The true, dramatic story of Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Oppenheimer' villain | Hacker News Reader

The true, dramatic story of Robert Downey Jr.'s 'Oppenheimer' villain

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Thank you for the non-paywalled link.

Apple News version: https://apple.news/APfWbSPYiSvu_2wLUFFVc6Q

Why is Apple News relevant here? Has paywall as well

This site is very Apple friendly and assumes everyone has a macbook, iphone, iwatch, ipad and ivision with all the subscription services available.

After all why use anything else! :)

PS I will keep using the archive links

Probably because a lot of people have the Apple One subscription tier that gets you Apple News+.

Which gets you access to a lot of pay walled media.

So a direct link is useful to those that have Apple News+.

So that’s why, and I appreciate the Apple News link :-)

Thanks, I didn’t realize I get these articles with my Apple News subscription.

Having read "Now it can be told" by Groves, I can testify to other commenters on how much the Manhattan Project was an enormous logistical problem - Elon's manufacturing prowess pales in comparison to what Groves had to grapple with.

On a different note, I liked how the movie portrayed the world of quantum mechanics and somehow didn't try to make Oppenheimer a hero or something more than what he was.

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.

Every 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.

That’s an expensive overhead shot unless it’s a model or cgi.

If 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.

A lot of the entire military base in Arrival was CGI.

https://youtu.be/wxSPdZl5sYw

The 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_desi...

Take 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.

I know its fashionable to hate in all things Hollywood, but calling it a "mediocre flick" is stretching it.

Listening 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.

Nolan 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.

Semi OT, but … wow. This is weird. As someone that never saw the movie, I didn’t know RDJ was in it. He wasn’t in the trailers I saw, at least not prominently:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uYPbbksJxIg

and yet now, everyone is talking about his role therein.

Maybe you don't recognize him with all the makeup:

https://youtu.be/uYPbbksJxIg?si=pk1SD4gnQTzxSlgI&t=161

Wouldn't be the first time.

https://youtu.be/xPxs0Qh72kY

So just that half second, deliberately makeup’d flash was him? Okay then I guess I can be expected for not thinking he’s in the movie.

I did not like this movie. That must be an unpopular opinion, given all the movie’s success. And specifically what I didn’t like was that the film makers could have gone in many directions in telling a story about Oppenheimer, but chose to make the RDJ villain central to the plot. The conflict in the film felt forced and unnecessary for telling a good story.

Some people like watching documentaries, some like a bit of drama. This movie catered to the masses, but it catered very very well.

Don't expect movie about scientists with complex story span over decades to get much better than this, they have to cut away important stuff and modify characters slightly.

While Nolan is a one of a kind director, his lack of research shows. He essentially adapted the book "American Prometheus" but didn't engage with any material beyond it.

Personally, I think the movie is too dramatized to be a documentary and too linear to be true drama. I'd rather have him stick to directing and get an A-class writer instead.

I think Oppenheimer was kept an enigma on purpose. I didn't exactly like the movie but I was somehow very impressed nevertheless. I don't regret seeing it but I might never watch it again.

Even Nolan's worst movies are impressive. That's kind of his genius. He could make a flight to Cincinnati awe-inspiring.

As someone with an interest in the history of physics as I'm sure many people here are, I didn't much like the film either. I liked the renditions of the different physicists and the overall arc of the story, but more like I'd be interested in a documentary.

What's impressive about the movie is that they managed to create drama, artistry and tension in what's fundamentally something you can't really make a movie about because in the end it's just a story of some physicists that successfully accomplished something without anyone really opposing them in any material way.

I think that's laudable and interesting. But if you would judge the movie just based on its entertainment value, I don't think it would score very high. The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.

> What's impressive about the movie is that they managed to create drama, artistry and tension in what's fundamentally something you can't really make a movie about because in the end it's just a story of some physicists that successfully accomplished something without anyone really opposing them in any material way.

Feynman made it way more interesting in his book without needing to create fake villains! You could make a whole movie about his shenanigans alone.

Feynman has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance in the movie. During one of the successful tests, there's a brief shot of a cheerful guy playing the bongos.

