Oppenheimer: Why Some Critics Are Accusing Christopher Nolan's Film Of 'Sanitizing' The Bomb

No matter which way you slice it, there's not really any way to discuss the creation of the atomic bomb without at least a little bit of controversy, even nearly eight decades later. This complicated legacy is no doubt much of what Christopher Nolan is trying to reckon with in his latest film about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. However, despite being highly acclaimed by both critics and audiences, not everyone is a fan of the film.

Some have argued that because the film doesn't include the results of the bombs being dropped in Japan and the fallout of the Trinity Test, that "Oppenheimer" is glossing over important consequences of the bomb's creation and use. This is very much the tack that Emily Strasser has taken in her article for Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

"Oppenheimer does not show a single image of Hiroshima or Nagasaki," Strasser writes. She went on to describe her mixed feelings with regard to the way that the blasts are depicted through the imagination of a haunted Oppenheimer in the film. "The scene is powerful and unsettling and, arguably, avoids sensationalizing the atrocity by not depicting the victims outright," Strasser continued. "But it also plays into a problematic pattern of whitewashing both the history and threat of nuclear war by appropriating the trauma of the Japanese victims."

Emily Strasser's grandfather worked on atomic weapons, and the writer has been reckoning with this legacy ever since. She recalled how flippantly depictions of the bomb could be in her hometown. "At the Catholic church in town, a pious Mary stands atop an orb bearing the overlapping ovals symbolizing the atom, and until it closed a few years ago, a local restaurant displayed a sign with a mushroom cloud bursting out of a mug of beer," Strasser wrote.

While Strasser doesn't seem to believe that "Oppenheimer" is this crude in its depiction of the impact of atomic weapons on the world, she does argue that we needed to see more of their devastating power to properly understand them in the film. "Not only is it dishonest and harmful to erase the suffering of the real victims of the bomb, but doing so moves the bomb into the realm of the theoretical and abstract," the writer argued.

Though, as we noted above, there are definitely many critics of "Oppenheimer" who echo exactly these kinds of arguments, there are those who share different views. Their opponents have suggested that the film — a biopic told almost exclusively through the titular scientist's viewpoint — straying too far away would betray the nature of the story as Christopher Nolan intended to tell it.

While audiences have been flocking to both "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer," neither film has been without its critics. Still, though the criticisms lobbed at Greta Gerwig's movie have been mainly shrugged off as baseless, those who take issue with Christopher Nolan's film do at least have some firm ground to stand on.

Emily Strasser digs deep into these points in her article. "'Oppenheimer' does not make a joke of nuclear weapons," she writes. "But by erasing the specific victims of the bombings, it repeats a sanitized treatment of the bomb that enables a lighthearted attitude and limits the power of the film's message." Even with that in mind, there are still many different takes on the film. Notably, director Oliver Stone turned the movie down because even he wasn't sure how to approach it. Meanwhile, scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson argued that creating the bomb was not evil.

Though the conversation about nuclear weapons — concerning both their creation and their use — has been ongoing since the bombs were first dropped back in 1945, it's unlikely that the debate will ever be truly solved. On the contrary, being that "Oppenheimer" is already predicted to be an awards contender, there is probably going to be plenty of talk to come on the subject.