5 ms·

History vs. Hollywood: Oppenheimer

41 points by keiferski 3y ago

10g1k 3y ago
Hollywood: Oppenheimer. History: Dozens of elite physicists and engineers. EDIT: Similarly... Hollywood: Steve Jobs. History: Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ives, hundreds of engineers. Fame is an industry. Like Kim Kardashian. They pick someone and generate a story, and that sells.
- keiferski 3y ago
  I didn't really get that sense from the film. At one point, Teller even says (paraphrased) to Oppenheimer, "You're not a scientist anymore, you're a politician now." He is portrayed as a manager, not a lone genius.
  - senectus1 3y ago
    yeah I definitely got the "collaborative" effort from the film.. its just that they made the film a biopic of one guy in that collab effort
  - anshumankmr 3y ago
    A significant scene was just about Oppenheimer going on an Avengers style recruiting mission, getting the who's who of scientists on board. I don't think any endeavour before that or after that comes even close to matching the number of brilliant minds working under the same roof to solve a problem. The closest might be Bletchley Park perhaps, though there the only household name amongst those scientists is Alan Turing.
    - defrost 3y ago
      Tommy Flowers, Bill Tutte, Joan Clarke, ... These names were known in an Australian household in the 1970s. I can add more but they get increasingly obscure - but Flowers was as well known as Turing in the commonwealth in the 1980s. Early peak Turing was when the Andrew Hodges book ('83 IIRC) got mainstream appeal later that decade, from there the myth grew.
      - OJFord 3y ago
        It's probably fair that Turing is the only world famous name, but I don't think the BP museum or authors etc. generally do others any great disservice - the names you mention should be familiar to anyone who's visited. I can't remember the film though, can believe it was more Turing-oriented.
- rawTruthHurts 3y ago
  Well, put that way, life is an industry.
- izacus 3y ago
  The Alan Touring movie was also ugly by assigning credit of many people straight to him. I wonder if Hollywood writers just can't imagine having accomplishments that required work of many great people.
  - boffinAudio 3y ago
    >Hollywood writers I'd wager the writers are just pandering to the mores of their audience, who currently seem more inclined to an affinity for cult-like behaviour than sustaining an actual interest in the reality of history.
    - aziaziazi 3y ago
      Exactly. Without diminishing their work, what they do has more in common with word freelancer than historian.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    > The Alan Touring movie was also ugly by assigning credit Not just the movie, many books and articles. They often give him credit for what a team of people did (in the war-time code cracking efforts) and barely at all mention the work for which he was uniquely¹ responsible. He deserves huge credit for his life's work, no one of a sensible mind would argue there, but many give him sole credit for the wrong things at the expense of acknowledging those he worked with. From what I know (or I am lead to believe, to be more accurate) of his character I think he would be rather miffed by this. [1] “standing on the shoulders of past researchers/thinkers” arguments aside, in some places
- bla3 3y ago
  Yes, but it is that way because these stories are what people want to buy movie tickets for.
- xeonmc 3y ago
  What would the Bollywood treatment of this be like?
seer 3y ago
While the movie was to my reading relatively accurate, what struck me most was how little was devoted to the context of the pacific war and why it was desperate to build that bomb, despite that Germany was (or almost) defeated. The horrors of the island wars against the japanese, and more to the point their immense almost religious commitment to opposing the US was a big factor in developing and using the bombs. It wasn’t a “should I build this bomb and kill n civilians, it was a real consideration and waying of lives, both civilian and military. Dan Carlin’s podcast about the pacific war kinda opened my eyes how dire the circumstances were really. Even more so it must have looked immensely so through the lenses of propaganda at the time … while the movie did touch a bit on all of that, it didn’t seem to me it did it justice, making it harder to empathize with Oppie, which in my mind is kinda a shame. Otherwise great movie!
- defrost 3y ago
  > what struck me most was how little was devoted to the context of the pacific war In almost every way that matters (save at the end) the pacific war had little to do with the Manhattan Project and building of the bomb. President Roosevelt approved the atomic program on 9 October 1941 and agreed to coordinate the effort with the British and maintained correspondance on that with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. This was after a long sustained effort by commonwealth (UK, Canadian, Australia, New Zealand) and european nuclear scientists to convince the US nuclear scientist and DoD that a nuclear weapon was actually possible and feasible and likely being worked upon by the Germans. Once started the project was a behemoth, a monster rolling downwards under it's own weight, with mining, processing, seperation, fabrication, testing, security and some 150,000 (IIRC) employed across multiple sites. The only thing that prevented atomic weapons being used in the carpet bombing destruction of German cities was the surrender of Germany just a few months prior to the first protype being ready for testing. The reasons for a new US President to sanction further testing of the new weapon he had only just barely first learnt about on two pristine Japanese targets remain somewhat hotly debated to this day. Much has been written about this after the bombs fell. I'd point out that anybody that has been exposed to massive projects understands one of the prime unspoken reasons, you cannot spend a massive proportion of GDP on a military project and not expect to see it used. Further discussion on the breadth of the nuke or not debate: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb-a-consensus-view/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-us...
