Headline, July 28 2022/ ''' '' ATOMIC BOMB ATONES '' '''

''' '' ATOMIC BOMB

 ATONES '' '''

'' NOW I AM BECOME DEATH - THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS. '' J. Robert  'Oppenheimer' : A man for our time. A Creator, and Destroyer. 

The director Christopher Nolan's complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, called the '' father of the atomic bomb,'' is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms   

'' OPPENHEIMER,'' CHRISTOPHER NOLAN'S STAGGERING FILM about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as ''the father of the atomic bomb,'' condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours.

A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WorldWar II - cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer's legacy and also shape this film. 

Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn't restage the attacks ; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes

The horrors of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film

'' Oppenheimer '' is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan's filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.

As Oppenheimer comes into focus so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics;  the next decade he's at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics.

Nolan makes the era's intellectual excitement palpable - Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 - and, as you would expect, there's a great deal scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly.

One of the film's pleasure is experiencing by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.

Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically.

Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film [which is projected in 70-millimeter], a format that he's used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality.

The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling.

In ''Oppenheimer,'' though, as in '' Dunkirk '' [2017], he uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event; here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.

It's at Berkeley that the trajectory of Oppenheimer's life dramatically shifts, after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland.

By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence [Josh Hartnett] a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, the cyclotron, and who plays an instrumental role in the Manhattan project.

Nolan integrates many black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation - Strauss's role in the hearing and the relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation's outcome - to create a dialectical synthesis.

One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms.

Yet Oppenheimer's genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the antisemitism of the Red scare.

It is here and now that the film's complexities and all its many fragments fully converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery -

Who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a Communist boogeyman in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.

Francois Truffaut once wrote that ''war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.

This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls.

You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose :

'' Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds, as Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. 

Now we, too, have become death, the destroyer of worlds.

The Sadness of this Publishing continues into the future. The World Students Society thanks author Manohla Dargis.

With most respectful dedication to The Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society - for every subject in the world - and then Mankind, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. 

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society, most lovingly called, !WOW! : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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