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At the 96th Academy Awards,Oppenheimerwon seven Oscars,including Best Picture.
So, what exactly does happen at the end ofOppenheimer?
During our early glimpses of this meeting, we never hear what they say.
Now, finally, we see the scene in full.
Now, Einstein gently confronts Oppenheimer about this sentiment.
You all thought that Id lost the ability to understand what Id started, he says.
Just remember, it wont be for you, Einstein adds.
It will be for them.
But Kitty Oppenheimer (Blunt) refuses to shake Tellers.
(This is something that happened in real life.
I believe we did, Oppenheimer says.
As the camera closes in on his face, we cut to an array of modern-day nuclear missiles.
Drifting among the clouds, we see vapor trails of nukes being fired through the air.
We see explosions across the surface of the planet, their blast radiuses unspeakably vast.
Then, a ring of fire begins to consume the Earth.
Nolan, like many of us, grew up under the specter of thermonuclear annihilation.
So, thats the ultra-nihilistic reading.
I did ask Nolan whether hed anticipated this kind of reaction to the finale.
Its the response Id hoped for in terms of the strength of the reaction, he said.
That specificity certainly wasnt my intention.
Nolan doesnt want to send messages with his work, and hes adamant about never being didactic.
But he did want, he says a strong set of troubling reverberations at the end.
Similarly, the conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein is this movies secret emotional fulcrum.
At that point, he was still presumablyriding high on his celebrity.
During the security-clearance hearing, it is noted repeatedly by others that Oppenheimer is passive and hesitant.
Did you think that if you let them tar and feather you the world would forgive you?
his wife Kitty asks him, angrily.
Oppenheimer, when did your strong moral convictions develop with respect to the hydrogen bomb?
When it became clear to me that we would use whatever weapon we had.
It very well might be.
(During a slideshow of Japanese A-bomb victims, he pointedly looks away.)
In some ways, hes now allowing himself to be punished through the security hearing.
Its a form of self-flagellation for not having spoken up sooner.
But lets think back to those droplets.
These effectively become one of the psychological through-lines of the film.
Early on, Oppenheimer notes that he was troubled by visions of a hidden universe.
It feels as if the physicists visions have now found a fearsome and concrete embodiment in real life.
He has worked his way through the science and has found himself face to face with a mushroom cloud.
They refer tohimself, to his own capacity for death and destruction.
Its clear that Oppenheimer blames himself for Tatlocks death.
If she did indeed commit suicide, he assumes she did it over their inability to be together.
After Trinity, Oppenheimer no longer has visions of the quantum world.
He begins to see something else.
A tense smile plastered to his face, he hesitates and seems paralyzed with indecision.
He sees a young woman, her face stripping off in flakes as if she were made of paper.
(A telling detail: The young woman is played by Flora Nolan, the directors daughter.)
Screams of joy become tears of anguish.
A young couple making out becomes a young couple holding each other and crying in terror.
The speech also evokes a psychological reality Nolan uncovered as he worked on the picture.
Its so beautiful for him, Lame told me.
Science to him is beauty and art and poetry.
It just makes the movie so much more devastating at the end.