anshumankmr 3y ago
>Does the Oppenheimer movie include a lot of CGI? >No. Director Christopher Nolan told Collider that Oppenheimer has "zero" CGI shots. This includes the bomb tests, which were recreated without CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery). "I think computer graphics, they're very versatile, they can do all kinds of things, but they tend to feel a bit safe," said Nolan. "That's why they're difficult to use in horror movies. Animation tends to feel a little safe for the audience. The Trinity Test, ultimately, but also these early imaginings of Oppenheimer visualizing the Quantum Realm, they had to be threatening in some way. They had to have the bite of real-world imagery. The Trinity Test, for those who were there, was the most beautiful and terrifying thing simultaneously, and that's where we were headed with this film." Last year, Top Gun: Maverick took a similar approach and it paid off (although a limited amount of CGI was used in the Tom Cruise blockbuster). This can't be. I had read the statement but the final shot where he and Einstein talked near the pond, where we see the visions inside Oppenheimer's mind, had to have been CGI. Also, though I am not sure how they filmed the Trinity test practically, it had to be a smaller explosion made to look bigger, so it had to have required some compositing work. The rest of the movie did not really have all that much in terms of VFX since almost every other was scene was dialogue heavy and was mostly shot inside closed spaces. The scenes where Oppenheimer was giving a speech and was experiencing visions of an explosion also could have been done 100% practically. This is not a slight on the movie or on Nolan, cause it would have been much easier for him to do the trinity test or the scene of Oppenheimer dreaming about atoms via CG (which I recently read was done by using an aquarium and glass balls). It was just Nolan doing his best to market his movie, considering the fact the cast nor his writers were available to market the movie. As a side note, I want to add that I felt the scene with the Trinity test was fantastic, especially the fact that the hall went dead silent for a few seconds,but the actual shot of the mushroom cloud paled in comparison to the actual footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfK9G7UDok&ab_channel=atomcentral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfK9G7UDok&ab_channel=atomc... https://youtu.be/hyiXpECM7eg?t=224 https://youtu.be/hyiXpECM7eg?t=224 This I felt that whenever we saw the actors reacting to the explosion, they are being bathed by the light from the explosion, but seeing the actual explosion itself did not live up to how Oppenheimer himself said that it looked like a thousand suns shining in the sky at once. But with the excellent music, acting, writing, direction, shot composition etc. it is easy to forgive.
NoRelToEmber 3y ago
Interesting website. I was rather shocked by the Woman King entry - I knew that historical films like to take liberties, but did not think they had the audacity to completely reverse the roles of heroes and villains, or in that case, the pro- and anti-slavery sides.
kristiandupont 3y ago
The "fact" part of the page says that Los Alamos was secluded, which this Twitter thread puts into quite a different light: https://twitter.com/AlisaValdesRod1/status/1682167160364494849 https://twitter.com/AlisaValdesRod1/status/16821671603644948...
- defrost 3y ago
  The region of the British atomic tests was equally secluded: https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/maralinga-how-british-nuclear-tests-changed-history-forever#:~:text=About%201%2C200%20Aboriginal%20people%20were,The%20explosion%20caused%20blindness https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/m.... Later tests at tropical islands respected human rights to a similar degree: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9199216 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9199216 Tests in French Polynesia were just as shady, perhaps more so. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56340159 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56340159 The two live 3–4-megaton Mark 39 nuclear bombs dropped on North Carolina didn't have quite the same effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
- Lolaccount 3y ago
  https://archive.li/PPyd4 https://archive.li/PPyd4
- soderfoo 3y ago
  It was relatively secluded. Federal agencies already owned and controlled 90% of the land needed for the site and the local residents were mostly homesteaders granted grazing permits by the Federal government. Landowners for the remaining 10% were compensated through the process of eminent domain. Utilities and roads were built to access the seized land. Maybe the process could have been more humane, but it is easy to sit back in the comfort of the 21 century and feign outrage. The nation was facing existential challenges and the war machine required sacrifice from all civilians. This kind of context would go a long way in fostering better conversations. In regards to this tweet, it would have been nice for the author to acknowledge that while the Hispanos' grazing permits for the land were withdrawn, it was their sacrifice for the war effort.
amriksohata 3y ago
It also missed that Oppenheimer quoted the Gita but the Hollywood film did not depict it factually. What Oppenheimer actually said about the Gita in an interview https://twitter.com/pun_fact/status/1680803902524989440 https://twitter.com/pun_fact/status/1680803902524989440 How Hollywood depicted it: https://twitter.com/Nikhilsingh21_/status/1682685435687075840 https://twitter.com/Nikhilsingh21_/status/168268543568707584... Its not that its offensive. But more so its not factual because he didn't do it over a mating conversation. But in a serious video.

