Oppenheimer was fucking great, but this isn't a movie review. There's a scene I want to make mention of, and for some reason no one online has the exact quote I want to talk about. They've got all sorts of quotes, many of them even great (especially Matt Damon's explanation as to why scientists would go out to the middle of nowhere for years), but no matter how I try to find it, most of the results I get are about the Destroyer of Worlds quote, and that's not going to do me any good here.
So I'm going on memory. There's a scene in which Oppenheimer is told that Hitler is working on an atom bomb, and he has a huge head start on America. He's asked if there's any advantage we might have over the Nazis, and Oppenheimer says, "Anti-semitism." He means that because of Hitler's prejudice, he's not giving funding to the top scientific minds, who are Jewish, and that's holding him back. But if you look at it another way, he seems to imply that Hitler's obsession with Jewish people is actually distracting him.
Huh. That sounds kind of familiar . . .
One other thing I thought was really great about Oppenheimer is the structure. I'm not seeing anyone else talking about it, either, so maybe I'm wrong in my interpretation. On the surface it seems that this is Nolan's most straightforward movie since, well, ever. It jumps back and forth in time a little, but it's not excessive and noticeable like, say, in Memento or, even more blatantly, in Tenet.
I think Nolan set the movie up so that the entire three-hour runtime actually happens in one second. Yeah, the whole movie, and possibly all of existence, happens at the very same time. I'm sure you didn't have to question why we're getting the atomic imagery and the sounds of a nuclear explosion, but what about the surface of the water? The ripples? What about the stomping of the feet in an auditorium? Oppenheimer feels these things before they even happen, which only suggests to me that it's all happening at once.
Anyone see the movie? Your thoughts on my hypothesis?
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