He was also the guy in the car that told Teller that the windshield stopped UV. Teller's response was "what stops the glass?"

Feynman's role in the actual project was pretty limited too. He was not one of the major figures.

> The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.

This is wildly subjective, different people watch movies for very different reasons.

Calling Barbie a better movie because it's easier to watch is something I didn't expect to witness on HN.

There's many definitions of "better movie". Being easier to watch is conceivably one of them.

Setting aside whether "easier to watch" is somehow beneath an HN reader, your parent said "more entertaining" not easier to watch. The primary goal of the movie industry is obviously to entertain.

(Well, the primary goal is to make money, but they do that by entertaining people.)

Nah, I don't think so. Every time I've seen something criticized or praised for its "entertainment value" it's been code for less challenging, simpler, easier to watch. It's fine if you like that, but you can't call a tropey, confused toy advertisement better because it has dancing instead of court scenes, come on. I guess it's unfair to expect much artistic sophistication in tech circles. In tech terms it's like dogpiling about Firefox having telemetry on by default and recommending Chrome as a better alternative without any justification.

The Barbie being an easier to watch movie than Oppenheimer is a take I didn't expect to see on HN. I'm pretty sure a lot of people on here were a lot more uncomfortable watching the Barbie movie than they were watching Oppenheimer.

I suspect a lot of people even plain didn't see the Barbie movie because they were more comfortable watching a movie that skirts over criticising American fascism/authoritarianism of the 40's and 50's, than watching a movie that treats modern American culture without kid gloves.

Now America was fascist and authoritarian in the mid-post WWII era?? Are you guys competing for biggest contrarian or did I accidentally step into a neomarxist forum?

America wasn't fascist, it had fascism. For example in the form of McCarthyism. I don't support Marxism or Communism. I just think the ruthless persecution, group think powered selective reading of the constitution and bullying tactics of empowered individuals constitute to enough of the qualities to be labeled fascism.

If you've got a scale that goes from equal rights direct democracy on the left to dictatorial fascism on the right, then America was not quite fascist in the sense that they still had indirect partly represented democracy. But the way minorities, other-gendered, other-lifestyled and the politically deviant were denied representation and other basic rights it was definitely on the fascist side of the spectrum.

I see what you mean and how that ties into Barbie, although this worldview is definitely rooted in neomarxist revisionism. But I don't have the time and energy to derail this any further so I'll leave it at that.

>The Barbie movie, which I just saw 2 weeks ago on my TV was clearly a better movie on I'm pretty sure every aspect, and you could tell it was in the first minute.

And I have the exact opposite view! hah

The Barbie movie felt like a series of clips to me. Not a coherent movie. I also dislike musicals, so maybe personal.

Also despite Oppenheimer being about The Manhattan Project, The Barbie movie felt "too american" for me with weird Twitter references to "The Znyder cut?". (How will that reference age in 2 years?)

Oppenheimer just feels like expertly crafted cinema. I truly got lost in it and the story. The first 20mins felt like 1h in a good way. Truly masterful.

They did pretty good given that Barbie got the higher number of views/sales as well as the videos floating around of people who did the whole "Barbieheimer" tour who just surfed TikTok on their phones during the film (because of how bored they were I presume).

If this is how the general public reacted to a movie like Oppenheimer, its impressive how well they actually did viewer wise.

People on TikTok will not have the attention span for a film like Oppenheimer.

Good point. However that is a substantial portion of the American audience.

I am aware and it is awful. I do hope intelligent movies like Oppenheimer continue to be made.

To me this movie showed how Oppenheimer's protests against nuclear proliferation was hushed by the powers of the time, leaving him to be remembered in history as the architect of the most fearsome weapon imaginable, not a brilliant scientist full of regret, becoming anti-proliferation but blackmailed into silence due to earlier communist ties.

I was also fascinated to learn that the fear of Germany getting the bomb first was what drove him and so many others to create the worst thing humans have ever created and used.

