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Comment by cypherpunks01 | Hacker News Reader

Was anyone else bothered by how Oppenheimer declined to show even a single scene of the devastation that was caused by dropping nuclear weapons on Japan?

I otherwise liked the film, but I thought it was wrong to hide it from viewers. The bombing was the central plot point of the whole film. It would have been different if it was a new director, or surprise hit or something, but Nolan knew it would be seen by many millions of people.

It could have been shown without losing any narration context at all, in the scene where the protagonist is shown slides of the destruction scenes, and the camera only shows him looking away. The director didn't need to force the audience to look away too.

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No, it didn't bother me; Oppenheimer himself never saw the devastation, he only could imagine it. It seems suiting for what the film was doing, to focus on his inner emotional state.

He was shown it, with slides in the debrief scene. He chose to look away, and that's all the camera shows.

Right, I mean to say he didn't see it in high definition / in person, as it sounded like you were suggesting the movie should have done.

Yes, and I'm sure the director had that perspective too - that it would have been weird to show a cutaway scene across the world. I suppose just the lack of depicting any human consequences of the bombing was what irked me, I think it could have been done creatively if he wanted to.

I for one was not bothered — the film up to that point had exclusively portrayed Oppenheimer‘s subjective experience in life. To showcase the footage you’re talking about would have meant showing events Oppenheimer did not see, but was certainly able to imagine enough that they affected him deeply — which is what WAS depicted in place of the footage.

While I understand wanting that outside perspective included within Oppenheimer to more fully reflect the actual historic events, I recognize that Oppenheimer was a film telling the story of one man’s internal perspective on events, and so including scenes like you suggest would have diluted and weakened that central premise and through line.

That being said: I am biased in that I do not expect artistic works to reflect a complete reality, but just the reality they choose to explore — I can certainly understand different points of view, especially with regard to such a monumental and tragic real life event.

I was so bored, that I wasn't bothered by it. I love Christopher Nolan's other movies though.

According to my favorite scene in the movie: Oppenheimer didn’t drop the bomb, Truman did. Now get that cry baby out of here.

I can understand the artistic choice to portray everything from Oppenheimer's mind / point of view and to not actually show the devastation, but like you I was bothered by how it was done with the bomb drop and also the complete lack of portraying the Nazi threat. Oppenheimer lived the entire war at home and never actually saw the bomb dropped. But it seemed disingenuous to me to show the power of his imagination when contemplating the universe so powerfully at the beginning of the film, then never portray his comprehension of the Nazi threat or the devastation his weapon would have caused. The closest they got was him imagining it in the room with the crowd, but that hardly did it justice in my opinion. That was critical context in many of the scientists' decisions: 27,000 people were dying PER DAY during World War 2 (on average). How you can portray the story of the atomic bomb without that setting (not to mention emphasizing the fear that the Axis would get the bomb first) is kind of beyond me.

The film was made for entertainment. It doesn't teach morality or answers hard existential questions. It's a comics inspired by reality, in my opinion.

I've yet to see Oppenheimer—but if what I've heard about the little effort put into attempting to speak Dutch is true, I can't say it surprises me. Apparently there's also a lot of other factual inaccuracies—this admittedly put me right off.

There comes a point where a director has to ask themselves if they're making entertainment for cash or poignant art. If the language was handled that sloppily, maybe that's the answer. It would be very easy to make a colossal fuck-up in presenting the horror of reality or be seen as cashing in on something absolutely grotesque.

Nolan's paymasters wanted some apologetic revisionism, that's all there is to it.

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