41 points by keiferski 3y ago

Hollywood: Oppenheimer. History: Dozens of elite physicists and engineers. EDIT: Similarly... Hollywood: Steve Jobs. History: Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ives, hundreds of engineers. Fame is an industry. Like Kim Kardashian. They pick someone and generate a story, and that sells.

keiferski 3y ago
I didn't really get that sense from the film. At one point, Teller even says (paraphrased) to Oppenheimer, "You're not a scientist anymore, you're a politician now." He is portrayed as a manager, not a lone genius.
- senectus1 3y ago
  yeah I definitely got the "collaborative" effort from the film.. its just that they made the film a biopic of one guy in that collab effort
- anshumankmr 3y ago
  A significant scene was just about Oppenheimer going on an Avengers style recruiting mission, getting the who's who of scientists on board. I don't think any endeavour before that or after that comes even close to matching the number of brilliant minds working under the same roof to solve a problem. The closest might be Bletchley Park perhaps, though there the only household name amongst those scientists is Alan Turing.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Tommy Flowers, Bill Tutte, Joan Clarke, ... These names were known in an Australian household in the 1970s. I can add more but they get increasingly obscure - but Flowers was as well known as Turing in the commonwealth in the 1980s. Early peak Turing was when the Andrew Hodges book ('83 IIRC) got mainstream appeal later that decade, from there the myth grew.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      It's probably fair that Turing is the only world famous name, but I don't think the BP museum or authors etc. generally do others any great disservice - the names you mention should be familiar to anyone who's visited. I can't remember the film though, can believe it was more Turing-oriented.
rawTruthHurts 3y ago
Well, put that way, life is an industry.
izacus 3y ago
The Alan Touring movie was also ugly by assigning credit of many people straight to him. I wonder if Hollywood writers just can't imagine having accomplishments that required work of many great people.
- boffinAudio 3y ago
  >Hollywood writers I'd wager the writers are just pandering to the mores of their audience, who currently seem more inclined to an affinity for cult-like behaviour than sustaining an actual interest in the reality of history.
  - aziaziazi 3y ago
    Exactly. Without diminishing their work, what they do has more in common with word freelancer than historian.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > The Alan Touring movie was also ugly by assigning credit Not just the movie, many books and articles. They often give him credit for what a team of people did (in the war-time code cracking efforts) and barely at all mention the work for which he was uniquely¹ responsible. He deserves huge credit for his life's work, no one of a sensible mind would argue there, but many give him sole credit for the wrong things at the expense of acknowledging those he worked with. From what I know (or I am lead to believe, to be more accurate) of his character I think he would be rather miffed by this. [1] “standing on the shoulders of past researchers/thinkers” arguments aside, in some places
bla3 3y ago
Yes, but it is that way because these stories are what people want to buy movie tickets for.
xeonmc 3y ago
What would the Bollywood treatment of this be like?