As a non-american, none of this was common knowledge and I welcomed the history lesson, I always wondered why such a brilliant physicist and intelligent person would want to destroy the world but never thought to find a book on the topic (I've since added American Prometheus to my read list). It is shameful he was not allowed a public platform to denounce nuclear arms as strongly as he felt.

This is a pretty common criticism (and I agree with it). To me it felt like the successful test was the obvious dramatic climax of the movie, but then you had another hour of a bunch of guys sitting in a room arguing about security clearance. It could have been shorter, or if they wanted to keep the length they could have explored Oppenheimer's early life in more detail.

But the successful test is not even remotely the moral conclusion of the story.

Agreed.

It felt like 'good' film - i.e. critics and film buffs etc would love it, cinematography etc, but I can't say I actually enjoyed watching the film.

To be honest I don't know of any good movie last few years. Might be because I am getting old or something.

Uncommonly known factoid: movie ticket sales have been sharply declining for decades. We hit 'peak Hollywood' in 2002. [1] That's especially remarkable when you consider that the population has continued to increase since then.

The 'record breaking sales' since then are mostly a product of inflation alongside a mix of price increases. Here [2] is a table of best selling movies, inflation adjusted. No movie made in the past 25 years, including the endless men in spandex movies, is among the top 10. It's not us - it's Hollywood, but they seem ultimately unable to bring themselves out of this rut. What happened? I suspect a mixture of drugs and politics - the two cancers of the mind.

---

[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

[2] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/top_lifetime_gross_adjus...

I’m not convinced you can draw strong correlations between ticket sales and movie quality, or even movie popularity.

DVDs, streaming, high definition TVs…there are a lot of technological improvements that have changed the way we consume media.

There's a really interesting poll (that was not so easy to dig up!) here. [1] It's from 2005, so still quite near peak movie, on why Americans aren't going to the movies. The interesting thing about the poll is, as you mentioned, the leading reason for people stated for why they aren't going to the movies anymore is they prefer to watch at home (33%).

Yet when the identical question is asked in a slightly different way, you get a very different result. When asked if they would see more movies if they were cheaper, 43% said they would be much more likely. When asked about movies being better quality, 36% said they would be much more likely to see more movies. And that was back in 2005 when movies were still far from the rock bottom current era of spandex, sequels, and remakes!

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/17113/What-Will-Get-Americans-M...

> back in 2005 when movies were still far from the rock bottom current era of spandex, sequels, and remakes!

Really? If anything, I’d say the frequency of remakes and sequels is going down from how I remember things back then.

The top movies in 2005 were Star Wars 3, a Harry Potter Sequel, a War of the Worlds remake, Charlie and the Chocolate factory remake. We also got spandex remakes of Batman Begins and Fantastic Four. Hardly some golden era of original storytelling

Wiki has a nice little series of pages with releases that placed 1st during at least one weekend in a year. The pages aren't well designed and have only a nav button at the very buttom (beyond even the references), but you can also just change the year in the URL manually. Anyhow, it's definitely not how you remember it.

2005 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2005_box_office_number...

2023 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2023_box_office_number...

Although of course you are right. 2005 was not a great year for Hollywood, though it had some decent movies like Sin City, and comedy still hadn't been banned yet (Meet the Fockers, 40 Year-Old Virgin) - so that was cool. But contrasted against 2023 (and the contemporary era in general), it makes it look like the Golden Era of Hollywood.

I don’t see it. For the highest grossing, three out of ten are original non-sequels if we are being generous in 2005, versus two of ten in 2023.

It's certainly quite hard to see things when you close your eyes. You intentionally ignored the lists of movies I referenced to try to find one you could spin into being 'not so bad.' And even in your cherry picked sample, there's still a decline - substantially more so when once one factors in your quite creative counting.

Modern Hollywood has always found itself in ruts, as efforts at stable revenue generation gradually give way to creative decline. For instance in the 90s every film was a disaster film of ever deteriorating quality, but they eventually managed to pull themselves out of it before the decline hit too hard. But this rut they're stuck in today seems like it's become inextricable and will be their final resting place, until we gradually see China become the new Hollywood. Incidentally one of the 2 novel top grossing 'Hollywood' films of 2023 you referenced was Chinese! All we have left is Christopher Nolan, one of the few individuals in Hollywood still putting out decent films.

