Oppenheimer (2023) on Netflix
Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer teaches in California, where several colleagues are Communist Party members. General Leslie Groves recruits him to help build the first nuclear weapon.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb8.2/101,098,247 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
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Plot summary
J. Robert Oppenheimer returns from studies in Europe to take teaching posts at Caltech and Berkeley. Several of the academics around him hold Communist Party membership, though he does not join. Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist and party member, is his romantic interest, and Kitty, a former party member, becomes his wife. After World War II begins, Ernest Lawrence warns him about his communist connections, and Oppenheimer pulls back. General Leslie Groves asks him to lead the Manhattan Project, and Oppenheimer proposes that the laboratory be built at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where scientists would try to finish an atomic weapon ahead of Germany. Edward Teller joins Los Alamos and warns that an explosion might set the atmosphere alight.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Oppenheimer (2023)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Christopher Nolan shot sections of Oppenheimer on IMAX black-and-white film that had never existed before: Kodak created the stock and FotoKem developed it specifically for this production, making it the first film ever to use IMAX black-and-white photography.
- Modern Los Alamos has a Starbucks on its main street, so Nolan could not film the town's exteriors there. His team rebuilt 1940s Los Alamos on a similar plateau at Ghost Ranch; the set took three months to build and was used for only six shooting days.
- Nolan staged the Trinity test with real explosives rather than computer graphics, and when the news broke online some fans, knowing his taste for practical effects, believed he had set off an actual atomic bomb. Nolan called that both flattering and scary.
- The atomic fireball was made with gasoline, propane, aluminium powder and magnesium. Special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher called the models "big-atures" because his team built them as physically large as they could, and forced perspective made them read at real-life scale.
- Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon and Emily Blunt each worked for $4 million instead of their usual $10-20 million fee. Downey read the script at Nolan's house, printed in black ink on red paper, and later called Oppenheimer the best film he has appeared in.
- Robert Downey Jr. had met Nolan years earlier about playing Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow, in Batman Begins. Nolan decided he was wrong for it, and the part went instead to Cillian Murphy.
- India's Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur demanded the deletion of the scene in which the Bhagavad Gita verse is read, and journalist Uday Mahurkar wrote an open letter to Nolan calling it a direct assault on the beliefs of a billion tolerant Hindus and asking for its removal worldwide.
