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For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face. 

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan's primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico's desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy's face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. "Oppenheimer" rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others. 

Sometimes the close-ups of people's faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven't happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don't just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer's team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer's life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The "fissile" cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer's career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact). 

The weight of the film's interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer's, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon ), Los Alamos' military supervisor; Robert's suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer ( Emily Blunt ), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey , Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer's post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he's a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau's director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it. 

That, I believe, is really what "Oppenheimer" is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war and the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it's not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn't indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do: Dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit in an aesthetically daring way while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that's about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about "Oppenheimer." It's not entirely about Oppenheimer even though Murphy's baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It's also about the effect of Oppenheimer's personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Safdie's Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock ( Florence Pugh , who has some of Gloria Grahame's self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn't going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman ) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic "crybaby" who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame's editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick -y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It's wedded to virtually nonstop music by  Ludwig Göransson  that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that's probably what it would feel like to read American Prometheus  while listening to a playlist of  Philip Glass film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it's like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one's own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn't delved into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn't important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the tale but the telling. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stories. But whether that characterization was true (and I'm increasingly convinced it never entirely was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it's been applied to a biography of a real person. "Oppenheimer" could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director's filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he'd been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward.

The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it's as if the park bench scene in " JFK " had been expanded to three hours). There's also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick  mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife honeymooned there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented further by the presence of "Full Metal Jacket" star  Matthew Modine , who co-stars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) It’s an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, variously evoking Michael Mann's " The Insider ," late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like "Hiroshima Mon Amour," "The Pawnbroker," "All That Jazz" and " Picnic at Hanging Rock "; and, inevitably, " Citizen Kane " (there's even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti , talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond). 

Most of the performances have a bit of an "old movie" feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered quickly, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet.

But as a physical experience, "Oppenheimer" is something else entirely—it's hard to say exactly what, and that's what's so fascinating about it. I've already heard complaints that the movie is "too long," that it could've ended with the first bomb detonating, and could've done without the bits about Oppenheimer's sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it's perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower's cabinet. But the film's furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how's and why's of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are appearing before a tribunal and bring called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The tribunal is out there in the dark. We've been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Oppenheimer (2023)

Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language.

181 minutes

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt as Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer

Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

Benny Safdie as Edward Teller

Michael Angarano as Robert Serber

Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence

Rami Malek as David Hill

Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr

Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols

Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer

David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi

Alden Ehrenreich as Senate Aide

Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush

Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman

Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez

Casey Affleck as Boris Pash

Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman

Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer

Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg

David Dastmalchian as William L. Borden

Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs

Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge

Tony Goldwyn as Gordon Gray

Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig

James Remar as Henry Stimson

• Christopher Nolan

Writer (based on the book by)

• Martin Sherwin

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Jennifer Lame
• Ludwig Göransson

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Oppenheimer’s big-screen odyssey: The man, the book and the film’s 50-year journey

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Among the many astonishing facets of Christopher Nolan’s “ Oppenheimer ” is the speed at which the movie came together. In early 2021, the director read “ American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” a sweeping biography by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird of the physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb. Riveted, Nolan immediately began adapting it into a screenplay. Less than a year later, he was filming. The movie , among this summer’s most anticipated, premieres on Friday.

But that’s only half the equation. By another metric — befitting one of history’s most complex figures and a filmmaker drawn to labyrinthine narratives — the adaptation of “Oppenheimer” can be seen as a multigenerational saga nearly half a century in the making. Nolan’s epic movie builds on an epic book with an epic industry backstory. The writing of “American Prometheus” took 25 years, and since its publication in 2005, the book had been floating through Hollywood like an atom no one could figure out how to split: always under option, never moving past development.

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This origin story begins in 1980, when Martin Sherwin , then 43, signed with Knopf to write a biography of Oppenheimer. Marty, as everyone called him, poured himself into the research, taking his family on a trip to New Mexico to meet Oppenheimer’s reclusive son, Peter, and tracking down just about every living person who had known the scientist. In time, Sherwin amassed some 50,000 pages of declassified government documents outlining Oppenheimer’s years as director of the Los Alamos lab and the subsequent loss of his security clearance during the panic of McCarthyism.

What Sherwin did not do, however, was sit down and write.

A singular collaboration

The deadline came and went, many times over. Sherwin’s son, Alex, recalls his father’s unwritten book as a subject of frequent ribbing at the dinner table of the family’s Boston home. “It was a great source of pleasure,” Alex said in a recent conversation. “He would say to me, ‘Do your homework,’ and I would say, ‘Write your book!’ He had a great sense of humor about it.”

Far from the cliché of the tortured writer, Sherwin was, if anything, diverted by his own rabid enthusiasm. He took a professorship at Tufts University, where he established the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center. Presaging the internet era, Sherwin pioneered what he called a “ space bridge ,” using a satellite during the late 1980s to hold live discussions between his classes and those at Moscow State University. He also wrote numerous essays and op-eds about the nuclear age.

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But by the late 1990s, nearly 20 years behind schedule on his book, Sherwin’s attitude toward the project became less sanguine. “At several points, the light at the end of the tunnel got very dim,” he later noted to an audience at a book fair. His wife, Susan, recalled in an interview that Sherwin began remarking that he was going to take the book to the grave.

“That became his joke,” she said, “that it would be on his tombstone.”

Sherwin came up with a bold solution: He would bring in a partner on the project — specifically, his friend and fellow historian Kai Bird . The two had met in 1980 and grew close in 1995, when both were involved in addressing a divisive Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay , the plane that released Oppenheimer’s bomb over Hiroshima in August of 1945. (When the plane was again exhibited in 2003, they co-authored an op-ed for The Times about it.)

While Bird was intrigued by the subject, he didn’t immediately warm to the idea of working together.

“I told him no — that I liked him too much,” recalled Bird, whose first book had begun as a collaboration with a friend that ended acrimoniously. Bird’s wife was adamant that he not take on another.

Sherwin was undeterred. Over the next six months, he traveled regularly from Boston to Bird’s home in Washington, D.C. “He seduced the two of us into thinking this was a good project,” said Bird. The two wrote a proposal, and Knopf agreed to a new contract in 2000 — offering them a book advance that came to $290,000 (after subtracting $35,000 paid to Sherwin in 1980). Bird recalled that Sherwin gave him a “bigger chunk” of the money since the book would be Bird’s sole income.

“Part of Kai and Marty’s story is the story of something that’s been lost in the publishing,” said Susan Sherwin. “The industry had a willingness to nurture people and projects in a way that’s kind of unimaginable today.”

The men celebrated the deal with martinis, christening the project with the same toast favored by Oppenheimer with the scientists of Los Alamos: “To the confusion of our enemies!”

Over the course of four years, they volleyed chapters back and forth to produce what became “American Prometheus,” a 721-page biography that is both grand in scope and granular in personal detail. Rapturously reviewed in 2005, the book won a Pulitzer Prize, an honor the writers took as a tribute to their singular collaboration.

A movie Marty would have loved

Immediately following its publication, the book seemed to be on a fast track to becoming a movie when Sam Mendes , the director then known for “ American Beauty ” and “Jarhead,” optioned it.

“We were very excited and completely naive,” said Susan, describing a familiar story of Hollywood entropy: unbridled enthusiasm morphing into development snags before petering out completely. Though the book continued to spark interest and remained under option by various producers, its authors stopped believing a movie would ever emerge.

“We acquired what you could call a more jaundiced view of Hollywood,” Bird said.

Then in September of 2021 — 40 years after Sherwin started the book and 16 since it was published — a friend of Bird’s sent him a curious item in Variety noting that Nolan’s next project would be about Oppenheimer. Bird and Sherwin had heard nothing about this. “I assumed maybe he was using a different book, or just going from the public record,” Bird said.

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But Nolan was indeed basing his movie on “American Prometheus,” thanks in part to the tenacity of someone who had never worked in Hollywood. Since 2015, the film rights had been under option by J. David Wargo, a successful New York businessman who studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was itching to get the book into production. Various scripts had been commissioned and rejected.

“Then, during the midst of the pandemic, Wargo got frustrated with the project and flew out to L.A. on a rented private plane and went to Hollywood,” Bird explained. In L.A., Wargo met with the actor James Woods , an old friend, who set up a meeting with Charles Roven , one of Nolan’s longtime producers. Roven handed the book to the director. (Wargo and Woods are both executive producers on “Oppenheimer.”)

As it happened, Nolan had recently completed “Tenet,” a movie that references the atomic bomb, and one of its stars, Robert Pattinson , had given the director a book of Oppenheimer’s speeches as a wrap gift.

“I’m always pushing various things forward, but this is one where a lot of different planets aligned,” Nolan explained during an interview, recalling the particular scene from “American Prometheus” that hooked him: “Los Alamos, this place that will always live in history or infamy, was first a place where Oppenheimer and his brother loved to go camping. Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, I’m looking at the most personal possible connection between a character and a massive change to the world that couldn’t be undone.”

“It was all very slow,” said Bird, “until suddenly one day it wasn’t.”

That fall, Nolan called Bird, asking if he and Sherwin could come up to New York from D.C. (where Sherwin had also moved) to meet with the director. Sherwin, then 84, was at that point too weak to travel. Two years earlier, he had been diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer.

“We met for two and a half hours, and Nolan humored my probing about the project,” Bird said. “But he made it clear that he worked confidentially and was not sharing the script.”

Nolan, for his part, found their meeting quelled some of his own jitters about the adaptation.

“One thing Kai said to me which gave me an enormous sense of confidence was that he believed any film should be framed around the security clearance,” said Nolan, whose script and final film is structured around that drama. “I breathed a large sigh of relief knowing he wouldn’t think I’d done anything so radical.”

Bird, after raising a glass to Nolan and toasting him with Oppenheimer’s words — “To the confusion of our enemies!” — was able to extract one kernel about the film.

“Did that line make it into the script?” he asked Nolan.

“It was in there,” the director said, “but I had to cut it for space.”

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Back in Washington, Bird rushed over to Sherwin’s home to tell him about the meeting. “He was gratified,” Bird recalled, “but still skeptical.”

Two weeks later, on Oct. 6, 2021, Sherwin passed away.

