Gopi Warrier

Circularity is a tool in storytelling. Start from one point and return to the same point at the end of the story, and reveal a facet that had been held back all through. In that sense, #Oppenheimer is a circular story. It starts with a conversation between Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, and Albert Einstein, and ends with that. The first meeting is a long shot. We know they talked, but we don't know what they talked. The same conversation in the last scene is a close-up. We know what exactly they talked about - taking science, its application and politics into a philosophical realm. Sandwiched in between these conversations is the ego of a man with immense political ambition and self importance - Lewis Strauss. Beyond this circularity, the Oppenheimer movie is fairly linear - moving between time zones in the life of the physicist. Everything else is mentioned in the background - the names of world’s leading physicists of the 20th Century, top universities across Europe and America, left activism in American universities, World War II, the McCarthy era, and even John F. Kennedy. Like any other average person from my generation, I was aware of the Manhattan Project, the bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War and the new world order. Did the movie add depth to my understanding? Only partially. What the movie teased out for me is the interface between personal self doubts, the excitement of a technological breakthrough and how geopolitics takes over once science ends. The most telling scene for me is when President Harry Truman tells Oppenheimer that the world will remember the president for dropping the bomb, rather than the person who made the bomb.