Marc Turcotte

I thought the movie was good. The movie focuses on Oppenheimer the person and the wicked politics that destroyed him. My disappointment was that the science was only casually presented. This movie is about the man, not the science. So for physicists in particular, it could feel shallow. Also the storyline makes all of it look like it was easy to achieve; basically straightforward. That is incorrect. People need to know that it was not. Some people denigrate Oppenheimer as a mediocre scientist; never won the Nobel and blah blah blah. That's really unfair. Oppie was brilliant. He was first to compute stellar collapse into a black hole. He was an outstanding physicist. Much of the nuclear physics behind the Manhattan project was closely related to astrophysics and found applications there. Oppenheimer was correctly portrayed as a very smart scientist who was co-opted, you could say tricked, by the military and wicked politics to do a job. What he did with fervor to stop Hitler he basically lost control of it when the US obliterated two Japanese cities with A bombs. Not enough was made of the real opposition at Los Alamos following Trinity to the prospect of using A bombs on Japan; the atomic bombs were developed to stop Hitler. When that proved unnecessary, Germany had already been beaten into the ground, bombing Japan with A-bombs everything to do with containing the Soviets, at least for a while. And after the war Oppenheimer was personally destroyed by politics and his naivete. From the beginning Manhattan project was so much bigger than his grasp of it; but he only understood it much later stripped of real influence. Finally, unless you have some exposure to the cast of characters, who they are what they did in what has been called the "golden age of physics", this movie can be very confusing. Better read up first. Also, overall, the movie does seem to glorify nuclear weapons; very sad.