Those closest to him have spent the last year savoring the making of “Oppenheimer” on his behalf. Susan and Alex Sherwin spent a day on the film’s set in Princeton, N.J., where they met Cillian Murphy , who plays Oppenheimer, and were startled to see in 3-D a version of the world Marty had dedicated so much of his life to researching.

Just before filming, Nolan let Bird read the script, putting the writer up in a downtown Manhattan hotel and waiting in the lobby for him to finish. Bird was struck by how faithful it was to the book, capturing what was always most important to Sherwin: the paradoxes at the heart of Oppenheimer’s character and the intimate details that dovetailed with enormous plate shifts of world history.

“He died knowing it was in the works, but it’s sad that he can’t be here to see the hoopla,” said Bird. “Marty would have loved it.”

Amsden is a writer based in Los Angeles.

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Oppenheimer Is More Than a Creation Myth About the Atomic Bomb

Christopher Nolan’s ambitious film explores the heated conversations and private anxieties that led to the unleashing of a terrible power.

Almost all of Oppenheimer is composed of conversation. There’s academic back-and-forth among theoretical physicists as they scribble nuclear equations on chalkboards; heated conversations between American politicians and military leaders about World War II and the fate of the country should the Nazis win; terse, loaded exchanges at panels and congressional hearings, with investigations sifting through rumors and conjecture in an effort to determine these scientists’ loyalty to the United States. The director Christopher Nolan rarely slows down to let his protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), actually think. When he does, the audience sees particles swirling in Oppenheimer’s mind, neutrons smashing and sparking, elemental forces being harnessed through intelligence and will.

It’s mesmerizing but also quite inscrutable—a beautiful representation of the terrible power Oppenheimer channeled in his involvement with the Manhattan Project, which created (and detonated) the first nuclear weapons. Nolan’s film encompasses far more than that, cramming almost all of the doorstop-size biography American Prometheus into a three-hour running time by moving at breakneck speed. It covers Oppenheimer’s beginnings as a student and his postwar battles with the government over his alleged Communist past. The result is a talky biopic with the intensity of an action movie, a series of meetings in offices and bunkers that somehow drives the planet to the brink of apocalypse. Although the visual scale is smaller than the many widescreen epics Nolan has made—save for the part where the bomb goes off— Oppenheimer might be his most ambitious work as a filmmaker to date.

It’s also a fascinating companion piece to the only other Nolan movie that’s rooted in real-life events: 2017’s Dunkirk . That film, which depicted the evacuation of Allied troops during World War II, was light on dialogue and heavy on complex action set pieces, bombarding the viewer’s eyes and ears with the fury of the front lines. Much of Oppenheimer is set during the same war, but it focuses on the behind-the-scenes figures who sought to end the war without firing a bullet. Nolan’s chief fascination, of course, is Oppenheimer himself, whom Murphy plays as a grand enigma—icy at times and effortlessly charming at others, sympathetic to leftist revolutionary causes but happy to bury those sympathies as he begins steering the Manhattan Project.

The film’s first hour barrels through his student years and his early days as a physicist in England and Germany; Oppenheimer crosses paths with legends in his field such as Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), and Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer). Their energetic discussions of quantum mechanics and atomic theory are difficult to keep up with, but as the plot thundered on, I realized that was part of the point: Even these esteemed men of science can’t quite grasp what they’re dealing with. The viewer knows where things are headed—the total success of the Manhattan Project, and the consequences of the weapons it produced—but there’s a frightening lack of awareness as, spurred by a fear of the Nazis reaching the same consequential milestone first, the development of the bomb is set in motion.

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Throughout the action, Nolan ping-pongs between timelines, as he has in many films past. In painstaking detail, he depicts the humiliating 1954 hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance and dredged up both his past associations with Communists and his overactive love life. A more daring element, told in black and white, follows the former Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (a tremendous Robert Downey Jr.) as he undergoes a Senate confirmation hearing for a Cabinet post, digging through the politician’s tense relationship and eventual enmity with Oppenheimer. The majority of the story, shown in color and centered on Oppenheimer, fizzes with energy and possibility; the Strauss-centric sequences are slow, seething, and obsessed with the past, representative of the conservatism and paranoia that calcified around the atomic society Oppenheimer helped to create.

Nolan’s ambition is to intertwine multiple biographical threads about his subject and his historical context. There’s the mad dash to create nuclear weapons, a thrilling race against time with an explosive conclusion: the Trinity bomb test that proved their theories correct. There’s the larger moral conflict that emerged especially after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as scientists such as Oppenheimer started begging governments to back away from the deadly arms race that politicians like Strauss were effectively pushing for. And then there are the deepest mysteries of Oppenheimer himself, a man who pleaded for peace later in life but who never fully held himself publicly accountable for the hundreds of thousands left dead by his invention.

As Oppenheimer zips toward its conclusion and switches perspectives with increasing mania, it becomes clear how carefully Nolan is working to keep the audience’s attention on his story’s lofty scope without losing sight of its cryptic protagonist. Murphy, with his frost-blue eyes fixed in a permanent thousand-yard stare, keeps the viewer (and the people around him) at arm’s length. But as the years pile on, it’s obvious how the guilt has stacked up too. The film lets reality start to crack around Oppenheimer as a result, turning the Trinity test into a haunting, invasive specter he can never quite shake.

Nolan is best known for spectacle, and some viewers will be able to see Oppenheimer in bone-rattling IMAX, projected on a skyscraper-size screen. But it’s more impressive for how the director has made such a personal narrative feel epic, not just in visual breadth but in dramatic sweep, presenting a story from the past that feels knotted to so many present anxieties about nuclear annihilation. After racing his way to scientific progress and achievement, Oppenheimer is confronted with an amoral world he had previously ignored; that existential horror, and the way it echoed into the 21st century, is the real hammer wielded by this tale.

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J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Grandson on What the Movie Gets Right and the One Scene He Would Have Changed

M oviegoers turned out in droves this weekend for writer-director Christopher Nolan's new film Oppenheimer , fueling an expectations-shattering domestic box office debut of $80 million . The three-hour-long biopic recounts the life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), the theoretical physicist widely known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” and has been praised by critics for its nuanced examination of a complicated historical figure.

The movie is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , one of numerous accounts of Oppenheimer's life and legacy. But according to Oppenheimer's grandson, Charles Oppenheimer, the famous physicist's family has their own their own approach to depictions of him and additional nuance to include.

Charles was born near Santa Fe, N.M., in April 1975, after both his grandfather and grandmother, Katherine "Kitty" Puening Oppenheimer (played by Emily Blunt), had passed away. However, he says he grew up having a very open dialogue about his grandfather's work with his father, Peter Oppenheimer, who spent several years of his early childhood at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

TIME spoke with Charles about what Oppenheimer gets right about his grandfather, what he would have changed, and the work he's doing to further Oppenheimer's legacy today.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

TIME: How was your grandparents' story told to you when you were growing up?

Charles Oppenheimer: Like most kids, I heard about my grandparents through my parents, and there was a marker at one point that stands out in my memory of speaking about Robert Oppenheimer being a famous person who had done his duty during World War II. He might have been a soldier, but his skills were in science, so he used science to do what he had to do during the war. But within the family, we had very open conversations. So my dad was always there if I had a question once I started hearing more about how we were related to a person that other people were talking about. I was always able to initiate a conversation and I do that to this day, especially with my father Peter.

So there was ongoing, open communication about who your grandfather was.

With a very big dividing line. Within the family, we absolutely talked about it as much as possible. With anyone outside of the family, my father doesn't discuss anything [about him] if he can avoid it.

Do you feel there are misconceptions about your grandfather?

There's such an incredible historical record of him. It's impressive, like every detail of every conversation of his spring break in 1924 is analyzed. If you have that much information and enough people writing and rewriting and interpreting, you can pick up any thread of meaning and narrative. The one that's developing right now is about as positive and as famous of an interpretation of him as you could have. And I find that being related to him and having insight into who he was doesn't always seem that interesting to other people. They're happy to ask a historian or a writer, and it's not necessarily true that my impression of his values is taken as the answer. So I kind of struggle with saying that I have a view of who he is and what he cared about and it not always getting across. That being said, I think with as much attention as is put on him, there is a large understanding of the complexity of the stuff he dealt with and the problems and opportunities of ushering science into the world.

Read more: Here's How Faithfully Oppenheimer Captures Its Subject's Real Life

You saw the movie. Were there parts that hit you the hardest, emotionally?

I was bracing myself for not feeling great about it, even though I talked to Chris Nolan and was very impressed by him. I saw him work on the set with an amazing intensity when I visited once or twice, and we had a great conversation. But I didn't know, am I going to love it? Am I going to hate it? I often have that reaction to biographies and pundits when they talk about my grandfather. I feel like they're missing something. And sometimes it really feels personal. Like when somebody wants to start a fight with you on the schoolyard, they'll talk about your family member. But during the movie, I found myself accepting and liking it. I thought it told a compelling story and I could just take it as art that was really engaging. I was really happy to have that reaction. I didn't expect it.

Were there parts that struck you as historically or emotionally inaccurate?

When I talked to Chris Nolan, at one point he said something roughly like, 'I know how to tell a story out of this subject. There are going to be parts that you have to dramatize a bit and parts that are changed. As family members, I think you're going to like some parts and dislike some parts.' That's probably led into my acceptance of the movie, even though I saw it very late, just when it came out. As a dramatized representation of the history, it was really largely accurate. There are parts that I disagree with, but not really because of Nolan.

The part I like the least is this poison apple reference, which was a problem in American Prometheus . If you read American Prometheus carefully enough, the authors say, 'We don't really know if it happened.' There's no record of him trying to kill somebody. That's a really serious accusation and it's historical revision. There's not a single enemy or friend of Robert Oppenheimer who heard that during his life and considered it to be true. American Prometheus got it from some references talking about a spring break trip, and all the original reporters of that story—there was only two maybe three—reported that they didn't know what Robert Oppenheimer was talking about. Unfortunately, American Prometheus summarizes that as Robert Oppenheimer tried to kill his teacher and then they [acknowledge that] maybe there's this doubt.

Sometimes facts get dragged through a game of telephone. In the movie, it's treated vaguely and you don't really know what's going on unless you know this incredibly deep backstory. So it honestly didn't bother me. It bothers me that it was in the biography with that emphasis, not a disclaimer of, this is an unsubstantiated rumor that we want to put in our book to make it interesting. But I like some of the dramatization. I thought Einstein's conversation with Oppenheimer at the end was really effective even though it wasn't historical.

