The Power Conundrum

In Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan digs into the moral dilemmas of those with the power to change the world.

- Aditya Mani Jha

When Albert Einstein (played by Tom Conti) made his first appearance in Christopher Nolan’s brilliant and dazzlingly ambitious new film Oppenheimer, there was a roar of approval from the early morning Vasant Kunj crowd I was a part of. Whether this was an audience particularly invested in particle physics is immaterial. The moment was a powerful reminder of how popular mythologies around scientists like Einstein or Oppenheimer are always at the forefront of the imagination. Stories guide us; they force us to make binary choices and, for better or worse, they end up defining us. And ultimately, Oppenheimer, across an absorbing, and at times, envelope-pushing three-hour spectacle, positions itself as a grand allegory about the moral consequences of large-scale storytelling.

The film is based on a Pulitzer-winning biography of the titular Robert J. Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the leader of the ‘Manhattan Project’ that built the first nuclear weapons, the ones that eventually wiped out over 2,00,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.