People often ask how much one life is worth, but all we truly know in this world is they are priceless. Yet lives are so often measured in bulk against one another as if they were functions of infinite limits comparable only in their differential senses. From country to country, era to era, lifestyle to lifestyle, our existence is used as not just a commodity but a deterrent towards the negatives of the world we inhabit. In times of war, a neverending span of time when faced with the American ideal, lives exist as a currency used to barter in the creation of power. Do peace and war stand on opposite sides of the same coin? Are they equal and opposite forces, pushing against one another, keeping this world in equilibrium? Peace as a Normal force, keeping civilization from falling into an incomprehensible abyss while the gravitational pull of war circles us into the shadows we form from existence.
All this is to say that I watched Oppenheimer, the cinematic equivalent of how I view the seventh circle of hell. War is orderly violence, lawful by those supplying it, and suffocating by those trapped in the thick of it. Christopher Nolan examines the legacy of the man who destroyed one world and created another atop its charcoaled body. Oppenheimer was a man who believed in the power of science, in that it is an ultimate power only capable of being stopped by itself or some mystical force still inchoate in this world.
Some others like myself have existed in a sphere similar to the man behind the bomb, perched in a chamber surrounded by fire like a satellite rested at a Lagrange point between the pulls of science and conscience. We learn to view our work with fear and disdain while pushing for not only its success but evolution to a higher force of destruction. Its toll is expressed in the film’s finale so perfectly within a discussion between J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein hinted at throughout the film as the breaking point of the planet’s safety and America’s unwavering trust in the men of science.
Oppenheimer as a film is a cinematic marvel, powerful and determined in its message. The trinity test is shown in full force as something to be worshipped by those viewing its potential and feared by all others. The examination of Oppenheimer done by the Personnel Security Board exhibits the harsh revocation of the man America once trusted its future in. The exploration of Oppenheimer’s messy romantic world parades the truth behind humans, that even those revered as those only below the gods are barely more than sacks of meat pushed forward by their libido as much as their urge to further their need for knowledge. Movies contain the power of expression in ways other forms of art are unable to achieve and in this film, we are given the view of miserable science over a lifetime and the destruction it can wrought on both the individual man and the community of humanity across time and space. The world as J. Robert Oppenheimer had known has burned away and a new world grows from its ashes, I — alongside all those in it — can only hope it exists as better than once was.