What was your role, if any, in the movie?

The family policy around media, books, and what I'd call the cult of Oppenheimer, is not to participate in it. It's a business to write and talk about Oppenheimer, and the model that my dad chose is: 'It's not very classy, and I'm not going to be involved in publicly representing Oppenheimer in ways that other people do as a business.' But when I saw this movie was coming out, I said, 'Wow, that's going to be really big.' I also have a big interest in representing my grandfather's values for today's world. That's the most important thing in my opinion. So I reached out said, 'Hey, could I get involved?', and Chris Nolan was nice enough to give me a courtesy call through Kai Bird—whose book I just criticized. I do think American Prometheus is really good, I just had a complaint about that one part.

So Chris Nolan gave me a call. He had finished the script and he said, 'I have so much material with American Prometheus .' I explained that my dad probably would be unlikely to talk. But I don't think he needed input from the family. And as an artist, he obviously has every right to do that. You need art to tell this story. And it's just a fact that when somebody writes a biography about our family, we don't have input or the ability to make decisions. The chain of this movie was American Prometheus was published and then Nolan licensed it. I tried to give my perspective, but there wasn't any official involvement.

Is there anything you would have advised them to do differently, had you been asked?

I definitely would have removed the apple thing. But I can't imagine myself giving advice about movie stuff to Nolan. He's an expert, he's the artist, and he's a genius in this area. But one amusing family story is that, if I invited myself to the set, they would entertain me coming, which I did twice. And so one time I visited the set in New Mexico. I saw them film and, in that particular scene, Cillian Murphy walks into a room and part of his line was calling someone an 'asshole.' And when I went back to Santa Fe and told my dad, he was horrified. He said, 'Robert Oppenheimer never swore. He was such a formal person. He would never, ever do that.' And I was like, 'Well, it's a dramatization.' But I was worried that in the movie he would be this swearing, abusive guy. Anyway, I think he said one swear word in the movie and I just happened to be in the room. So there is a chance that if we had been consultants, we could have added some details and depth. But there's such a complete record. It was enough for Nolan to tell the story he intended to.

Did the movie help you come to any kind of deeper understanding of your grandfather?

When I saw how Nolan put this together, I was like, wow, there are thousands of pages of more details than what he put in there. But he was able to summarize it to the effect of: are we going to destroy ourselves as a species? That told as a story is really important. It's not exactly a revelation, but it's an important message. I always look at my grandfather's actual words instead of what other people said about him. And I think his advice is really relevant today, because he was right about how to manage atomic energy. If we had followed his actual hard policy proposals, we could have avoided an arms race right after World War II.

Robert Oppenheimer saw where we should go and he was right at that time. That really counts for a lot. It's not just the fact of like, ‘Oh, I regret something I did.' He put in effort to affect policy that could have literally changed history, and being overruled and discredited, which is what Nolan tells the story of, is important in that light. The way he told this story through [Lewis] Strauss’ perspective was really masterful.

There have always been two facts in tension: on the one hand, Oppenheimer helped create a weapon of mass destruction that was used to kill hundreds of thousands of people . On the other hand, the existence of nuclear weapons has succeeded as a deterrent for nearly 80 years, with superpowers like the U.S., Russia, and China avoiding war for fear of what would happen if those weapons again got into play. What are your thoughts on that complex legacy?

To me, that's the most interesting part and the most relevant today. The movie, while really good, had less emphasis than I would have put on the period of 1945 right before the bomb dropped to 1947, which was the time where we could have avoided an arms race. It is true that he ushered these weapons in, and then we went into an arms race, and we haven't destroyed ourselves. But the difference is him and [Niels] Bohr saw the arms race coming and said, ‘We really must avoid this.' It's not good enough that we just haven't died yet. It was a disaster that we got into an arms race and it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of science, as illustrated in the scene they have in there with Truman where Oppenheimer had been telling people that if we don't co-manage this with our allies, which were the U.K. and Russia at the time, we're going to get into an arms race and it's going to be extremely dangerous.

The gut reaction from Truman and others was, let's just make as many of these bombs as fast as possible and we'll keep it secret and the Russians will never get the bomb. So you have a scientific expert that's telling the government, this is what we need to do, and you have the government doing the opposite. We got into an arms race not because of a hard-nosed, pragmatic understanding of we need to build these bombs, but a scientific misunderstanding that we could keep it secret. Robert Oppenheimer's deepest message is that the world had changed around the atomic bomb dropping. But it wasn't just atomic bombs, it was the fact that the scope of our technologies had increased to the point where we could destroy ourselves and we had to unite in a new way. And that's exactly what he said: Mankind must unite or we will perish. That's the message that we can bring into today's world.

You started the Oppenheimer Project to continue your grandfather's work today. Can you tell me a little bit about what the organization does?

Even though I spent a lot of time in this interview trying to correct some historical detail, you never win that discussion. But if you look at Robert Oppenheimer's values, what he wrote, what he said, how he led scientists, it’s clearly an amazing record. He led scientists to solve a hugely difficult technical problem under the threat of existential risk. And then he talked about, how do we manage the outcome of improving science and technology at that speed? He had a poetic way of talking. So when he spoke about what should we do about it, it wasn't just an engineered answer. He had a really deep, rounded view of it because of his education and interest. And what he said was, we need to unite in a new way—and his policy tried to put that in place.

It's exactly what we need to do today in the world. We can draw dots between the idea that if we hadn't gone into an arms race, we would have actually been able to use that scientific discovery for abundant nuclear energy . The same science could have made unlimited energy. We had a little bit of a push there of making it, but we were making bombs constantly at the same time, and that eventually sabotaged the public acceptance of nuclear energy. Now, we've gotten carbon output and climate change. So if we could use the idea of ushering in technology in an industrial scale effort to affect a really threatening problem, like climate change and lack of enough energy, we could apply the same type of effort that we had in the Manhattan Project towards today's problems. And it wouldn’t include creating a bunch of bombs, because that method of warfare stopped working in 1945. It doesn't work. Our institutions haven't caught up with that insight.

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Write to Megan McCluskey at [email protected]

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated Press

‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

The vivid portrait of the “father of the atomic bomb” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

In Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Oppenheimer,” Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times

The movie is based on “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Eddie Adams/Associated Press

The book took 25 years to write. The authors amassed an extraordinary amount of documents, some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and FBI dossiers.

Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times

Nolan, the biopic director argues that the physicist who oversaw creation of the atomic bomb was both the most important person who ever lived and hopelessly naïve.

“His story is central to the way in which we live now and the way we are going to live forever. It absolutely changed the world in a way that no one else has changed the world. You talk about the advent of the printing press or something. He gave the world the power to destroy itself. No one has done that before.”

Nolan shot the film in IMAX 70-millimeter, a rarity in modern filmmaking. Many movie aficionados consider that format the gold standard, but the film is available in IMAX 70-millimeter at just 30 screens in the world, 19 of them in the U.S.

Read our full review of “Oppenheimer.”

• Cast & crew
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Oppenheimer

The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb.

• Christopher Nolan
• Martin Sherwin
• Cillian Murphy
• Emily Blunt
• 4.2K User reviews
• 484 Critic reviews
• 90 Metascore
• 347 wins & 358 nominations total

Top cast 99+

• J. Robert Oppenheimer

• Kitty Oppenheimer

• Leslie Groves

• Lewis Strauss

• Senate Aide

• Thomas Morgan

• Gordon Gray

• Lloyd Garrison

• Patrick Blackett

• Senator McGee

• Chairman Magnuson

• Senator Bartlett

• Senator Pastore

• Senator Scott
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Engineering 'Oppenheimer'

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• Trivia In order for the black and white sections of the movie to be shot in the same quality as the rest of the film, Kodak produced a limited supply of its Double-X black and white film stock in 70mm. This film stock was chosen specifically for its heritage - it was originally sold to photographers as Super-XX during World War II and was very popular with photojournalists of the era.
• Goofs The stop signs are yellow in the film, which is accurate. The United States used yellow stop signs until 1954.

J. Robert Oppenheimer : Albert? When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world...

Albert Einstein : I remember it well. What of it?

J. Robert Oppenheimer : I believe we did.

• Alternate versions To get a U/A rating certification in India, the movie was edited to remove or censor all nudity using CGI. For example, the scene where Tatlock and Oppenheimer have a conversation and the former character was topless, the nudity was censored with a CGI black dress. Many Middle Eastern countries use this exact same censored version for release.
• Connections Featured in Louder with Crowder: Going Out with a Bang! (2022)
• Soundtracks Holiday in Big Band Land (uncredited) Written by Gerhard Narholz Performed by Les Brown and His Band of Renown

User reviews 4.2K

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• Why did Niels Bohr not help with the Manhattan project?
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• July 21, 2023 (United States)
• United States
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• Official Facebook
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• Oppengeymer
• Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA (only interiors, Los Alamos facilities interiors, including Oppenheimer's house, Fuller Lodge Interior and Exterior)
• Universal Pictures
• Atlas Entertainment
• Gadget Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $100,000,000 (estimated)
• $329,862,540
• $82,455,420
• Jul 23, 2023
• $975,297,660

Technical specs

• Runtime 3 hours
• Black and White
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Digital

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American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Reviewed by lawrence d. freedman, by kai bird and martin j. sherwin.

In this stunning blockbuster, two accomplished Cold War historians have come together to tell Robert Oppenheimer's poignant and extraordinary story. They reveal the complexity of a man whose Jewishness was expressed through secular humanism, who was notable for his ethical sense and erudition yet played a leading role in bringing weapons of mass slaughter into existence. Oppenheimer's fears that this achievement would ruin the world led him to urge international control of atomic energy, which, along with his espousal of left-wing causes during the tumultuous 1930s, led him to become the most celebrated victim of the anticommunist paranoia of the 1950s. The authors convey how these great issues appeared to Oppenheimer at the time and describe his interaction with the remarkable figures with whom he was in regular contact -- George Kennan, David Lilienthal, Isidor Rabi, and the antihero Lewis Strauss. The background political context is not fully explored, but this is a small complaint. Bird and Sherwin have undertaken a daunting amount of research, and they do full justice to the complexity of Oppenheimer's story.

