John M Frazier

John M FrazierWow! What a movie! It held my interest for three hours and I have the attention span of a five year old. I would quickly run out of superlatives if I tried to give it its due. That's the good news. The bad news is that in showing the cavalier manner in which the government treated Oppenheimer, Nolan does violence to the facts. According to the accounts I have seen, the primary targets of both bombs were military but cloud cover required switching to secondary, civilian, targets for purposes of documentation. That is not anything like Nolan's version. It was a military operation having little to do with Los Alamos in a brutal dehumanizing war by a country that abhors the regimentation and concentration of power that war brings. We wanted the war over in the vain hope of standing down from those conditions. We didn't grasp the full scope of the atomic age. We are not the ogres of this movie, just steely warriors of an era of hateful total war. That being said, I found the movie extremely well made, moving and lyrical. Five *****

2 likes