To be uncomfortable with the film Oppenheimer?

[LKM23]

I haven't seen the film, I'm sure it's a brilliant thriller and will be a Blockbuster hit. I don't think I'll watch it though, it makes my feel really uncomfortable.

It feels like a man who at the end of the day killed thousands of people and damaged millions is being celebrated and turned into a hero.

I lived in Japan for 10 years in my twenties. I visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and spent a lot of time with people both directly and indirectly affected by the dropping of the bombs. Those scars are real and still there and will be for a very very long time. It changed Japan and the people who live there forever and at the end of the day I think he was an awful person.

AIBU?

Also the various intelligence services files would have more information than even historians

My family is Malaysian. During the war.the Japanease were responsible for.more than 1m deaths of largely civilians in the Malay federation excluding those held as prisoners of war. Sllave labour was common and my own grandfather was beheaded in front of his family. He had helped the British and Indian army in retreat.with supplies. British colianialism was not great for us in a number of ways but the Japanease occupation was truly awful. It is important when we consider colonialism that we remember that all colonists could behave very badly indeed. Not just the white ones either.

@Cyclebabble . How traumatic for you all.

There are a lot of terrible accounts on this thread .

Exactly...history is written by the victors

Finally saw this today and no O is not feted as a hero. It follows the project, his resistance to developing the H bomb afterwards and investigations into him. It was about the politics of the time. You do need to have a certain amount of intelligence to understand this film and knowledge of world history perhaps unlike the ones coming out moaning that it was too long and they couldn't distinguish " one man from another". Maybe they thought it was going to be Peaky Blinders.

Just seen it and really enjoyed it. He really should win an Oscar for best actor.

obviously I don’t know how historically accurate it is or if they’re painting him in a better light but he talks about his doubts and is convinced if he doesn’t help usa to get there first then the nazis will develop the bomb first and the consequences will be worse.

It shows him very troubled with ptsd flashbacks of people,dying, etc after the bomb was dropped and he tried to stop the USA developing the weapons further.

He's not being turned into a hero at all. The film makes the devastating impact of the bomb's creation very clear and how much he regretted helping make it

I don’t know how historically accurate it is or if they’re painting him in a better light but he talks about his doubts and is convinced if he doesn’t help usa to get there first then the nazis will develop the bomb first and the consequences will be worse.

It's pretty historically accurate, all of those things his doubts and protests against the H Bomb etc were all things that were recorded at the time.

The film is based on a biography - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin which goes into so much detail of Oppenheimer's life, it is a fascinating read but definitely one that requires a lot of time to process as it is hefty reading.

Last year (inspired by the OMD song) DS did some research about Paul Tibbets and Enola Gay. There are accounts written by various people involved in the bombings on Japan available to read and it's very thought provoking.

I saw it last night and thought it was excellent. I also thought that the film largely did an excellent job of showing the moral and historical complexities of the bomb program.

@melj1213 thank you, I’ll read the book next.

Exactly...history is written by the victors

I don't think that this applies nowadays as history is being revised with different conclusions being reached by current analysts.

It really is an excellent film, and not in any way a hagiography o'r glorification of Oppenheimer. YABU to dismiss this work based on your guesses as to what it might be like. "Uncomfortable" is, however, a pretty appropriate word for the way the film leaves the viewer feeling!

I'm excited. Seeing it with subtitles tonight. First film I've seen in a few years. If the score is like Interstellar then I'll be a wreck.

Being unable to distinguish one man from another is related to level of facial recognition, and face blindness, not intelligence- many highly intelligent people are face blind - it is unhelpful to be so dismissive of a very upsetting disability.

If film makers want people with facial recognition difficulties to watch their films them they need to make their characters easier to distinguish from each other.

This film will lose a lot of potential customers because it already has a reputation for failing to do that.

The film shows that he was a theoretician and perhaps naive. He was very remorseful that so many people died and tried to stop the American government from developing the H bomb. His life was destroyed because of this.

While this is all very interesting what % of the population does it apply to? I wonder what % of that % were in the cinema I was in yesterday?

I tended to think it was a lack of knowledge and a lack of the ability to concentrate in the people I heard.

The score is amazing - we saw it in an Imax!

well, I am face blind myself, and know several others who are, but I don't know what percent of the population are. It is a spectrum however, and a lot of people who have minimal difficulties are struggling with this film. In real life, with both sexes and a mix of ethnic origins around you, you might have little or no trouble at all if you are only slightly face blind, but then have a lot of difficulty watching a film full of white men in suits with short hair.

As it's men, it would have been better to mix and match a bit with moustaches and beards, even if the characters didn't have these in real life - that is the advantage of men on screen, they can be differentiated like this - as opposed to a film full of white women with long blond hair, when there is little to no chance of telling them apart.

I won't be going to see it, I have been warned by many people who have minimal difficulties that it is impossible to tell the characters apart.

That is so odd as the "white men in suits" are very identifiable by the very well known actors that portray them.

I'm not minimising your condition btw.

but I wouldn't identify a well known actor if they bit me in the leg! And lots of other people have not found it easy, so I am guessing that they may well use other cues to identify the actors, in other films - them being around fewer other similarly dressed men, might be one!

Of course there could also be people with no facial recognition difficulties who simply have not concentrated enough, as well

Exactly and general lack of knowledge of the period.

I won't be going to see it, I have been warned by many people who have minimal difficulties that it is impossible to tell the characters apart.

It really isn't impossible. I suppose if you don't know any of the actors or the names of the scientists involved then it can be confusing as you're trying to put names and faces together with no context as to who the are and what significance they have, especially early on when we are introduced to a lot of characters in quick succession.

Yes there is the occasional moment when there's a large group of them together where it might take me a second to remember who they are but that's more because of the fact a lot of the cast are well known actors and I have heard of a lot of the scientists they were playing so I was doing the mental jigsaw in my head in the early stages and getting distracted. I was sitting there thinking "Who was speaking, oh that guy ... Where do I know him from ... Oh that's Rami Malek ... He's playing David Hill ... Why do I know Hill's name again ... Wait focus on the film ... what did that other guy just say? ... Where do I know him from ... Etcetc" and was then playing catch up but that was mostly my own attention span/ease of distraction rather than because it was impossible to tell them all apart.

And there was Tom Conti as Einstein - it was so strange for me to see Einstein in the movie as somehow that to me " was a long time ago".