Make no mistake about it, Christopher Nolan was the visionary behind “Oppenheimer”—the latest in a lineup of 21st-century masterpieces of his, though this one just may surpass the likes of “The Dark Knight,” “Inception,” and “Interstellar” as the director’s very best.
But even he would attest that sometimes, you get by with a little help from some of the more unlikely friends you’ve made along the way.
Considered the best picture front-runner at March 10’s 96th Academy Awards, Mr. Nolan’s characteristically mega-scale epic has grossed back its $100 million budget more than ninefold—to the tune of $960 million, as of March 7. Not too shabby for an R-rated historical drama that has re-leveled the playing field otherwise commandeered by superhero sagas and action franchises.
Mr. Nolan’s feature-length meditation on the trauma of success is based on a real-life tormented individual: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who dared to move the Earth with the great application of what would prove to be his most fateful of theories—giving rise to the atom bomb.
The film fulfills modern eyes unaware of the mountains of guilt that all-consumed and remained within Mr. Oppenheimer.
The United States took his surrender-leveraging agent and ran with it, choosing to drop “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively.
Though initially commissioned to beat and defeat Nazi Germany, the atomic bomb’s debut ultimately neutralized a Pearl Harbor-responsible Japan as an enemy of America altogether, bringing a swifter end to World War II.
“Oppenheimer” also demands audiences hold requisite knowledge of the “Red Scare” panic that plagued the postwar nation not as impervious to entertaining communist ideals as its government preferred. The film rewards viewers with much ado about forgotten figures whose power forever remained in the shadows—until now.
An adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 biography “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the big screen “Oppenheimer” conveys equal authentic portrayals—albeit with some creative liberties taken—of events that shaped the fabric of global policy.
One needs to look no further than Ludwig Goransson’s conquering, yet melancholic score to understand the depths that both authors, the director, his cast and crew, and the subject himself went through.
On mood alone, “Oppenheimer” has attained “tonal rocket” status.
And it all started with a favor done in good faith by a most unpredictable source.
The genesis of Mr. Nolan’s most recent box-office smash is his follow-up to the COVID-19-impacted “Tenet.”
A star of the latter, Robert Pattinson, gifted the director a book of Oppenheimer’s speeches at their film’s wrap party.
Once the film was a go, it was full stops-a-go—an oddity unto itself, considering how long it took not one, but two authors to pen the eventual Pulitzer Prize-winning book that the film would be based on.
The book would spend nearly two decades in “development hell,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Sherwin was initially hired to write a biography on all things Oppenheimer in 1980 but became so enmeshed in the 50,000 pages’ worth of declassified government files bestowed upon him that it took tabbing fellow historian and friend Mr. Bird in 1994 to help him hone his sprawling masterwork.
Fast-forward to 2005: Their book has just been released, and is all the rage. Movie talks immediately commence, but the pair nevertheless develop a “jaundiced view of Hollywood” after an option by acclaimed “American Beauty” director Sam Mendes goes nowhere.
By 2015, the film rights had fallen to one J. David Wargo, a New York businessman and former student of physics himself. Mr. Wargo was itching to get the book into production, but again, to no avail.
Meanwhile, as the volcanic potential of Oppenheimer’s explosive life story lay dormant in Mr. Wargo’s determined, but still mortal hands, an old friend of his with much more skin in the biz started to spend the next few years conjuring up liberation operations from frequent “Twitter Jail” stints.
When actor James Woods took to the social media platform now known as “X” to voice his political beliefs, he essentially became death, destroyer of his own forward momentum as a screen performer, to those casting mainstream film productions in this day and age.
At the turn of the millennium, Mr. Woods was at the top of his game and fame, having compiled ample clout in the character actor pool with villainous “The Onion Field,” “Casino,” and “Ghosts of Mississippi” performances, and sympathy in the leading man department as a burnt-out photojournalist in Oliver Stone’s 1986 film “Salvador.”
Moreover, Disney didn’t flinch when handing him two major paydays for standout voicework as the “big bads” in “Hercules” and “Recess: School’s Out.”
Mr. Woods was so prolific in Hollywood that it even went understated how, in 2001, he reported suspicious airplane activity to the FBI conducted by members of the same outfit that would carry out the Boston-to-Los Angeles hijacking on 9/11 a month later.
The most flak that the good samaritan and greater patriot would typically receive in the years to come was in mere jest, and in character as a downright evil version of himself on Fox’s animated mainstay “Family Guy.”
Now, as the times would have it, Mr. Woods’s good name has been tarnished through overly politicized means—and mostly by his own doing.
“The blacklist against conservatives in Hollywood is very real,” Mr. Woods shared after The Gersh Agency dropped him as a client in 2018.
Mr. Woods felt he hurt his “hireability” more so every time he publicly aligned himself with the 2016-elected Donald J. Trump and today’s Republican Party—something he refused to stop doing, lest he risk his opposition winning.
Mr. Woods has been repeatedly locked out of his account for overboard memes, trolls, and decries and doxes of Democrat representatives.
The proof of blackballing was surely felt in the optics: No one was inviting Mr. Woods to the party; no one was inviting anyone anywhere, in 2020.
Indefinite delays had brought the film industry to a dire state.
