Oppenheimer biographer is emotionally recovering as he calls Christopher Nolan’s film a “stunning artistic achievement”

There is no doubt that Christopher Nolan has taken on one of the heaviest subjects in human history. While the summer usually belongs to action spectacles, kids’ movies, or comedies, Oppenheimer comes along to tell its story about the darkest invention in existence. The drama is even shot in big-screen formats, including IMAX, which are intended to enhance the experience of special effects-laden movies designed to take viewers on a visual roller coaster. Christopher Nolan is one who often explores heady themes with deep character studies in his films, regardless of genre. According to Variety, the biographer behind the subject of Oppenheimer is still processing his emotions after watching the film.

Kai Bird, the Historian who co-wrote the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which served as the basis for this film, spoke in a conversation with David Nirenberg at Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York about how he hopes the movie sparks talk about the issues explored in Oppenheimer.

Bird explains, “I am, at the moment, stunned and emotionally recovering from having seen it. I think it is going to be a stunning artistic achievement, and I have hopes it will actually stimulate a national, even global conversation about the issues that Oppenheimer was desperate to speak out about — about how to live in the atomic age, how to live with the bomb and about McCarthyism — what it means to be a patriot, and what is the role for a scientist in a society drenched with technology and science, to speak out about public issues.”

Bird had written American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer with the late Martin J. Sherwin, and their book had won a Pulitzer. Nolan adapted the book, which would serve as a biography of the revolutionary physicist and his odyssey to create the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project during World War II. Cillian Murphy plays the titular role in the movie, and Nolan had reportedly written the screenplay in first person, which should further explore the personal struggle and immeasurable regret Oppenheimer carried with him.