Megan McCluskey
TIME, July 21, 2023
“Antisemitism impacted him throughout his time studying at Harvard, and later, amid the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany, changed the way he engaged with his Jewishness.”
After months of building anticipation, writer-director Christopher Nolan’s new movie Oppenheimer arrived in theaters Friday, kickstarting an opening weekend where it’s expected to collect around $50 million at the domestic box office.
The three-hour (and nine second) biopic centers, as its title suggests, on J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), the theoretical physicist widely known as the “father of the atomic bomb” who infamously summed up his life’s work in a 1965 NBC News documentary by reciting a line from the sacred Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer—currently no. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller chart, thanks to the film—the movie jumps back and forth through time as it explores the life and legacy of its subject. “What I wanted to do was take the audience into the mind and the experience of a person who sat at the absolute center of the largest shift in history,” Nolan said in the film’s production notes. “Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse.”
Here’s what to know about how the true story of Oppenheimer’s life compares to the movie.
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