• More By Lawrence D. Freedman

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Everything We Know

Christopher nolan's oppenheimer : release date, trailer, cast & more, get the inside scoop on oppenheimer learn about the plot, cast, release date, imax format, and watch the trailer on rotten tomatoes..

TAGGED AS: movies , news

Billboards and movie theater pop-ups across Los Angeles have been ticking down for months now: Christopher Nolan’ s epic account of J. Robert Oppenheimer , the father of the atomic bomb, is nearing an explosive release on July 21, 2023.

Nolan movies are always incredibly secretive, twists locked alongside totems behind safe doors, actors not spilling an ounce of Earl Grey tea. But there are always curtains to pull to glimpse the magic behind the prestige, even with a Nolan film based on real events. So with more than five months left until IMAX theaters are packed to the brim, here’s everything we know about Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer :

Behind the Film

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©Paramount Pictures)

Christopher Nolan returns after three years and Tenet’ s rocky pandemic-delayed release for his 12th feature film, Oppenheimer . The biopic about the infamous theoretical physicist represents a number of transformations for Nolan’s career. First and foremost, the film is his first with Universal Pictures following his dramatic split with his previous studio partner, Warner Bros., which had released all of his films since Insomnia . (Paramount and Warner Bros. shared distribution on Interstellar .)

In 2021, WB opted to debut their entire feature slate in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously . In response, Nolan, an avid defender of the theatrical experience, called them “ the worst streaming service .” Numerous studios — Sony, Paramount, Apple among them — engaged in a war to land production and distribution for Oppenheimer . Universal acquiesced to Nolan’s conditions, which included total creative control and a traditional theatrical window, and won out at the end of the day.

(Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)

Nolan’s production team has solidified, but slightly changed, too. Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson , who is only a Tony away from an EGOT, returns after his first collaboration with Nolan on Tenet , furthering the question of whether Nolan’s famed partnership with Hans Zimmer is over or just on pause. Oppenheimer will mark the fourth Nolan picture shot by Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema , who can literally carry an IMAX camera on his shoulders . And visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson ( Mad Max: Fury Road , Dunkirk , Tenet ) tag-teamed with long-time Nolan special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher to simulate the nuclear tests. (More on those later.)

The newcomers, however, are 45-year veteran costume designer Ellen Mirojnick ( Behind the Candelabra , The Greatest Showman , Bridgerton ) and production designer Ruth De Jong, who worked with Van Hoytema and Universal on Nope .

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©Universal Pictures)

Roughly 20 years after Cillian Murphy’ s screen test for Nolan’s Batman Begins , which was so entrancing to the director that it led to Murphy’s casting as the villainous Scarecrow, the Irish actor finally steps into a leading role for one of his greatest cinematic partners. And if the trailer is any indication, with close-up after close-up, Murphy’s hypnotic eyes will be the window into one of the most complex minds in human history.

Matt Damon also steps up from secret role in Interstellar to mustached general Leslie Groves Jr. And the reunions run deep overall, as Oppenheimer features Casey Affleck ( Interstellar ), Kenneth Branagh ( Dunkirk , Tenet ), James D’Arcy ( Dunkirk ), Matthew Modine ( The Dark Knight Rises ), David Dastmalchian ( The Dark Knight ), and Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight Trilogy) as President Harry S. Truman.

(Photo by Emma McIntyre, Karwai Tang, Mondadori Portfolio, Kevin Mazur/Getty Images)

It seems that there wasn’t a place for a return of Harry Styles , but Nolan is tapping into younger audiences through Oscar nominee Florence Pugh . And there’s an unexpected additional avenue into the social media generation: Josh Peck , whose casting echoes Topher Grace’ s appearance in Interstellar , begging the question of whether the Nolan household is a fan of early 2000s sitcoms.

The remainder of the cast is a who’s who of Hollywood stars. Robert Downey Jr. , Rami Malek , and Emily Blunt are the remaining big names, while Alex Wolff , Dane DeHaan , and Devon Bostick bring a bit of the indie darling vibe. And then there’s a deluge of That Guys, headlined by premiere That Guy Jason Clarke , but also including young Han Solo Alden Ehrenreich and Josh Hartnett , who, like Murphy, was nearly cast as Batman but turned down the role .

Perhaps the most tantalizing piece of the acting puzzle, however, is Tom Conti as Albert Einstein. The casting was not heavily reported on, but then, in the IMAX exclusive trailer ahead of Avatar: The Way of Water , bam, there was Einstein, a bombshell cameo to rival the obsessive superhero cameo culture.

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

At first glance, the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book  American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, presents itself as a departure from the Nolan norm. He’s never done a biopic. He’s only directed two period films, both more explicitly in his wheelhouse. And he’s not usually one to tell a story based on real events. (The exception, Dunkirk , has close personal ties to Nolan’s British upbringing.) But upon closer inspection, the film is a culmination of Nolan’s most prominent interests.

Nolan is principally a materialist. In The Dark Knight trilogy, he envisions Batman as empowered by military technology and Gotham as simply Chicago. In Interstellar , his sci-fi is simply an expansion of what the world’s top theoretical physicists are discussing. In The Prestige , the fantastical takes a backseat and the big twist is that — spoilers! — there was simply a twin brother. In that lens, it only makes sense that Nolan would make a film about the man who made the most powerful object in human history.

Nuclear weapons, in particular, have been present in Nolan films for over a decade. The Dark Knight Rises revolves around a neutron bomb. When promoting Interstellar , the director told The Daily Beast that such weapons are one of his greatest fears. And Tenet even namedrops Oppenheimer. When Oppenheimer producer Charles Roven (The Dark Knight trilogy) suggested the book to Nolan, it’s easy to see why the director signed on so quickly.

And while this is Nolan’s first biopic, the director nearly made one about Howard Hughes two decades ago. Jim Carrey was to star and Nolan calls it “the best script I’ve ever written,” but it was scrapped once Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator went into production. Nolan put many of those thematic interests into Bruce Wayne. And if certain lines in the IMAX exclusive trailer are any indication — “You’re a dilettante, you’re a womanizer, unstable, theatrical, neurotic” — some may have also found a place in Oppenheimer .

IMAX and Explosions

Oppenheimer will feature footage in color and in black-and-white, harkening back to the director’s breakout film, Memento . But the IMAX-obsessed Nolan encountered an immediate technical hurdle: no one had ever shot on IMAX film in black-and-white before .

“So we challenged the people at Kodak and Fotokem to make this work for us,” Nolan told Total Film. “And they stepped up. For the first time ever, we were able to shoot IMAX film in black-and-white. And the results were thrilling and extraordinary.”

However, no hurdle would be greater for the practical-forward director than simulating the Trinity Test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. Details are sparse, but Nolan confirmed to Total Film that his team accomplished it without CGI. Given how unprecedented even a tiny fraction of an atomic explosion would be for a film production, one must ask if miniatures and/or forced perspective were used. But as with all Nolan movies, only time will tell.

Oppenheimer opens in theaters on July 21, 2023. Get your tickets now . 

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What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Oppenheimer ?

At the 96th Academy Awards, Oppenheimer  won seven Oscars ,  including Best Picture.

Few films have ever been more based on a book than Oppenheimer . Christopher Nolan ’s adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus , manages the astonishing feat of distilling almost every single one of the book’s 591 pages onto celluloid. Seemingly no bit of dialogue, nor stray anecdote, about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer goes unused.

In fact, Nolan’s chief creative license comes not in the film’s content but its form. While American Prometheus is told in rough chronological order, Oppenheimer skips around the timeline thanks to a pair of nesting framing devices built around a pair of 1950s hearings. Nolan also frequently cuts to fantastical imagery that attempts to dramatize what it was like inside Oppenheimer’s head. As Matt Zoller Seitz notes in his review, this method recalls the experience of getting through a book like American Prometheus : It “paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually.”

Nevertheless, Oppenheimer is still a movie, which means that even this most rigorous of biopics must at times employ shortcuts and shorthand. With American Prometheus as our guide, here’s a rundown of what’s fact and what’s fiction.

Did Oppenheimer poison his Cambridge tutor’s apple?

The early scene of Oppenheimer poisoning an apple belonging to Patrick Blackett, his Cambridge tutor, is so bizarre that it seems unlikely to have been a screenwriter’s invention. Indeed, it did happen: In the fall of 1925, Oppenheimer really did inject chemicals from the school lab into Blackett’s apple. No one, not even Oppenheimer himself, seemed to know why he did this. As American Prometheus notes, “Robert liked Blackett and eagerly sought his approval.” The attempted poisoning appears to have been a case of misdirected “feelings of inadequacy and intense jealousy.” Luckily, Blackett never consumed the offending fruit, though in real life the university found out about the incident. Oppenheimer’s parents intervened to prevent him from being expelled, and the young scientist was put on probation and sentenced to mandatory psychiatric counseling.

There are disparate opinions on whether the apple was truly poisoned with cyanide, however. Noting that instead of being tried for attempted murder, Oppenheimer got off with a relatively lax punishment, Bird and Sherwin conclude it was more likely he “had laced the apple with something that merely would have made Blackett sick.”

Was Oppenheimer one of the first people to theorize about the existence of black holes?

In the film, one of Oppenheimer’s first scientific breakthroughs is his theorizing about the potential of dead stars collapsing inward with such gravity that even light could not escape — what we now know of as black holes. Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder really did publish such a paper, and that paper really did come out the same day Hitler invaded Poland. But Oppenheimer the film makes a slightly bigger deal of this than Oppenheimer the man did. While brilliant, Oppenheimer’s intellectual temperament often prevented him from embracing all the possibilities of his discoveries. “Oppenheimer never took the time to develop anything so elegant as a theory of the phenomenon, leaving this achievement to others later,” American Prometheus states. “Having made the initial creative leap … [he] quickly moved on to another new topic.” A footnote adds that, when approached about the subject decades later, Robert “expressed no interest in what was rapidly becoming the hottest topic in physics.”

How tumultuous was Oppenheimer’s romance with Jean Tatlock?

As in the film, Oppenheimer met a med student named Jean Tatlock at a Communist party (with a lowercase P ) hosted by his landlady. Within months, they began a romance. American Prometheus describes Tatlock as “a free-spirited woman with a hungry, poetic mind … always the one person in the room, whatever the circumstances, who remained unforgettable.” She was also an official member of the Party, though she admitted to Oppenheimer that she “found it impossible to be an ardent Communist.” It was this relationship, as much as the Depression and the Spanish Civil War, that pushed him to embrace left-wing social causes.

