Director: Jon H. Else
Cast: Hanse Bethe, Robert Serber, Robert Wilson, Frank Oppenheimer
Have I Seen it Before: Never. On that note, one more anecdote from film festival land: The film runs, and one guy gets up to leave for a moment. One of the volunteers for the festival—who wasn’t there for the intro to the film—asks where the guy is going (which is kind of a weird flex, I’ll admit) and the guy replies, “I’ve seen it before.” That guy was the director of the film.
Did I Like It: Why bring up such a story? Well, it’s not even my story. Lora was closer to the incident, and I didn’t hear it at all, as I was too engrossed with the film as it was playing out. The Manhattan Project can sometimes be overblown to the point where each element is inflated to the explosive level of the participants’ eventual successful work. This was true even before Christopher Nolan made the entire affair pure explosive Oscar bait in Oppenheimer (2023).
But here, the people—J. Robert Oppenheimer being the notable exception, as he was notablly dead before the cameras started rolling—who built the bombs that hung over the second half of the twentieth century are real people. They have plenty of insights into their work, the events of their lives, and the people who influenced both, but they are also allowed to be slightly banal, even boring figures. That might sound like faintly damning the film, but the more regular these people are depicted, the more fascinating they become.
One might remark that the film ages a little roughly around the edges, viewing the creation of the bomb through the lens of the disarmament-focused 80s, but zeroing in in the back half of the film not just on the tragedy not of Oppenheimer’s eventual political exile, but also on the uncontrollable nature of what they wrought has more potency for the current political age than one might have thought.