seer 3y ago

While the movie was to my reading relatively accurate, what struck me most was how little was devoted to the context of the pacific war and why it was desperate to build that bomb, despite that Germany was (or almost) defeated. The horrors of the island wars against the japanese, and more to the point their immense almost religious commitment to opposing the US was a big factor in developing and using the bombs. It wasn’t a “should I build this bomb and kill n civilians, it was a real consideration and waying of lives, both civilian and military. Dan Carlin’s podcast about the pacific war kinda opened my eyes how dire the circumstances were really. Even more so it must have looked immensely so through the lenses of propaganda at the time … while the movie did touch a bit on all of that, it didn’t seem to me it did it justice, making it harder to empathize with Oppie, which in my mind is kinda a shame. Otherwise great movie!

defrost 3y ago
> what struck me most was how little was devoted to the context of the pacific war In almost every way that matters (save at the end) the pacific war had little to do with the Manhattan Project and building of the bomb. President Roosevelt approved the atomic program on 9 October 1941 and agreed to coordinate the effort with the British and maintained correspondance on that with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. This was after a long sustained effort by commonwealth (UK, Canadian, Australia, New Zealand) and european nuclear scientists to convince the US nuclear scientist and DoD that a nuclear weapon was actually possible and feasible and likely being worked upon by the Germans. Once started the project was a behemoth, a monster rolling downwards under it's own weight, with mining, processing, seperation, fabrication, testing, security and some 150,000 (IIRC) employed across multiple sites. The only thing that prevented atomic weapons being used in the carpet bombing destruction of German cities was the surrender of Germany just a few months prior to the first protype being ready for testing. The reasons for a new US President to sanction further testing of the new weapon he had only just barely first learnt about on two pristine Japanese targets remain somewhat hotly debated to this day. Much has been written about this after the bombs fell. I'd point out that anybody that has been exposed to massive projects understands one of the prime unspoken reasons, you cannot spend a massive proportion of GDP on a military project and not expect to see it used. Further discussion on the breadth of the nuke or not debate: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb-a-consensus-view/ http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-us...