Although Oppenheimer’s friends later described Tatlock as his true love, their romance was as stormy as depicted in the film; the running bit about her hatred of flowers comes directly from the book. (We’ll never know whether she ever interrupted coitus to make him read from the Bhagavad Gita.) Robert Serber claimed she “disappeared for weeks, months sometimes, and then would taunt [him] mercilessly … She seemed determined to hurt him, perhaps because she knew Robert loved her so much.” However, while the film shows Oppenheimer as the one who ended their on-again, off-again relationship, American Prometheus states that “in the end, it was Tatlock who made the final break.” What this says about Nolan’s filmmaking vis-à-vis female agency, I’ll leave you to debate. However, it was not a completely clean break, and Oppenheimer really did leave Los Alamos in 1943 to spend the night with her. They never saw each other again.

How did Jean Tatlock die?

On January 4, 1944, Tatlock was found dead in her bathtub by her father. She had taken sleeping pills and left an unsigned note. Her death was ruled “suicide, motive unknown.” Bird and Sherwin agree that much of the evidence aligns with the accepted story. The night before her death, she told a friend she was feeling “very depressed,” and those close to her reported she was struggling with her sexuality. Still, the authors leave room for a seed of doubt. Noting the existence of chloral hydrate in her system, they open the possibility that Tatlock might have been “‘slipped a Mickey’ and then forcibly drowned,” quoting a doctor who says, “If you were clever and wanted to kill someone, this is the way to do it.” As a nod to the uncertainty around Tatlock’s death, Oppenheimer depicts both the official version and the conspiracy theory.

Was Kitty Oppenheimer an alcoholic?

Most of the supporting characters in Oppenheimer are sketched with only a single trait: Jean Tatlock is naked; Richard Feynman plays the bongos; Edward Teller stopped worrying and loves the bomb. Emily Blunt’s frustrated wife Kitty gets more screen time than most, but even she is defined largely by her ubiquitous martinis. American Prometheus features plenty of unflattering character witnesses for Kitty — her sister-in-law calls her “evil” — many of whom discuss her heavy drinking. However, her drinking only seems to have become a problem once Robert was ensconced in Princeton after the war. “A free-spirited, whimsical woman, Kitty found it impossible to fit into Princeton’s stiff, small-town, high-society scene,” the authors write. And what the film doesn’t spotlight is that Robert was hardly a teetotaler himself. “His martinis were strong and he drank them with pleasure,” Bird and Sherwin say, and a friend remembers parties at which “Oppie made everyone drunk quite consciously.”

Did Oppenheimer try to give away his child to a friend?

No one would award the Oppenheimers the Nobel Prize of parenting. The scene in Oppenheimer when Robert suggests giving away his son to his best friend, Haakon Chevalier, is based on a real conversation, but the circumstances were different. After the birth of daughter Katherine in 1944, Kitty went home to see her parents, taking 2-year-old Peter with her. (She likely suffered from what we today would call postpartum depression.) Baby Katherine was left with Kitty’s friend Pat Sherr; Robert visited twice a week. A few months in, Robert asked Sherr if she wanted to adopt Katherine, saying, “I can’t love her.” She declined, later telling the authors of American Prometheus that she felt Oppenheimer wanted his daughter to have “the fair deal that he felt he couldn’t give her.”

Did Chevalier really ask Oppenheimer about passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union?

The “Chevalier Incident” looms large in Oppenheimer’s security hearing, and the actual events played out the way they do in the film. Shortly before Oppenheimer left for Los Alamos, Chevalier casually informed him that their mutual acquaintance George Eltenton was available to pass confidential technical information to the Soviets. Oppenheimer called the proposal treason, and that was that. Whether the conversation was cut short by Kitty bursting in and saying, “The brat’s down — where’s my martini?” is unknown, as is whether Eltenton was an official Soviet spy or merely an enthusiastic amateur. (Bird and Sherwin lead toward the latter.)

Oppenheimer’s first mistake was in waiting months to disclose the conversation to security officers. His second mistake was not telling them the whole truth. He refused to name Chevalier and made up what he later called “a cock-and-bull story” about Eltenton approaching multiple people. For his postwar enemies, this was irrefutable proof that Oppenheimer could not be trusted.

Was Los Alamos uninhabited before the scientists moved in?

In addition to the Los Alamos mesa finally being a way to combine his two great loves, New Mexico and physics, the film’s Oppenheimer pitches it as the perfect tabula rasa for a secret nuclear lab: The only traces of humanity are a nearby boys’ school and the Natives who use the location as a grave site. However, there were rural communities living in the vicinity of Los Alamos as well as the Trinity test site. Early screenings of Oppenheimer have been met with protests meant to call attention to the harm the U.S. government inflicted on these “downwinders,” many of whom later developed cancer as a result of radiation exposure.

Was there 11th-hour drama before the Trinity test?

It would not be a movie if the scientists at Los Alamos did not face a last-minute obstacle before the Trinity explosion.  Oppenheimer  gives us two: a late-night storm and a failed implosion test. Both really happened. The night before the test was marked by “thirty-mile-an-hour winds and severe thunderstorms,” raising the agonizing possibility that Trinity would have to be delayed. Unlike in the film, Oppenheimer was not the only voice assuring everyone the storm would pass; the Army’s meteorologist agreed. During the event, the test  was  delayed but only by 90 minutes, from 4 to 5:30 a.m.

The drama over the failed implosion test was less intense. The previous day, the team had pinpointed the culprit: blown circuits in the test’s wiring. The actual “gadget” would be fine.

Were the scientists worried they might accidentally ignite the Earth’s atmosphere?

The film features a dark running joke in which the scientists reassure themselves that the possibility of the bomb igniting the atmosphere and thereby destroying all life on Earth is “near zero.” This comes from a real fear, first raised by Teller, of an unstoppable chain reaction sparking nitrogen in the atmosphere. In real life, Oppenheimer sought reassurance not from Albert Einstein but MIT’s Karl T. Compton, who later wrote, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.”

As in the film, Hans Bethe was the one who made the calculations to produce the “near zero” figure. But there was still enough suspense on the eve of the Trinity test that Enrico Fermi really did take side bets beforehand on the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse.

How complicit was Oppenheimer in the decision to target Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Oppenheimer features a chilling scene of the United States’ top military and scientific minds discussing how and where to drop the atomic bomb. While he was sympathetic to Niels Bohr’s argument that the threat of the bomb should usher in an age of openness and cooperation, in practice Oppenheimer took the side of military brass, rationalizing that it was not scientists’ responsibility to decide how the weapon should be used. He refused to support Leo Szilard’s attempts to block the bomb from being dropped on Japan, and in the pivotal meeting, he silently gave his blessing to the decision to target Japanese civilians. Oppenheimer “played an ambiguous role in this critical discussion,” Bird and Sherwin write. “He had won nothing and acquiesced to everything.”

Much of this scene is taken directly from the official record of the meeting. However, the moment when Kyoto is removed from the list of targets because the secretary of State honeymooned there was a last-minute addition to the script, inspired by actor James Remar’s own research into his character. “It has this bureaucratic quality of a group of men discussing massive destruction and how they’re going to do these awful things. And you’re suddenly seeing a human face to these negotiations,” Nolan told Vulture .

Did Oppenheimer tell Harry Truman he felt he had blood on his hands?

Oppenheimer’s infamous meeting with Truman took place in October 1945. It did not go well: Oppenheimer failed to convince the president of the need for international control of atomic energy, while Truman confidently stated the Soviets would never get the bomb. Getting nowhere, Oppenheimer really did confess his guilt over the Manhattan Project, which turned Truman’s stomach. His quip in the film “Don’t bring that crybaby into my office again” is inspired by real remarks Truman made afterward, as is Oppenheimer’s line about giving Los Alamos back to the Indians.

What was Oppenheimer’s relationship with Albert Einstein like?

Tom Conti’s Einstein functions as the moral center of Oppenheimer , popping up every so often to provide words of wisdom. The film’s portrait of Einstein and Oppenheimer’s relationship is largely accurate. Scientifically, they were at odds: Einstein never got onboard with the quantum revolution, leading Oppenheimer to consider him a relic of an earlier age. Thus American Prometheus calls their relationship “always tentative,” though Einstein “eventually acquired a grudging respect for” the younger scientist. The specific interactions seen in Oppenheimer never happened, though the pivotal 1947 meeting that recurs throughout the film seems to refer to a real birthday celebration — which included a commemorative book full of backhanded compliments — that the Institute for Advanced Study threw for Einstein in 1949.

Was Klaus Fuchs the reason the Soviets got the bomb?

Klaus Fuchs was a German Communist who fled the Nazis and settled in England, where he became an acclaimed theoretical physicist and, thenceforth, a Soviet spy. (Funnily enough, actor Christopher Denham also played a spy at Los Alamos in the show Manhattan .) As a member of the British contingent, he “passed detailed written information to the Soviets about the problems and advantages of the implosion-type bomb design.” When Fuchs’s espionage came to light in 1950, Oppenheimer’s enemies naturally blamed the lab’s director and “demanded renewed scrutiny of Oppenheimer’s left-wing past.”

While the most famous, Fuchs was not the only spy at Los Alamos. A technician named Ted Hall, who feared a U.S. nuclear monopoly, passed detailed reports on the lab’s workings to the Soviets. As American Prometheus states, “Hall was the perfect ‘walk-in’ spy; he knew what the Russians needed to know about the atomic bomb project; he needed nothing himself and expected nothing.” A technician named David Greenglass, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, also passed secrets to the Soviets, which ended poorly for the whole family. Historians recently uncovered a fourth spy, engineer Oscar Seborer, who might have been the most important of them all. According to the New York Times , “His knowledge most likely surpassed that of the three previously known Soviet spies.”

Why did Lewis Strauss hate Oppenheimer?

After hiring Oppenheimer to run the Institute for Advanced Study, why did Lewis “It’s Pronounced Straws ” Strauss devote years of his life to ruining the man? American Prometheus notes that, while the men were initially cordial to each other in Princeton, “the seeds of a terrible feud were born.” (Oppenheimer was not wholly innocent; at one point, he prevented Strauss from buying a house nearby by having the institute purchase it instead.) As the film depicts, Oppenheimer really did humiliate Strauss in front of Congress when the two men disagreed about exporting radioisotopes, a scene that is taken largely verbatim from the book. Afterward, the authors write, “Strauss was angry, and he would stay angry until he had settled the score … Oppenheimer had made for himself a dangerous enemy who was powerful and influential in every field of Robert’s professional life.”

