I remember looking at all the social media reactions of critics and friends who had seen Oppenheimer, now up for a Best Picture Oscar. So many of them described walking out of the movie “devastated” and “depressed.” They said it was “all too true,” that they felt “destroyed” and that the movie would “haunt them for a long time.”
I found myself puzzled by these reactions and wondering what I was missing. Sure, the movie didn’t exactly end on a cheery note. It concludes with Oppenheimer, guilt-ridden over having destroyed so many Japanese lives with the atomic bomb, suggesting that by inventing the bomb, he and the allies “had” started a chain reaction that would destroy the world. The film then portrays his imagining the bomb destroying our world.
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