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There’s a lot of bits in the Oppenheimer film that seem simplified. For example that Los Alamos appears to be a fairly small operation, a bunch of shacks in the
by ant6n 3y ago
There’s a lot of bits in the Oppenheimer film that seem simplified. For example that Los Alamos appears to be a fairly small operation, a bunch of shacks in the prairie, a kind of physics camp for a team of nerds.
In reality the Manhattan project at Los Alamos was a huge operation, like 8000 people living there in 1945, a kind of university/research campus and town, but the movie doesn’t really show the scale. Also, the Trinity test was actually done 4h away from the Los Alamos site, and just the test was also a huge operation.
The way Groves and Oppenheimer decide important matters, while standing in the prairie or sitting on a train or on the way out of some meeting makes it seem they‘re planning an Oceans Elevens style heist, not one of the biggest techno-scientific projects of the 20th century.
- bmitc 3y agoEvery picture I have seen indeed shows it was a bunch of shacks and hastily built buildings. I'm not for sure a tour of Los Alamos was necessary. An overhead shot might have worked.
- newsclues 3y agoThat’s an expensive overhead shot unless it’s a model or cgi.
- bell-cot 3y agoIf Peter Jackson could CGI Lord of the Rings two decades ago, then it should be pretty cheap to CGI a zoom shot on a cookie-cutter WWII "boom town" now. And there are probably quite a few WWII-era aerial photographs to start from.
- bmitc 3y agoA lot of the entire military base in Arrival was CGI. https://youtu.be/wxSPdZl5sYw https://youtu.be/wxSPdZl5sYw
- ant6n 3y agoThe few images on Wikipedia look fairly different than the movie to me, for example this overhead shot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Y#Gun-type_weapon_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Y#Gun-type_weapon_desi...
- tomalbrc 3y agoTake it for what it is: a mediocre Hollywood flick. Sure, the movie contains elements or mentions of real life people and events, but its Hollywood after all.
- lawn 3y agoI know its fashionable to hate in all things Hollywood, but calling it a "mediocre flick" is stretching it.
- yodon 3y agoListening to family members who grew up at Los Alamos during the period of the film talk about it, the film captures exactly what Los Alamos really looked like and felt like.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoNolan tried to avoid pure CGI shots in the movie. Since modern Los Alamos looks almost nothing like it did then, he built a fake Los Alamos at Ghost Ranch and filmed there. I'm guessing he didn't have the budget for 1000 buildings so he took some artistic license.