Film· 2023· Drama
Oppenheimer: it draws on 3 recorded sources.
The works this one is recorded as drawing on.
Christopher Nolan's film is credited as based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, from his student years through the Manhattan Project to the 1954 security hearing that stripped him of his clearance. The hearing and Lewis Strauss's confirmation are the film's frame.
Events, places, movements and ideas outside fiction that this work is recorded as drawing on.
Real world
The physics is the plot. Nolan's film follows Oppenheimer from Göttingen through Berkeley to Los Alamos, and the pressure in it comes from the science being genuinely uncertain: whether the bomb would work, which design would, and the calculation about atmospheric ignition that had to be done before they could proceed. From the record: the recruitment of the Los Alamos physicists, the implosion lens problem, the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, the target committee, and the 1954 security hearing that stripped Oppenheimer's clearance. The Manhattan Project is also the film's moral subject rather than its setting: a piece of applied physics that its makers understood completely and could not control at all.
Real world
The story of the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test, and of the security hearing that later stripped Oppenheimer of his clearance in the McCarthy years.