Filmmaker Spike Lee has some thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” dubbing the biopic a “great film” but adds that he wishes it showed “what happened to the Japanese people”.
Nolan’s film deals with the life of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer who led American efforts to create the atomic bomb with the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s.
The film deals with the United States dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, but only shows the bombings from the perspective of those who made it – never setting foot in Japan.
A big part of that is due to the film staying confined to its protagonist’s perspective throughout much of its runtime. Speaking with The Washington Post, Lee says:
[Nolan] is a massive filmmaker… and this is not a criticism. It’s a comment. If [‘Oppenheimer’] is three hours, I would like to add some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people. People got vaporized. Many years later, people are radioactive.
It’s not like he didn’t have power. He tells studios what to do. I would have loved to have the end of the film maybe show what it did, dropping those two nuclear bombs on Japan. Understand, this is all love. And I bet [Nolan] could tell me some things he would change about ‘Do the Right Thing’ and ‘Malcolm X.'”
Lee has highly praised Nolan before, previously using Nolan’s “Dunkirk” as a film in his New York University film class.
Another filmmaker who recently offered comments was “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve who gave his take on “Oppenheimer” to Lindsey Bahr:
“I was absolutely floored, blown away by the beauty of the projection, but also more importantly by the movie itself. It took me days to recover. It’s a very traumatic and powerful movie. This idea all humans are attracted to play with fire you know it’s like that destructive part of our self. Our ego is always the worst advisor. The fact that it’s a triumph at the box office and with critics, it’s almost like, I would say, a triumph of intelligence.”
The three-hour “Oppenheimer” grossed more than $930 million globally throughout its run and is Nolan’s third-highest-grossing movie ever.