anshumankmr 3y ago

>Does the Oppenheimer movie include a lot of CGI? >No. Director Christopher Nolan told Collider that Oppenheimer has "zero" CGI shots. This includes the bomb tests, which were recreated without CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery). "I think computer graphics, they're very versatile, they can do all kinds of things, but they tend to feel a bit safe," said Nolan. "That's why they're difficult to use in horror movies. Animation tends to feel a little safe for the audience. The Trinity Test, ultimately, but also these early imaginings of Oppenheimer visualizing the Quantum Realm, they had to be threatening in some way. They had to have the bite of real-world imagery. The Trinity Test, for those who were there, was the most beautiful and terrifying thing simultaneously, and that's where we were headed with this film." Last year, Top Gun: Maverick took a similar approach and it paid off (although a limited amount of CGI was used in the Tom Cruise blockbuster). This can't be. I had read the statement but the final shot where he and Einstein talked near the pond, where we see the visions inside Oppenheimer's mind, had to have been CGI. Also, though I am not sure how they filmed the Trinity test practically, it had to be a smaller explosion made to look bigger, so it had to have required some compositing work. The rest of the movie did not really have all that much in terms of VFX since almost every other was scene was dialogue heavy and was mostly shot inside closed spaces. The scenes where Oppenheimer was giving a speech and was experiencing visions of an explosion also could have been done 100% practically. This is not a slight on the movie or on Nolan, cause it would have been much easier for him to do the trinity test or the scene of Oppenheimer dreaming about atoms via CG (which I recently read was done by using an aquarium and glass balls). It was just Nolan doing his best to market his movie, considering the fact the cast nor his writers were available to market the movie. As a side note, I want to add that I felt the scene with the Trinity test was fantastic, especially the fact that the hall went dead silent for a few seconds,but the actual shot of the mushroom cloud paled in comparison to the actual footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfK9G7UDok&ab_channel=atomcentral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfK9G7UDok&ab_channel=atomc... https://youtu.be/hyiXpECM7eg?t=224 https://youtu.be/hyiXpECM7eg?t=224 This I felt that whenever we saw the actors reacting to the explosion, they are being bathed by the light from the explosion, but seeing the actual explosion itself did not live up to how Oppenheimer himself said that it looked like a thousand suns shining in the sky at once. But with the excellent music, acting, writing, direction, shot composition etc. it is easy to forgive.

NoRelToEmber 3y ago

Interesting website. I was rather shocked by the Woman King entry - I knew that historical films like to take liberties, but did not think they had the audacity to completely reverse the roles of heroes and villains, or in that case, the pro- and anti-slavery sides.

kristiandupont 3y ago

The "fact" part of the page says that Los Alamos was secluded, which this Twitter thread puts into quite a different light: https://twitter.com/AlisaValdesRod1/status/1682167160364494849 https://twitter.com/AlisaValdesRod1/status/16821671603644948...

defrost 3y ago
The region of the British atomic tests was equally secluded: https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/maralinga-how-british-nuclear-tests-changed-history-forever#:~:text=About%201%2C200%20Aboriginal%20people%20were,The%20explosion%20caused%20blindness https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/m.... Later tests at tropical islands respected human rights to a similar degree: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9199216 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9199216 Tests in French Polynesia were just as shady, perhaps more so. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56340159 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56340159 The two live 3–4-megaton Mark 39 nuclear bombs dropped on North Carolina didn't have quite the same effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
Lolaccount 3y ago
https://archive.li/PPyd4 https://archive.li/PPyd4
soderfoo 3y ago
It was relatively secluded. Federal agencies already owned and controlled 90% of the land needed for the site and the local residents were mostly homesteaders granted grazing permits by the Federal government. Landowners for the remaining 10% were compensated through the process of eminent domain. Utilities and roads were built to access the seized land. Maybe the process could have been more humane, but it is easy to sit back in the comfort of the 21 century and feign outrage. The nation was facing existential challenges and the war machine required sacrifice from all civilians. This kind of context would go a long way in fostering better conversations. In regards to this tweet, it would have been nice for the author to acknowledge that while the Hispanos' grazing permits for the land were withdrawn, it was their sacrifice for the war effort.

amriksohata 3y ago

It also missed that Oppenheimer quoted the Gita but the Hollywood film did not depict it factually. What Oppenheimer actually said about the Gita in an interview https://twitter.com/pun_fact/status/1680803902524989440 https://twitter.com/pun_fact/status/1680803902524989440 How Hollywood depicted it: https://twitter.com/Nikhilsingh21_/status/1682685435687075840 https://twitter.com/Nikhilsingh21_/status/168268543568707584... Its not that its offensive. But more so its not factual because he didn't do it over a mating conversation. But in a serious video.