Christopher Nolan and the "Oppenheimer" cast discuss the atomic bomb and its chilling echoes today: 'Humanity can only deal with one apocalypse at a time.'

2023年07月22日

彼の最新作であり、おそらく最も重要な映画である『オッペンハイマー』を観た後は、多くの人が心配するだろう。名前が示すように、ノーラン作品は科学の天才であり物議を醸した原爆のゴッドファーザーであるJ・ロバート・オッペンハイマーの人生を引き受けています。After watching "Oppenheimer", his latest and perhaps most significant film, many will be worried. As the name suggests, Nolan has taken on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific genius and controversial godfather of the atomic bomb.

Christopher Nolan and the 'Oppenheimer' cast discuss the atomic bomb and its chilling echoes today: 'Humanity can only deal with one apocalypse at a time.'

//Summary -Level-C2//

Christopher Nolan's latest film, "Oppenheimer," explores the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific genius behind the atomic bomb. The film, which Nolan describes as a subjective storytelling experience, presents a haunting retelling of the bomb's creation and aftermath. The narrative is primarily experienced through Oppenheimer's perspective, portrayed by Cillian Murphy. The film has gained relevance due to the renewed threat of nuclear war, and Nolan suggests it also reflects current anxieties about technological innovation, such as artificial intelligence. The director hopes the film will explore the relationship between science, technology, government, and society. "Oppenheimer" was released in US and UK on 21 July 2023.

"The bomb, Dimitri. The hydrogen bomb," an exasperated US president reminds his Soviet counterpart in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 classic, Dr Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb".

As if the bomb could never be forgotten. At the height of the Cold War, when Mutually Assured Destruction was at its maddest, nuclear war was abstracted through humour - perhaps the only sensible way to deal with something so terrifying.

The bomb was a sick joke to be ridden, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally, a totem of humanity's ingenuity and stupidity to be riveted and let fly.

To look at it directly was to be blinded by its glare; its wielding power was too absurd - and too close - to face. Best to send in the clowns.

It seemed inconceivable then, but the atomic bomb has faded from memory. In the 21st century, other existential threats have reared their heads. But the nuclear threat feels closer now than it has for generations. And it's at this moment that Christopher Nolan asks his audience to face it head-on.

"Our relationship with nuclear weapons is very complicated," Nolan told CNN. "The fear ebbs and flows. It's almost like humanity can only deal with one apocalypse at a time, and there are many things to worry about."

But many will be worried after watching "Oppenheimer", his latest and perhaps most significant film. As the name suggests, Nolan has taken on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific genius and controversial godfather of the atomic bomb.

Working in IMAX, the director conjures up a stunning, altogether haunting retelling of the story of the bomb's creation and its aftermath over three tense hours that pushes the limits of the medium itself.

Nolan's screenplay - unusually written in the first person - is based on the definitive biography "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin but stops short of their forensic view of the physicist.

Alternating between colour and monochrome - the director has described the former as a subjective and the latter as an objective lens on events - we experience the narrative primarily through Oppenheimer's eyes.

"We have to get the facts right. We have to be guided by history. But we're trying to give the audience an experience. We're trying to entertain and engage them meaningfully," explains Nolan.

"It's subjective storytelling," he added. "We try not to judge the man. We're trying to experience and understand things with him."

Oppenheimer's piercing blue gaze is inhabited by Cillian Murphy, the director's longtime collaborator and first leading man. "Oh, there was a man," Murphy said of his character. "I was thrilled to be given the opportunity - it's a dream role. But it's so multifaceted and massive, you dive in."

Murphy plays Oppenheimer from a young Cambridge student in the 1920s to the post-war McCarthy era and beyond, without distracting de-ageing CGI (the physicist died in 1967).

Around him swirls a who's who of impeccably suited scientists, military men and politicians, along with the women in his life, wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) and lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) - a vast supporting cast in the truest sense of the word.

"Watching Cillian and Chris together, it was two people at the height of their powers," says Matt Damon, who stars as Leslie Groves, the brusque general overseeing the Manhattan Project.

"It felt almost like when Spielberg did 'Saving Private Ryan'," he added, "watching Chris Nolan with a story worthy of his enormous skill. Everybody could feel it, so everybody came in with everything they had and said, 'All right, how can we support this?'"

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A renewed threat

For most of Nolan's considerable cast, Oppenheimer's invention was the backdrop to their upbringing. "This was our existential threat growing up," recalls Robert Downey Jr, who plays Lewis Strauss, the founding commissioner of the US Atomic Energy Commission and later a political operative.

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"We were growing up at that time, but it's almost too much to deal with, so you push it out," Damon said. "It's like we've all been living under this sword of Damocles for 80 years... Our kids, it's not part of their experience to the extent it should be."

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Nolan knows all too well. "I told one of my teenage sons what I was working on," he recalls. He said, "Well, does anybody care about that anymore? "

That was a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, he hadn't asked that question when we finished the film.

Russia invaded Ukraine days before the cameras started rolling, Murphy notes, and it was under that cloud that filming began in New Mexico, at a stand-in for the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos headquarters.

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The film has taken on a disturbing relevance, especially the post-war passages documenting an arms race that Oppenheimer warned against. Its examination of his legacy, from the perspective of the physicist and the people around him, forms a devastating and complex coda.

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Today, the ethical debate about the bomb is still raging. But even if a nuclear war hadn't broken out in Europe in 2022, Nolan believes that "Oppenheimer" contains crossover anxieties.

"(Nuclear war) is unique in the threats that we face, but it also relates to a lot of our relationship - particularly young people's - with technology and technological innovation," he said. "Because ultimately the atomic bomb, as terrible as it is and has been, was an incredible technological innovation."

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Eighty years after the Trinity test, technological innovation looks like artificial intelligence (AI), he offered, and the potential dangers of "unleashing these things on the world".

"A lot of the scientists I talk to, a lot of the people who work in the technology sector I talk to, they're worried about this," he added.

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"They see what they're doing as their Oppenheimer moment, and they look to his story for guidance on how the relationship between science, technology, government and society should work."

"I don't know that Oppenheimer's story has the answers," he added. "It certainly raises the questions, and in a way that I think we will find quite chilling."

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Kubrick made us laugh at the bomb because it was an appropriate coping mechanism. Now Nolan's fierce and sincere contemplation will awaken a new generation to its horrors - which also feels right.

For a director obsessed with the workings of time, the arrival of his latest film is eerie. But there is a sense that the film will outlive this moment, only adding to his reputation as one of the few blockbuster directors with the clout to pull off work on this scale.

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"There's always been this mystique around Nolan," said Downey Jr. "In the spring into summer when the first 'Iron Man' came out (in 2008), people were like, "Oh, this will do until 'The Dark Knight' comes out." So you're like, "Oh, that's not a Chris Nolan."

"He's a master filmmaker; there's no denying that," he added, "and you don't get many of those every generation."

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"I think this film is kind of the apotheosis of his talent as a director," Murphy said. "To have had the privilege of working with him over the years and to see him move towards this, it's phenomenal to watch."

"Oppenheimer" was released in the US and UK on 21 July 2023.