Still, while Strauss’s feud with Oppenheimer was in many ways a petty power struggle, the men did have a very real disagreement about the hydrogen bomb. Strauss convinced himself that Oppenheimer was “sabotaging the project” and had paranoid visions of the doctor poisoning the scientific community against him. The film condenses the years of debate over the H-bomb, but the broad strokes are accurate, as are beats like Oppenheimer snubbing Strauss’s son and daughter-in-law at Strauss’s birthday party.

Who gave Oppenheimer’s security file to William Borden?

A WWII veteran obsessed with the Soviet nuclear threat, William Borden in the early ’50s became the favorite attack dog of Oppenheimer’s enemies. Oppenheimer treats the question of who provided him Oppenheimer’s security file as a big mystery, but if you’ve read American Prometheus , you’ll know the answer from the start: It was Strauss! (The film skips over the fact that H-bomb enthusiast Teller played an equal role in setting Borden against Oppenheimer, whispering in Borden’s ear about delays in the thermonuclear program and Kitty’s previous marriage to a Communist.) The book includes a pivotal meeting in April 1953, in which Borden and Strauss seemingly agreed “Borden would do the dirty work and Strauss would provide him access to the information he needed.” After examining the record of withdrawals of the file, the authors conclude the sequence “was surely coordinated; it could not have been a coincidence.”

Was David Hill’s testimony the thing that turned the Senate against Strauss?

The framing device around Strauss’s Commerce-secretary confirmation hearings is Nolan’s one major departure from American Prometheus , which devotes less than a page to Strauss’s comeuppance. While it’s true that a Manhattan Project scientist named David Hill, portrayed in the film by Rami Malek as a kind of Chekhov’s Eyeball, testified about Strauss’s obsession with destroying Oppenheimer, he was far from the only witness to provide negative testimony. As Slashfilm notes, Los Alamos scientist David Inglis had previously delivered his own scathing words about Strauss’s “personal vindictiveness.”

Furthermore, the scientists weren’t the only ones against him. Like Oppenheimer, Strauss also had made a powerful enemy: New Mexico senator Clinton Anderson. A contemporary report from Time called the confirmation battle the inevitable result of the “blood feud” between Strauss and Anderson, which “has gone far beyond the personal quarrel between two men; it has widened out to involve their friends and their associates, strained old ties and old loyalties, brought charge and countercharge, insult and counterinsult, rumor and counterrumor.” Rather than a stirring congressional speech, it was intense backroom lobbying from Anderson that truly doomed Strauss’s confirmation. But the bit about John F. Kennedy voting against him is real.

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American Prometheus: The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture OPPENHEIMER Paperback – May 1, 2006

• Print length 721 pages
• Language English
• Publication date May 1, 2006
• Dimensions 5.21 x 1.58 x 7.97 inches
• ISBN-10 0375726268
• ISBN-13 978-0375726262
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From the back cover, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Books; Reprint edition (May 1, 2006)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 721 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375726268
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375726262
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.21 x 1.58 x 7.97 inches
• #1 in Nuclear Physics (Books)
• #8 in Scientist Biographies
• #34 in United States Biographies

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Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer. His new book is The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames. A biography of a CIA officer, The Good Spy was released on May 20, 2014 by Crown/Random House. Kai's last book was a memoir about the Middle East entitled Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 (Scribner, April 27, 2010). It was a 2011 Finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. He is the co-author with Martin J. Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Duff Cooper Prize for History in London. He wrote The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (1992) and The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998). He is also co-editor with Lawrence Lifschultz of Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998). He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's writing fellowship, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center, Bellagio, Italy and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and a contributing editor of The Nation. He lives in Miami Beach.

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A sub for Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” about J. Robert Oppenheimer & his involvement in developing the atomic bomb. Starring Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., and Florence Pugh. Based on Kai Bird’s & Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer-winning biography “American Prometheus”.

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Trinity and the Birth of the Atomic Bomb

'american prometheus' authors on 'the triumph and tragedy of j. robert oppenheimer'.

Detail from the cover of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer hide caption

He is remembered as the father of the bomb. But the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer is more than how the world's most destructive weapon came to be. A new biography describes a complex, contradictory and at times mystical genius who defies easy labels.

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, authors of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Read an Excerpt

In the first decade of the twentieth century, science initiated a second American revolution. A nation on horseback was soon transformed by the internal combustion engine, manned flight and a multitude of other inventions. These technological innovations quickly changed the lives of ordinary men and women. But simultaneously an esoteric band of scientists was creating an even more fundamental revolution. Theoretical physicists across the globe were beginning to alter the way we understand space and time. Radioactivity was discovered on March 1, 1896, by the French physicist Henri Becquerel. Max Planck, Marie Curie and Pierre Curie and others provided further insights into the nature of the atom. And then, in 1905, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Suddenly, the universe appeared to have changed.

Around the globe, scientists were soon to be celebrated as a new kind of hero, promising to usher in a renaissance of rationality, prosperity and social meritocracy. In America, reform movements were challenging the old order. Theodore Roosevelt was using the bully pulpit of the White House to argue that good government in alliance with science and applied technology could forge an enlightened new Progressive Era.

Into this world of promise was born J. Robert Oppenheimer, on April 22, 1904. He came from a family of first- and second-generation German immigrants striving to be American. Ethnically and culturally Jewish, the Oppenheimers of New York belonged to no synagogue. Without rejecting their Jewishness they chose to shape their identity within a uniquely American offshoot of Judaism—the Ethical Culture Society—that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism. This was at the same time an innovative approach to the quandaries any immigrant to America faced—and yet for Robert Oppenheimer it reinforced a lifelong ambivalence about his Jewish identity.

As its name suggests, Ethical Culture was not a religion but a way of life that promoted social justice over self-aggrandizement. It was no accident that the young boy who would become known as the father of the atomic era was reared in a culture that valued independent inquiry, empirical exploration and the free-thinking mind—in short, the values of science. And yet, it was the irony of Robert Oppenheimer's odyssey that a life devoted to social justice, rationality and science would become a metaphor for mass death beneath a mushroom cloud.

Robert's father, Julius Oppenheimer, was born on May 12, 1871, in the German town of Hanau, just east of Frankfurt. Julius' father, Benjamin Pinhas Oppenheimer, was an untutored peasant and grain trader who had been raised in a hovel in "an almost medieval German village," Robert later reported. Julius had two brothers and three sisters. In 1870, two of Benjamin's cousins by marriage emigrated to New York. Within a few years these two young men—named Sigmund and Solomon Rothfeld—joined another relative, J. H. Stern, to start a small company to import men's suit linings. The company did extremely well serving the city's flourishing new trade in ready-made clothing. In the late 1880s, the Rothfelds sent word to Benjamin Oppenheimer that there was room in the business for his sons.

Julius arrived in New York in the spring of 1888, several years after his older brother Emil. A tall, thin-limbed, awkward young man, he was put to work in the company warehouse, sorting bolts of cloth. Although he brought no monetary assets to the firm and spoke not a word of English, he was determined to remake himself. He had an eye for color and in time acquired a reputation as one of the most knowledgeable "fabrics" men in the city. Emil and Julius rode out the recession of 1893, and by the turn of the century Julius was a full partner in the firm of Rothfeld, Stern & Company. He dressed to fit the part, always adorned in a white high-collared shirt, a conservative tie and a dark business suit. His manners were as immaculate as his dress. From all accounts, Julius was an extremely likeable young man. "You have a way with you that just invites confidence to the highest degree," wrote his future wife in 1903, "and for the best and finest reasons." By the time he turned thirty, he spoke remarkably good English, and, though completely self-taught, he had read widely in American and European history. A lover of art, he spent his free hours on weekends roaming New York's numerous art galleries.

It may have been on one such occasion that he was introduced to a young painter, Ella Friedman, "an exquisitely beautiful" brunette with finely chiseled features, "expressive gray-blue eyes and long black lashes," a slender figure—and a congenitally unformed left hand. To hide this deformity, Ella always wore long sleeves and a pair of chamois gloves. The glove covering her left hand contained a primitive prosthetic device with a spring attached to an artificial thumb. Julius fell in love with her. The Friedmans, of Bavarian Jewish extraction, had settled in Baltimore in the 1840s. Ella was born in 1869. A family friend once described her as "a gentle, exquisite, slim, tallish, blue-eyed woman, terribly sensitive, extremely polite; she was always thinking what would make people comfortable or happy." In her twenties, she spent a year in Paris studying the early Impressionist painters. Upon her return she taught art at Barnard College. By the time she met Julius, she was an accomplished enough painter to have her own students and a private rooftop studio in a New York apartment building.

All this was unusual enough for a woman at the turn of the century, but Ella was a powerful personality in many respects. Her formal, elegant demeanor struck some people upon first acquaintance as haughty coolness. Her drive and discipline in the studio and at home seemed excessive in a woman so blessed with material comforts. Julius worshipped her, and she returned his love. Just days before their marriage, Ella wrote to her fiancé: "I do so want you to be able to enjoy life in its best and fullest sense, and you will help me take care of you? To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me. Good-night, dearest."

On March 23, 1903, Julius and Ella were married and moved into a sharp-gabled stone house at 250 West 94th Street. A year later, in the midst of the coldest spring on record, Ella, thirty-four years old, gave birth to a son after a difficult pregnancy. Julius had already settled on naming his firstborn Robert; but at the last moment, according to family lore, he decided to add a first initial, "J," in front of "Robert." Actually, the boy's birth certificate reads "Julius Robert Oppenheimer," evidence that Julius had decided to name the boy after himself. This would be unremarkable—except that naming a baby after any living relative is contrary to European Jewish tradition. In any case, the boy would always be called Robert and, curiously, he in turn always insisted that his first initial stood for nothing at all. Apparently, Jewish traditions played no role in the Oppenheimer household.