I scrolled down to the top 10 highest grossing section in each link you posted and counted the number of non-remakes, sequels, or “spandex” movies. Those are your links and the categories you defined.

Sorry I’m not really following the entirety of your rant.

You ignored 40+ films from both years, and these films made the difference even more strikingly apparent than your cherry picking.

As for your understanding, I think there are generally two types of films in Hollywood. There's the largely uninspired make a buck type film, and there's the more creative works where you have a group of people who actually have a pretty neat idea. 'Hollywood' did not remake the Little Mermaid because there was some wave of inspiration where they felt they could really create an amazing film. It was just an uninspired sifting through an IP bucket to find what could be remade to make a movie for the year. And that drivel is what they dug up.

And this is of course nothing new. But what's changed has largely been the ratio. I reference the spandex films not because there's anything inherently wrong with the genre, but because it's become the clearest embodiment of this uninspired conveyor-belt style film-making. The overwhelming majority of these stories may as well have been written by ChatGPT, and the future ones probably will be! And Hollywood is absolutely spamming us with them at this point. But there's nothing inherently awful about the genre. The Dark Knight was clearly an inspired and quiet good film, yet of course it was also spandex.

I've absolutely nothing against Hollywood and am more than happy to see an inspired film. In recently saw Dune 2 yesterday - a sequel of a remake!? But I have no interest in watching 'conveyor belt films', and that is currently the vastly overwhelming majority of what is coming out of Hollywood. And that's not how it used to be.

> Here [2] is a table of best selling movies, inflation adjusted. No movie made in the past 25 years, including the endless men in spandex movies, is among them.

The Force Awakens (2015) is #11. Avatar (2009) is #15. Avengers Endgame (2019) is #16. And that’s just in the top 20. Not too bad for a list that covers a century of films, especially when you consider the limited entertainment options available in the first half of that century.

Unfortunate 'typo.' I meant in the top 10. Edited the post.

Inflation is a real factor but you are leaving out rereleases and more time to make money.

(and ignoring Star Wars VII and the rest of the movies made in the last 25 years (including spandex) that ARE on that list)

Part of it is that Hollywood has gotten worse, but another part of it is that our other mindless entertainment options have gotten better. 30 years ago, if you didn't want to go to the movies, you had what, TV? Books? Now you have TikTok, Instagram, Fortnight, Reddit. There's a larger and more powerful set of forces competing for the same limited hours in a day.

It took me a long time to finally see it, because I was a little skeptical of the hype, but I felt Everything Everywhere All at Once was brilliant.

My dad liked Oppenheimer too.

He is 65.

Maybe stick to cartoons? Rick and Morty and Marvel?

What directions could they have gone to? Besides, this movie is not just about Oppenheimer, it’s also about the thirst of power of bureaucrats.

> chose to make the RDJ villain central to the plot

The movie is really about the conflict between a small-souled bureaucrat and a physics genius. The question is: what could a different story have been? I'm not sure there is enough juice in the "personal guilt" angle, and I don't think the "communist spie" angle is viable in today's Hollywood, given the general political leanings and, well, who the actual traitors were. Oppenheimer's direct involvement hasn't been conclusively proven (unlike eg Leo Szilard and a myriad others), so it comes down to how much you believe Pavel Sudoplatov's testimony, who was an NKVD general.

> That must be an unpopular opinion, given all the movie’s success.

Maybe not so much unpopular as outside the (lucrative) bubble. [1]

The economic goal of the film/television industry is to make a thing that its audience will watch. Then this result is celebrated (multiple times) until the final event, a sort of Super Bowl where statuettes are thrown for touchdowns.

It's a huge global business, something on the order of $130 b USD. [2]

It's also interesting to read the section, "Largest markets by box office revenue" in the referenced article. [2]

If you enjoy the early era of Hollywood, this film is a treat: https://archive.org/details/hollywoodparty1934originaltheatr...

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_the_United_States#/m...

[2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry

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