Mr. Nolan had tried but failed to bring moviegoers back to the theaters with a convoluted “Tenet” rollout. After a fallout with Warner Bros., he was back on the studio—and project—seeking streets.
Again, enter: Mr. Woods—a right-time, right-place variable in an unforeseen equation.
The “Oppenheimer” film rights-wielding Mr. Wargo spontaneously rented a private plane and flew to Los Angeles in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic; Mr. Woods was there to receive his many-years-grown malcontent mate and set up a meeting with Charles Roven, a producer on several of Mr. Nolan’s hit films, starting with 2005’s “Batman Begins.”
As “American Prometheus” writer Mr. Bird relayed in his late co-scribes stead and honor, Mr. Roven next handed the book off to Mr. Nolan, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The director explained that his intrigue became a vision when reading within “Prometheus” how the Manhattan Project’s Nevada base emerged from what was once the Oppenheimer brothers’ pure-imaginative playground as boys.
“Los Alamos, this place that will always live in history or infamy, was first a place where Oppenheimer and his brother loved to go camping,” Mr. Nolan said in an interview.
“Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, I’m looking at the most personal possible connection between a character and a massive change to the world that couldn’t be undone.”
“It was all very slow,” Mr. Bird reflected, “until suddenly one day it wasn’t.”
Heading into the final hours of an impressive awards run amassed, the coveted golden statuette to be issued at the culmination of cinema’s big night is “Oppenheimer’s” to lose, pundits and the consensus alike project.
Phillip Griffin, a Long Island-based military historian who “works on almost a daily basis in the identification of who historical artifacts once belonged to,” calls it “an excellent film by any measure” that “achieved a greater degree of historical accuracy than most of its contemporaries.”
“As a custodian of history, I do not have the privilege to accept one answer as the truth just because it conveniently fits the narrative I am trying to preserve; purveyors of history should always strive for the same accuracy in their work,” Mr. Griffin told The Epoch Times.
“Unfortunately, the very nature of history rarely being objective means that it often lends itself to creative license ... this is why when history and entertainment cross paths, certain important details may be tossed to the wayside in favor of a more concise, coherent, or compelling story.”
In cross-comparing the “Oppenheimer” book, film counterpart, and the man himself, Mr. Griffin commends Mr. Nolan for “rarely missing” when it came to tackling the Manhattan Project and the fallout thereafter.
According to Mr. Griffin, he managed to create a resounding period drama without sacrificing historical integrity as he did with the “disproportionate representation of Englishmen” on the beachfront battle scenes in Mr. Nolan’s earlier World War II cinema entry, 2017’s “Dunkirk.”
“Oppenheimer” steering clear of such fact-bending gives Mr. Griffin hope that “future works of cinema can apply the same attention to detail, finding the balance between historical accuracy and art.”
“There were only two anachronistic or unprecedented meetings depicted between Mr. Oppenheimer and his contemporaries which were, in my opinion, significant enough to warrant mentioning,” Mr. Griffin said.
“Oppenheimer’s meeting with Albert Einstein, where he expressed his concerns about potentially igniting the atmosphere with the detonation of his bomb.
“In actuality, this conversation happened with Arthur H. Compton, a fellow principal participant in the Manhattan Project; and Oppenheimer’s meeting with President Truman—for in reality, Truman did not express his displeasure with Oppenheimer’s sentiment until he was gone, not while he was still exiting the Oval Office and within earshot.
“These shows of artistic license often operate in conjunction with the greater dilemma of not always knowing for certain what was said between the historical figures of a film in private.”
The cavalcade of star power contracted for the film—namely Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., and Emily Blunt, all Oscar-nominated—put in career-best performances here.
Mr. Murphy’s especially refreshing, and by all accounts accurate, interpretation of Oppenheimer as the defiant man of new science who sported no delusions of grandeur, but self-awareness of actual grandeur, set the new standard for project carriage.
The film is at its best when investigating its thesis: What exactly happened during a politically charged period that saw the “Father of the Atom Bomb” go from Time “Person of the Year” to persona non-grata?
As for Mr. Woods on the campaign and comeback trail? By this time on March 10, he just may be the last laugh-deliverer.
Though, as an executive producer with presumably no creative input or supervisory position on-set, Mr. Woods accepting the final award in place of Mr. Nolan or his wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas, is the definition of “implausible.”
Then again, so, too, was a blacklisted actor receiving a healthy cut of the near-billion-dollar-earning box-office, instant classic—up for 13 Academy Awards in total on March 10—without lifting a finger, or spending a penny of his own unsullied-after-all fortune.
“Because I wholeheartedly support both my unions (SAG-AFTRA and WGA) while on strike, I am not allowed to do promotional work on productions in which I performed services as an actor or writer. I am extremely proud of this work as an executive producer, however #Oppenheimer,” Mr. Woods quote-tweeted in response to the LA Times’ July 2023 publication on how “Oppenheimer” came to be.
By Oppenheimer’s internalized-no-more admission, his path toward forgiveness shall indubitably be a lengthy, if not irredeemable one.
Per his conscience personified, as the architect of modern warfare, he is thereby also the one piloting all successive WMDs to their targeted victims—stubborned by a belief that such is the fate of he who gave man the power to destroy themselves.
