TCTTS said:

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This is how it felt doing math homework with your dad pic.twitter.com/BPYzriedYh

— Sydney🚀 (@CountVolpe) July 25, 2023

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The interrogator in the movie is Roger Robb who later went on to become a Federal Judge.

As a lawyer for the committee here he went after Oppenheimer...but also notably defended a known commie, too. Just a lawyer doing lawyer stuff, I guess.

Quote:

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Robb was the court-appointed attorney for Earl Browder, a leader of the Communist Party, in a Contempt of Congress case in 1950, earning praise from Browder despite their political differences. He also successfully defended Otto Otepka, a former State Department official accused of giving unauthorized material to a Senate committee.

Robb was special counsel to the Atomic Energy Commission at an AEC hearing on the loyalty of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Over the course of four weeks, Robb and the AEC panel interrogated Oppenheimer and other witnesses on his past affiliations with Communists, with Robb using harsh prosecutorial tactics. The board voted 2-1 to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance. This became a major part of the plot line of the 2023 Christopher Nolan movie Oppenheimer.

In 1968, Robb represented Barry Goldwater in his libel suit against Ralph Ginzburg and Fact magazine, which had claimed that Goldwater was mentally unstable. The jury awarded Goldwater $1 in compensatory damages and $75,000 in punitive damages, which was upheld on appeal.

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The state only ever cares about the state. Everything else is secondary.

Currently well ahead of Inception and Dunkirk through 5 days.

https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/custom-comparisons-extended/Oppenheimer-(2023)/Inception/Dunkirk-(2017)#tab=day_by_day_comparison

Finished the book. It doesn't get into David L. Hill's testimony against Lewis Strauss during the confirmation hearings. Nolan has drawn that from other sources.

Also, the specific reference to kennedy in the movie drew an eyeroll from me, too, but was specifically mentioned in the book.

poundstone said:

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Why was that too rough? Truman wasn't exactly a great guy

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Because it didn't happen that way?

Truman could be as mean as any snake...but saying that in front of the guy who gave you the Bomb?

Lands wrong.

TCTTS said:

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Finally - and this was pretty hilarious - one part of the theater started doing exactly what the audience in the bleachers had just been doing on screen - stomping their feet and clapping - and pretty soon the entire theater joined in - all 900 or so people stomping, clapping, and laughing - and the theater finally turned off the movie.

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Interesting story but, with hindsight of the whole movie...kind of an interesting moment.

There's been a lot of conversation about Nolan's choice not to show the results of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. That scene, with the stomping, was (IMO) pretty clearly the stand-in. And it's not just because of the visuals of skin peeling off - I thought the stomping itself was the real point. There's this crowd of people madly cheering, and on one hand you get it...but they're cheering for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. By the end of the movie, I found the stomping to be pretty horrifying, and I think that was the point.

Saw it last night in IMAX at First Colony Mall in Sugar Land. The ticket person told us when we arrived that the AC just went out in the theater and wasn't expected to come back on. We were given the option to either get a refund or watch it with no AC. We checked out the theater and it fairly comfortable so we decide to stay. I didn't think about how hot it may get over the course of a 3 hour movie. I think most people decided to get a refund because there were maybe 30 other people watching it with us.

I got so enthralled by the movie that I completely forgot about the AC being broken. I only remembered it wasn't working when I felt the air kick on in the last 10 minutes of the showing.

Incredible movie with great acting. I was worried about the 3 hour runtime, knowing it was mostly dialogue, but the pacing of each scene really kept it moving and made it feel much shorter than that. The time hopping kept me mentally engaged trying to figure out if the scene was before or after the bomb. I felt like I was on the "edge of my seat" for most of the movie.

The use of sound is what really made this movie....thundering crescendos followed by absolute silence, for example. I'm going to encourage others to view it in theaters primarily for the sound. I think the visuals will translate fine to home viewing, but the audio won't unless you have a great setup.

Squadron7 said:

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FtWorthHorn said:

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TCTTS said:

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Finally - and this was pretty hilarious - one part of the theater started doing exactly what the audience in the bleachers had just been doing on screen - stomping their feet and clapping - and pretty soon the entire theater joined in - all 900 or so people stomping, clapping, and laughing - and the theater finally turned off the movie.

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Interesting story but, with hindsight of the whole movie...kind of an interesting moment.

There's been a lot of conversation about Nolan's choice not to show the results of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. That scene, with the stomping, was (IMO) pretty clearly the stand-in. And it's not just because of the visuals of skin peeling off - I thought the stomping itself was the real point. There's this crowd of people madly cheering, and on one hand you get it...but they're cheering for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. By the end of the movie, I found the stomping to be pretty horrifying, and I think that was the point.

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It would be more accurate to say that they were cheering for the unexepended lives of American GI's, however much animosity they may have had for the Japanese.

Everyone agrees that Japan was essentially defeated. It is a huge talking point, then and now.

But on every battlefiend acroos the Pacific where we faced them, how many lives were we (and the Japanese) forced to expend to reach the end of fighting regardless of how foregone the outcome.

From Midway forward...Peleliu, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo, Okinawa....how foregone the outcome was mattered not at all.

The acceptance and/or realization of defeat is not the same as surrender. And while the weapon was singularly destructive as a single device, our incindiary bombings raids killed many more civilians.


Yeah, I almost added this but was posting right before a call started. I'm not implying the bomb was unnecessary, a wrong decision, I didn't understand the crowd, etc. But in the context of the movie, I thought it was fairly clear that the stomping was, in Oppenheimer's mind and when it was repeated throughout the movie, the sound of the consequences of the bomb.

Edit: Actually discussed this with my wife right after we saw it last night, it was particularly interesting in the context of Oppenheimer trying and struggling to explain when his moral qualms began. He tried to intellectualize some fission vs. fusion issue, but my takeaway (for the movie, if not Oppenheimer in reality) was that it was really that auditorium scene that did it. It's what hit him with the consequences, and his feelings in the future always went back to that moment.

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And also remember that Oppenheimer himself was a very charismatic and motivating figure personally. You have to assign a very generous amount of the footstomping as being an appreciation of the man himself throughout their three year project come to fruition.

My perfect General Groves?

Brian Dennehy.

RIP

Hilarious.