Sometime after Robert's arrival, Julius moved his family to a spacious eleventh-floor apartment at 155 Riverside Drive, overlooking the Hudson River at West 88th Street. The apartment, occupying an entire floor, was exquisitely decorated with fine European furniture. Over the years, the Oppenheimers also acquired a remarkable collection of French Postimpressionist and Fauvist paintings chosen by Ella. By the time Robert was a young man, the collection included a 1901 "blue period" painting by Pablo Picasso entitled Mother and Child, a Rembrandt etching, and paintings by Edouard Vuillard, André Derain and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Three Vincent Van Gogh paintings—Enclosed Field with Rising Sun (Saint-Remy, 1889), First Steps (After Millet) (Saint-Remy, 1889) and Portrait of Adeline Ravoux (Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890)—dominated a living room wallpapered in gold gilt. Sometime later they acquired a drawing by Paul Cézanne and a painting by Maurice de Vlaminck. A head by the French sculptor Charles Despiau rounded out this exquisite collection.*

Ella ran the household to exacting standards. "Excellence and purpose" was a constant refrain in young Robert's ears. Three live-in maids kept the apartment spotless. Robert had a Catholic Irish nursemaid named Nellie Connolly, and later, a French governess who taught him a little French. German, on the other hand, was not spoken at home. "My mother didn't talk it well," Robert recalled, "[and] my father didn't believe in talking it." Robert would learn German in school.

On weekends, the family would go for drives in the countryside in their Packard, driven by a gray-uniformed chauffeur. When Robert was eleven or twelve, Julius bought a substantial summer home at Bay Shore, Long Island, where Robert learned to sail. At the pier below the house, Julius moored a forty-foot sailing yacht, christened the Lorelei, a luxurious craft outfitted with all the amenities. "It was lovely on that bay," Robert's brother, Frank, would later recall fondly. "It was seven acres . . . a big vegetable garden and lots and lots of flowers." As a family friend later observed, "Robert was doted on by his parents. . . . He had everything he wanted; you might say he was brought up in luxury." But despite this, none of his childhood friends thought him spoiled. "He was extremely generous with money and material things," recalled Harold Cherniss. "He was not a spoiled child in any sense."

By 1914, when World War I broke out in Europe, Julius Oppenheimer was a very prosperous businessman. His net worth certainly totaled more than several hundred thousand dollars—which made him the equivalent of a multimillionaire in current dollars. By all accounts, the Oppenheimer marriage was a loving partnership. But Robert's friends were always struck by their contrasting personalities. "He [Julius] was jolly German-Jewish," recalled Francis Fergusson, one of Robert's closest friends. "Extremely likeable. I was surprised that Robert's mother had married him because he seemed such a hearty and laughing kind of person. But she was very fond of him and handled him beautifully. They were very fond of each other. It was an excellent marriage."

Julius was a conversationalist and extrovert. He loved art and music and thought Beethoven's Eroica symphony "one of the great masterpieces." A family friend, the anthropologist George Boas, later recalled that Julius "had all the sensitiveness of both his sons." Boas thought him "one of the kindest men I ever knew." But sometimes, to the embarrassment of his sons, Julius would burst out singing at the dinner table. He enjoyed a good argument. Ella, by contrast, sat quietly and never joined in the banter. "She [Ella] was a very delicate person," another friend of Robert's, the distinguished writer Paul Horgan, observed, ". . . highly attenuated emotionally, and she always presided with a great delicacy and grace at the table and other events, but [she was] a mournful person."

Four years after Robert's birth, Ella bore another son, Lewis Frank Oppenheimer, but the infant soon died, a victim of stenosis of the pylorus, a congenital obstruction of the opening from the stomach to the small intestine. In her grief, Ella thereafter always seemed physically more fragile. Because young Robert himself was frequently ill as a child, Ella became overly protective. Fearing germs, she kept Robert apart from other children. He was never allowed to buy food from street vendors, and instead of taking him to get a haircut in a barber shop Ella had a barber come to the apartment.

Introspective by nature and never athletic, Robert spent his early childhood in the comfortable loneliness of his mother's nest on Riverside Drive. The relationship between mother and son was always intense. Ella encouraged Robert to paint—he did landscapes—but he gave it up when he went to college. Robert worshipped his mother. But Ella could be quietly demanding. "This was a woman," recalled a family friend, "who would never allow anything unpleasant to be mentioned at the table."

Robert quickly sensed that his mother disapproved of the people in her husband's world of trade and commerce. Most of Julius's business colleagues, of course, were first-generation Jews, and Ella made it clear to her son that she felt ill-at-ease with their "obtrusive manners." More than most boys, Robert grew up feeling torn between his mother's strict standards and his father's gregarious behavior. At times, he felt ashamed of his father's spontaneity—and at the same time he would feel guilty that he felt ashamed. "Julius's articulate and sometimes noisy pride in Robert annoyed him greatly," recalled a childhood friend. As an adult, Robert gave his friend and former teacher Herbert Smith a handsome engraving of the scene in Shakespeare's Coriolanus where the hero is unclasping his mother's hand and throwing her to the ground. Smith was sure that Robert was sending him a message, acknowledging how difficult it had been for him to separate from his own mother.

When he was only five or six, Ella insisted that he take piano lessons. Robert dutifully practiced every day, hating it all the while. About a year later, he fell sick and his mother characteristically suspected the worst, perhaps a case of infantile paralysis. Nursing him back to health, she kept asking him how he felt until one day he looked up from his sickbed and grumbled, "Just as I do when I have to take piano lessons." Ella relented, and the lessons ended.

In 1909, when Robert was only five, Julius took him on the first of four transatlantic crossings to visit his grandfather Benjamin in Germany. They made the trip again two years later; by then Grandfather Benjamin was seventy-five years old, but he left an indelible impression on his grandson. "It was clear," Robert recalled, "that one of the great joys in life for him was reading, but he had probably hardly been to school." One day, while watching Robert play with some wooden blocks, Benjamin decided to give him an encyclopedia of architecture. He also gave him a "perfectly conventional" rock collection consisting of a box with perhaps two dozen rock samples labeled in German. "From then on," Robert later recounted, "I became, in a completely childish way, an ardent mineral collector." Back home in New York, he persuaded his father to take him on rock-hunting expeditions along the Palisades. Soon the apartment on Riverside Drive was crammed with Robert's rocks, each neatly labeled with its scientific name. Julius encouraged his son in this solitary hobby, plying him with books on the subject. Long afterward, Robert recounted that he had no interest in the geological origins of his rocks, but was fascinated by the structure of crystals and polarized light.

From the ages of seven through twelve, Robert had three solitary but all-consuming passions: minerals, writing and reading poetry, and building with blocks. Later he would recall that he occupied his time with these activities "not because they were something I had companionship in or because they had any relation to school—but just for the hell of it." By the age of twelve, he was using the family typewriter to correspond with a number of well-known local geologists about the rock formations he had studied in Central Park.

Excerpted from American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Copyright © 2005 by Kai Bird. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Ranking The Alien Movies By Box Office

They say in space, no one can hear you scream. On Earth, though, you can easily hear people talking about how much they love the "Alien" movies. There's a reason this franchise has kept churning out new installments like 2024's "Alien: Romulus" since 1979. Moviegoers around the globe can't get enough of those slimy Xenomorphs and heroic franchise fixtures like Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). 

It doesn't hurt that each installment's varying aesthetics ensures that the "Alien" franchise caters to many different tastes. The reserved horror atmosphere of "Alien," for instance, is much different from the modern PG-13 thrills of "Alien vs. Predator." There's a versatility to the "Alien" saga that extends to so many aspects of these movies. Another wildly malleable element within the series? The box office performances of its various installments.

Over nearly 50 years, the assorted "Alien" titles have had wide-ranging box office outcomes. Some were grave disappointments, some did just fine, while still others were huge hits that forever changed Hollywood. Ranking the "Alien" movies from lowest to highest grossing at the worldwide box office (as well as analyzing the significance of the franchise's box office trajectory) makes it clear how many different financial outcomes the "Alien" saga has produced. A flop can be followed by a massive hit. Even at its financial nadir, however, the franchise has never extinguished people's passion for these movies. Like one of those relentless Xenomorphs, the "Alien" movies keep on surviving and surprising people.

8. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

"Alien vs. Predator: Requiem" was always going to be at a disadvantage at the box office. The novelty of seeing the "Alien" and "Predator" beasties fighting had already worn off with its 2004 predecessor, "Alien vs. Predator." Even shifting the action to a populated Earth city wasn't inherently a fresh gimmick. After all, the original "Alien vs. Predator" also took place on the same planet, only in the Arctic. Without any big names in the cast or enticing connections to the beloved 20th century "Alien" and "Predator" movies, there was really nothing to drum up hype for 2007's "Requiem."

Initially, it didn't look like "Requiem" would be a total box office cataclysm, thanks to a $9.5 million domestic opening day. While not a record-shattering bow, that was enough to make it the third-biggest movie in America in a crowded marketplace. However, this Christmas Day newcomer quickly fell off a cliff, only drumming up $41.7 million domestically, making it the only "Alien" movie to date to earn less than $45 million in North America. Worldwide, "Requiem" fared much better with a $128.8 million haul. On a $40 million budget (almost half the budget of "Alien vs. Predator"), "Requiem" technically turned a profit. But its North American sum meant it was game over for any more crossovers for the "Alien" saga. Making people care twice about a war where "whoever wins, we lose" was a battle "Requiem" couldn't win.

One "Alien" sequel had gone over like gangbusters, so why not try another? "Alien 3" arrived in theaters over Memorial Day weekend of 1992 with high hopes of replicating its predecessors' incredible box office successes. This time, director David Fincher took the franchise to a prison planet and delivered bold narrative maneuvers such as killing off beloved "Aliens" characters like Newt. James Cameron's "Aliens" was often a brutally intense movie, but it also ended triumphantly with Ripley and Newt getting away from all those Xenomorphs. "Alien 3" was a grimmer, more muted affair that concluded with Ripley sacrificing herself. Trying to turn this material into a feel-good summer blockbuster was always going to be challenging — in fact, "Alien 3" almost didn't get released.

"Alien 3" scored the fifth-biggest domestic opening weekend of 1992, clearly indicating that this project arrived in theaters with enough goodwill to tee it up for a leggy run across that year's hottest months. However, it plummeted afterward thanks to disastrous word-of-mouth, and only grossed $54.9 million in North America. That was a substantial decrease from the domestic hauls of the previous "Alien" movies even without accounting for inflation. Overseas, the film grossed a robust $103.5 million for a $158.5 million global haul, which meant the $55 million title barely broke even in theaters. However, given that "Aliens" had done roughly 11 times its budget worldwide just six years earlier, 20th Century Fox had to have hoped for more when it came to "Alien 3."

