Coming from the Congo, I knew where an essential ingredient for atomic bombs was mined, even if everyone else seemed to ignore it.
  • bermuda@beehaw.orgEnglish
    24·
    1 year ago

    It feels like a lot of people missed that the movie is about the guy and not so much about the Manhattan project. It seems like a lot of that is due to misleading marketing though. I’m guessing many people watched it because of the bomb.

    I saw it and los Alamos takes a bit of a backseat and plays more into the plot as opposed to being the plot.

    Edit: I read the article all the way through and I see now it’s less of a complaint about a lack of scenes and moreso about the complex history being shown in quick and succinct metaphor. I’ll leave this comment up though because I think it’s related, despite what OP seems to think (weirdly enough)

    • liv@beehaw.orgEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      This article is about something that was in the movie, though.

      The closer we get to the bomb’s completion, the more marbles go into the bowl. But there’s no mention in the film of where two-thirds of that uranium came from: a mine 24 stories deep, now in Congo’s Katanga, a mineral-rich area in the southeast.

      As the marbles steadily filled the bowl onscreen, I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand.

      It was a stylistic choice, as the author confirmed with Nolan at the premiere. Compare with, say, the opening of Uncut Gems where the stylistic choice was to show the conditions in which it was mined.

      Personally I think this article is well worth reading. In the West, a lot of the general public’s knowledge about colonial activities in DRC is sort of frozen somewhere around the 19th century.

        • liv@beehaw.orgEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          This article doesn’t read to me like a complaint about the film, though?

          The tone seems to me to be more, I went to a film about A+B, now I’m sharing my experience that C was a big part of that which wasn’t shown, even though it was symbolised by marbles.

          To me, that’s always worth pointing out, especially when so many people seem to get a lot of their views about history from moving image media.

          And maybe one day when someone does make something that touches a bit on the historical conditions behind “Great Man” style history, it might be more welcomed than it would be in the current climate, if articles like this one help people know a bit more.

          I’m remembering when Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Mansfield Park came out. The Jane Austen novel is about people living in a house that was literally owned by a slave owner with plantations in the West Indies, but that stuff had never been shown before. Some people were really scandalised but I thought it was quite interesting. Understanding about how Western history intersects with, say, African history is helpful in understanding the world we live in now.

    • Rentlar@beehaw.org
      6·
      1 year ago

      You are absolutely correct. People were already complaining that the movie was so long and jumpy as it was, there isn’t the time and attention span to go through detailed scenes of what was happening in Japan, what was happening in Europe, what was happening in Katnga where uranium was extracted, what was happening at most of the factories and other parts that went into making the atomic bomb.

      It was a story about the titular individual Oppenheimer, and the people within his sphere of influence. Oppenheimer and his buddies would have next to no clue on any of these things. To say the uranium extraction process and history was ignored by the 3 hour movie on Robert Oppenheimer is not very substantial to me.

      • iain@feddit.nl
        5·
        1 year ago

        These kinds of articles are not about wanting to add to the runtime, just about providing extra context to the things portrayed in the movie.

        • bermuda@beehaw.orgEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          That’s fair. When I watched it I found myself wondering what was going on and who everybody was a lot of the time. As a sciency guy I recognized names but I definitely think it would have been nice to explore the surroundings of various aspects to projects.

          Even though the Manhattan project wasn’t the goal of the movie as I said, some context on how an atomic bomb works definitely would have helped.

    • pkulak@beehaw.org
      4·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, that’s why I didn’t like it. I just couldn’t buy the premise that Oppenheimer was some kind of martyr because he got his security clearance revoked and couldn’t use a free house anymore. The producers had to go out of their way to ignore an interesting story and focus on boring hearings and unimportant nonsense.

    • keeb420@kbin.social
      4·
      1 year ago

      i feel like someone could make a movie about these things, and make a very good movie of it. however oppenheimer isnt that film and nor should it be.

  • circularfish@beehaw.orgM
    2·
    1 year ago

    Gentle reminder that this is the nice Lemmy instance.

    This is a good article and the point is well made that there is a lot of troubling colonial history that the story told in the film does not include. The point has also been made that the movie is a biopic about one individual and that wasn’t the story it was trying to tell.

    Feel free to explore those issues, as there are some inherently political concerns involved, but please do so without the ad hominem. If “you this” or “you that” starts creeping back into the discussion, we’ll be forced to lock the thread.

  • sculd@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    Everything surrounding the Manhattan Project and Cold War are so complicated that essentially any take is going to miss something.

    Oppenheimer is already 3 hours long, and some are already saying it should have added the perspective of Japanese.

    Realistically how much more content can the movie portray without turning it into a history book?