Oppenheimer: Fission and Fusion

Christopher Nolan is a generational filmmaker. I’ll never forget when he said all movies are a statement about human nature and Oppenheimer is no exception. I’m a Nolan fanboy and anytime Nolan makes a film it’s an event and you better believe I’m seeing it in true 70mm IMAX ha! Anyways let me splurge my thoughts here. 

This film plays out through two points of view: Oppenheimer (color) and Strauss (black and white). While that could be broken down in several ways, I think the main point of those are the titles Nolan labels each in the beginning: Fission and Fusion. 

Oppenheimer is Fission, in my words he is the man who creates the chain reaction. How does Nolan show this? At the beginning of the film what’s the first image we see? Ripples from rain drops. At the end of the film what’s the image we see? Oppenheimer staring at a pond with ripples, why? Because Oppenheimer is a man who creates a ripple effect. He is the first domino that knocks down other dominos. The destroyer of worlds who paves the way for other weapons of mass destruction. This is the theme of Fission. Yes he’s conflicted with Strauss but his main conflict is the chain reaction. This can be seen in the shallow focus and how he lives in two different worlds. The world of quantum physics and the physical world. The shallow focus shows he’s obscuring himself as he wrestles with his internal conflict of creating a weapon of mass destruction. 

Strauss is Fusion, in my words he is the man who collided with others. He is energy. Strauss’s world is all black and white, he forms opinions about things and doesn’t change his mind, he draws a line in the sand, and there is no grey area for him. He is the opponent of Oppenheimer and channels all his energy into colliding with him. He is Oppenheimers external conflict. The man who seeks to tear Oppenheimer down. 

While this movie looks to the past, some may see it as pertinent to our future. Right now we wrestle with A.I. and all the ripple effect that will have. 

But this film didn’t get me thinking about the future as much as it did the past. There was one man who kicked off a chain reaction, and he didn’t drop an atom bomb but he dropped an Adam Bomb. In Genesis 3 we see that Adam, tempted by the serpent, was the destroyer of worlds. He brought sin into the world and with sin death (Roman’s 5). That’s the ripple effect, what’s the fusion/collision? It’s that instead of humans being in harmony with God and with each other there is now war. The energy has resulted in enmity. Since the Fall, humankind has continued to create ripple effects of destruction, but the Bible mentions another man who brings us out of destruction. That man, The Man who is God, Jesus “for if by the transgression of the one many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many” (Romans 5:15). There was an image at the end of Oppenheimer of the world slowly being consumed by fire from nuclear weapons. The image conveyed, we destroy ourselves. Biblically that’s correct, we destroy ourselves. But that’s not all there is to the story. One man brought death, but the second man brought life.

Nolan has created a visual and audio masterpiece that causes us to both look forward and back and contemplate the ripple effect of every thought and action we have, “now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”