Oppenheimer

Spiritually Speaking at the Movies: "Oppenheimer", 2023.

"Oppenheimer" won the Oscar for Best Picture category Sunday night at the Academy Awards in Hollywood. In the Spiritually Speaking category, however, was that so?

Despite winning the “almost always” Best Picture/Director tandem Oscars, and a couple of outstanding acting performances also rewarded, there was a glaring — and important — loss as well: and that was Best Adapted Screenplay. The Academy saw fit not to award Oppenheimer with that Oscar, giving it instead to "American Fiction" written by 40-year-old Cord Jefferson.

What Mr. Jefferson said about big budget films is worth a closer look.

“I understand this is risk averse industry,” he said upon receiving the Oscar. “but a $200 million movie is also a risk, and it doesn’t always work out… Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making 20, $10 million movies or 50, $4 million dollar movies.”

It is axiomatic in film making that good editing, wowie-zowie special effects and even good acting, rarely overcomes a weak script, which is what actors say to each other, the conclusions they draw and the points being made. How often have you heard that great acting was handicapped by the film’s script they were given?

True beauty is in the writing. It is easier, it is said, to made a good movie with a low budget, adequate production values and armed with a superior script, than a weak script with a block-buster production budget that really has no center.

And that leads us straight to "Oppenheimer."

Sadly, the characters in the important story of the development of the atomic bomb lack the spiritual dimension any normal and moral person would have when wrestling with notions of pre-meditated mass extinction. It was right that the Academy by-passed "Oppenheimer’s" writing for another, more deserving effort. That bypass speaks volumes as to whether you should spend almost three hours seeing it.

The Story

This telling of J. Robert Oppenheimer takes us inside the minds and actions of the scientists, military officers and politicians who created the most destructive and deadly weapon, in human history. These makers of the atomic bomb were driven by government pressures to produce this weapon before Hitler’s Nazis could do so.

So why the lack of the spiritual dimension, which would seem to be the first questions participants would be asking themselves, and us, as viewers?

We are left with two choices: One, most scientists, as presented, are amoral people who don’t give adequate thought to the drastic consequences of their work. Or, two, the scriptwriter (director Christopher Nolan) and producers omitted it out of concern that the spiritual grappling would hurt box office revenue, giving ammunition to critics in an increasingly amoral society, or risk offending viewers of various spiritual persuasions. Perhaps there would also be blame for some of the Jewish makers of the atomic bomb as being “the destroyer of worlds.”

Despite great production skills and acting by Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, Robert Downy Jr as his nemesis and Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife, the film’s lack of a moral center is like a three-legged stool missing one leg. Good Luck if you can salvage any spiritual resonance from that handicap.

Historically speaking, the film has fascinating moments. Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) have significant lines, and the look into their lives is arresting. Here are the greatest scientific minds of the 20th Century forming the future we now live in. We are seeing our lives being molded before us.

"Oppenheimer" has more than one story line to keep it being bogged down by extinction alarm-ism. It looks into the scientist’s early interest in communism, and shows how that led to a tragic result for him as anticommunist McCarthyism swept through the country in post-war years.

Finally, there is the implied application — the logical conclusion of making the atomic bomb — for today, now that humans are armed with destruction.

“The power you are about to unleash will forever outlive the Nazis and the world is not prepared,” a scientist tells Oppenheimer. “You could lift up the stone without being ready for the snake that is revealed.”

"Oppenheimer", also shows fascinating glimpses into the rapid construction of Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb is tested. It’s a bit plot-thin, though. You would think a nearly three-hour movie could remedy that.

Instead, the film wastes our time and patience with sexual exploits that don’t advance the story. But they do get the film the “R” rating it seems to be striving for. Take out the steamy scenes and the run-time is mercifully shorter, but it also becomes a PG-13 movie.

"Oppenheimer’s" moral force is embodied in the question that drove the Los Alamos team— do the Nazi’s get the bomb or do Americans? In recruiting for the bomb making, Robert Oppenheimer opines to a reticent fellow scientist, “I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon… but I know the Nazi’s can’t.”

This scene includes the lone spiritual allusion made, and it’s so thin, one almost need be a theologian to see it.

“A bomb,” this scientist says, “will affect the just and the unjust,” a paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount passage where Jesus says that God, “sends rain on the just and unjust.”

It’s interesting sidelight to speculate that if Hitler had this weapon prior to June 6, 1944, would there have been a D-Day and ensuing liberation of Europe? The continent might still be in chains today because Nazi’s would have likely set the world on fire, rather than go down to defeat.

Would merciless aggressors who are prepared to die rather than be captured, do it by taking as many as lives they could with them? Would the allies have advanced to a Normandy invasion and risked world annihilation? One tends to think not.

Some will want to see" Oppenheimer" because it has won Best Picture, or they like the actors. Others will be drawn by its mix of history, science and political conspiracy.

But this column focuses on spiritual and moral content and that invites the screenplay to shine, and it doesn’t here. This film seems to be for people actively avoiding any spiritual content in life and don’t like to be reminded there is a spiritual dimension to our existence.

The development of the atomic bomb should have triggered one of the great moral/spiritual debates in human history. This particular telling of the story shows us that the bomb’s developers had little or no interest in such talk. For that reason I found little to be interested in here. I suggest you give "Oppenheimer" a pass and move along. It’s basically a bomb.