magazine cover star in 1949 Did he like being called ‘ Oppie’? ‘He plays Oppenheimer as a very intense personality, which is exactly right: he was very intense and thoughtful, a man full of contradictions who was fragile and sensitive but also strong. ‘He wasn’t just a nerdy personality – he loved French literature and British poets and the novels of Ernest Hemingway, and he acquired a fascination for Hindu mysticism.’ The historian is full of praise for Murphy’s performance. 'He was deeply charismatic, and attractive to women,’ says Bird. ‘He became a public non-entity.’ Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures Florence Pugh plays Oppenheimer’s lover Jean Tatlock in the film What was Robert Oppenheimer really like, IRL? ‘Just nine years later, he was hauled before a kangaroo court, humiliated and stripped of his security clearance,’ explains Bird. ‘There’s a great arc to it,’ says Bird, ‘from the triumph to the tragedy of what America did to him in the era of the McCarthy witchhunts.’ In 1945 Oppenheimer was a national hero who had helped his country win the war, his face adorning the covers of Time and Life magazines. ‘He was the director of the Los Alamos secret city that produced “the gadget” in two and a half years.’ What’s the story of Oppenheimer? It was a race against time against Nazi scientists that he won for his country, explains Bird. Oppenheimer’s greatest achievement – and the meat of the movie – came when he was asked to run America’s wartime A-bomb project in New Mexico, the top-secret Manhattan Project. ‘He was one of America’s leading physicists and was on the cutting edge of quantum physics in the 1920s and ’30s.’ What was the Manhattan Project? ‘Oppenheimer is regarded as the father of the Atomic bomb,’ says his biographer Kai Bird. Yes, and the movie cleaves closely to the facts of Robert Oppenheimer’s well-documented life. He answers the big questions about the hero of 2023’s smartest and most gripping movie. Pulitzer-winning historian Kai Bird co-wrote his biography, ‘American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer’, the book on which Nolan’s new movie is based. Happily, unlike Tenet, which we still don’t understand, we’ve found someone to fill in the blanks on the life of this iconic quantum physicist and A-bomb pioneer ahead of the film’s release. Who was J Robert Oppenheimer, the man played by Cillian Murphy in the film, and what did he do? Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is about to hit cinemas – and like the British filmmaker’s last blockbuster, Tenet, its title will come with a question mark for some moviegoers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |