J. Robert Oppenheimer

Sunday

Roger Kimball

The atomic bomb saved Japanese lives, too

It’s August 6, which means that it is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.   Every year at this time there are a spate of articles about that horrific event. Some of the articles are condemnatory; some hand-wringing; some are defiantly supportive.  This year, the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s new movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb has given the controversy over the development and deployment of that awesome weapon a new urgency.   Something else that has contributed to the fraught atmosphere is the war in Ukraine. After all, one side in that conflict, Russia, controls the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, more than 6,000 warheads. My friend Roger L.

hiroshima atomic bomb japanese

Sunday

Oliver Jia

Japan deserves to see Oppenheimer

As millions of people across the world rush into cinemas this week to see Christopher Nolan’s latest epic thriller Oppenheimer, one notable country will not be part of the film’s initial release window despite the relevant subject matter — Japan. For reasons that are still unclear, Universal Pictures has not announced a Japanese release date. Yet if any place deserves to see a film based on the life of the theoretical physicist who played an essential role in developing the atomic bombs which ended World War Two, it should be the country that was most affected by them. Hollywood films being delayed for release in Japan is a very common occurrence, and it rarely ever has anything to do with politics.

japan oppenheimer
oppenheimer
Aaron Gwyn

Oppenheimer’s passenger

Ripples appear in courtyard puddle outside the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge; a tornadic funnel erupts from the black atmosphere toward Earth. Between these images — the small one of intimate life and the colossal one of planetary death — a haunted young man looks on in curiosity and horror.  The man is Robert Oppenheimer, played to perfection by Cillian Murphy, a theoretical physicist “troubled by visions of a hidden universe.” This visionary, capable of conjuring apocalypse from the particles stowed inside atoms, spends the first fifteen minutes of the film looking bewildered — a gaunt, gray sliver of a man wandering through his life like a ghost.