6. Alien: Resurrection

As Jason Voorhees, Han Lue, or Jon Snow can attest, death is not the end for a character audiences love enough. So it was with Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley, who very explicitly perished in the downer ending of "Alien 3." However, this pop culture icon still returned to the big screen with "Alien: Resurrection" five years later through the magic of cloning. This Ripley wasn't just an ordinary human, but a scientific creation that had Xenomorph DNA in her genetic code — the ultimate alien hunter had become part alien herself. 

This installment also paired Ripley up with actors like Ron Perlman and Winona Ryder in a production intended to restore the "Alien" franchise to its pre-1992 box office glory. Unlike the three previous installments, 1997's "Resurrection" opened over Thanksgiving weekend rather than Memorial Day. This decision resulted in a $16.4 million domestic opening weekend and a $47.8 million lifetime gross in North America. That frontloaded run was no surprise: "Alien: Resurrection" had no chance of sticking around long-term at the box office, thanks to competition from December 1997 heavyweights like "Scream 2" and a new film from "Aliens" filmmaker James Cameron called "Titanic."

Per usual for a domestically underperforming "Alien" installment, "Alien: Resurrection" made up financial ground overseas. Thanks to international moviegoers, "Resurrection" eventually grossed $160.7 million, narrowly ahead of the final worldwide gross for "Alien 3." But even that feat wasn't enough to erase the disappointing aura hovering around the box office run of "Alien: Resurrection."

5. Alien vs. Predator

In 2005, eventual "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" screenwriter David S. Goyer openly declared that a movie about Batman and Superman fighting was a terrible idea. For Goyer, pitting beloved pop culture icons against one another signaled creative inertia and studio executive desperation. What sounded like a nightmare to Goyer circa 2005 was music to the ears of 20th Century Fox executives at the dawn of the 21st century, as they green-lit "Alien vs. Predator," a crossover meant to rejuvenate both the "Alien" and "Predator" franchises. Ripley had been taken as far as she could go ... why not have the Xenomorph duke it out with another famous extraterrestrial? 

Seeing these two beasties collide for the first time proved irresistible to moviegoers. In its domestic run alone, "Alien vs. Predator" grossed $80.2 million, which is still (as of this writing) the third-biggest gross ever for an "Alien" movie. Surprisingly, "Alien vs. Predator" did a bit worse overseas than the two 1990s "Alien" movies. Even with that caveat, this Paul W.S. Anderson feature had no trouble accumulating $172.5 million worldwide. 

Sometimes, it's no surprise why a movie crushes it at the box office. Promising moviegoers both "Alien" and "Predator" carnage was more than enough to get people excited and light up the box office. What sounded trite to Goyer was a minor goldmine for the "Alien" saga.

Believe it or not, there was a time when not every James Cameron movie  automatically cracked $2 billion or more at the worldwide box office. This arcane age saw Cameron kick off his post-"Piranha II: The Spawning" directorial career in 1984 with the $78.3 million worldwide haul of "The Terminator." That sleeper sci-fi hit led to Cameron getting the keys to the "Alien" saga, with the proceedings centered more this time on action than slow-burn horror. But Cameron wasn't the only relatively untested element at play with "Aliens." Execs at Fox were not even sure that they wanted to make a sequel to the original "Alien," especially one costing so much more to make than its predecessor.

It turned out there was no reason to worry about it: "Aliens" grossed a massive $183.2 million worldwide upon its release in July 1986, including a gigantic $85.1 million in North America alone. "Aliens" was the seventh-biggest movie of 1986 domestically and the third-biggest of the year globally. Goodwill from the initial "Alien" installment clearly helped, but the follow-up's excellent word-of-mouth ensured that "Aliens" was consistently one of the five biggest movies in America every weekend through Labor Day 1986. With this smashing success, "Alien" was officially a franchise and James Cameron had scored his first worldwide mega-hit. It would not be his last.

The "Alien" saga is now so deeply entrenched in American pop culture that it's difficult to imagine any point in history where it wasn't in our lives. However, back in 1979, "Alien" was very much an unknown quantity at the box office. Even with "Star Wars" becoming such a huge box office phenomenon in 1977, uncertainty loomed over "Alien" and the sci-fi genre's viability as a whole. Those doubts quickly vanished once "Alien" grossed a whopping $186.9 million at the worldwide box office on just a $10.7 million budget. $64.3 million of its gross came from its domestic run, where it earned enough to become North America's ninth-biggest movie of 1979.

"Alien" was so massive that it still stands as one of the biggest non-"Ghostbusters" live-action movies in Sigourney Weaver's lengthy career. When "Alien" hit theaters, there weren't a ton of precedents for costly sci-fi/horror in the theatrical marketplace. That dearth of past hits made Fox executives nervous, but it helped "Alien" stand out to moviegoers. Here was a movie delivering a cosmic story that wasn't common on the big screen.

Offering something new, not to mention delivering the kind of restrained scares that made "Jaws" a phenomenon a few years earlier, was a recipe for box office success. With this theatrical performance, "Alien" went from an unknown wild card to a pop culture sensation, sparking a multimedia franchise that continues to this day.

2. Alien: Covenant

Before "Prometheus" hit theaters, its creative team played coy about just how connected the film was to the larger "Alien" mythos. The "Prometheus" sequel, by contrast, was upfront about what franchise it was building on — even down to the film being called "Alien: Covenant" rather than "Prometheus 2." With a title firmly rooted in the "Alien" saga and posters putting the snarling Xenomorph front-and-center, "Alien: Covenant" was the first "Alien" solo feature marketed as such to hit theaters in nearly 20 years. 

Absence sometimes makes the heart grow fonder, but even given all the time that had passed since "Alien: Resurrection," "Covenant" was no breakout hit at the box office. In its North American run, "Covenant" grossed just $74.2 million, beneath the domestic gross of "Aliens" from 31 years earlier. It was also down 41% from the lifetime domestic haul of "Prometheus." With a $238.5 million worldwide gross, "Covenant," which cost $97 million to produce, was not a tremendous money-loser, but this was still a disappointing haul. Intense May 2017 competition (namely from early May hit "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2") also didn't help.

However, the biggest problem here may have been the divisive audience response to "Prometheus." Exploring more of this corner of the "Alien" mythos just didn't appeal to moviegoers. No wonder the "Alien: Romulus" marketing has emphasized connections to the original "Alien" feature rather than the Engineers explored in "Covenant" and its direct predecessor.

1. Prometheus

Humans have always wondered where we came from and who created us. "Prometheus" attempted to probe those queries while also tying into background lore details from the very first "Alien" movie. This audacious-sounding endeavor was helmed by original "Alien" director Ridley Scott, making his big return to the franchise after more than three decades away. Scott's return functioned, at least on a promotional level, as a reassuring element for long-time "Alien" fans. A pair of trashy "Alien vs. Predator" installments and the mixed response to the two 1990s "Alien" movies had tarnished the brand's reputation. Scott was here to put things right for the beleaguered, confusing "Alien" franchise with "Prometheus."

These elements, not to mention the striking marketing for "Prometheus," led to it hitting new box office highs for the "Alien" saga. To date, "Prometheus" is the only "Alien" installment to clear both $100 million domestically and $250 million worldwide. Its global haul soared above those records with a $402.4 million worldwide gross ($126.4 million of which came from North America). 

When the dust settled on summer 2012, "Prometheus" was the season's 10th-biggest movie domestically, aided in its box office run by a marketing campaign that presented it first and foremost as an original movie. This was an accessible, star-studded horror movie anyone could watch, not just die-hard "Alien" devotees. Plus, for those obsessed with "Alien," getting Scott behind the camera again was a can't-miss proposition. 

No billion dolllar grossers, no problem

The "Alien" saga is one of the longest-running ongoing film franchises, but unlike other 1960s/1970s properties still invading theaters, no single title in the series has broken any box office records. While the James Bond and "Star Wars" movies each have at least one installment that's cracked $1 billion+ worldwide, only a single "Alien" feature has narrowly crossed $400 million. Each title's individual worldwide grosses are a tad lower than you might expect for such an enduring brand. Where are the $700 million+ performers that dominate the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Wizarding World sagas?

What "Alien" has in its favor is consistency.  Over nearly 50 years, an "Alien" movie is practically guaranteed to make at least $125 million worldwide. Additionally, each installment has been reliably profitable to some degree. The more modest budgets for each picture have ensured that the "Alien" saga has avoided cataclysmic misfires like "Dark Phoenix" or "Terminator: Genisys" that permanently derailed other famous film franchises. 

Most intriguingly, the "Alien" movies keep cropping up as must-see attractions across each decade. These films don't need 30 or 40 years of dormancy to become events again. Even just five or six years away from multiplexes is enough to get audiences hankering again for more "Alien" movies. Sure, the financiers behind these sci-fi/horror films would love to join the $1 billion club. But the "Alien" saga has proven that steady, reliable returns can be just as good as occasional record-smashing box office juggernauts.

The Alien Movies, Ranked From Worst To Best

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Ahead of the release of Alien: Romulus , here’s a definitive ranking of all the xenomorph flicks

This month, the latest entry in the long-running Alien sci-fi franchise hits theaters. Alien: Romulus , starring Cailee Spaney ( Civil War ) and Isabela Merced ( Madame Web ) from noted horror director Fede Álvarez, debuts August 14, and from the trailers and early reactions, it looks like a fantastic entry in the decades-old series.

We all know which Alien films are the absolute best (and you’ll see two Kotaku writers duke it out over whether or not Alien or Aliens reigns supreme), but not every xenomorph flick has been good—nay, some of them have been very, very bad. Whether it was the questionable crossovers that were the Alien Vs. Predator flicks, or the bizarre way in which Alien: Covenant tried to be both an Alien movie and a Prometheus sequel, there are some misses in the iconic franchise.

So, ahead of the theatrical release of Alien: Romulus , we’ve ranked the Alien films from worst to best. Click through to see where they all stack up.

9. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

The first AvP wasn’t a cinematic masterpiece, but it was a fun and action-packed movie that gave fans what they wanted: A live-action fight between Xenos and Yautja. At the end of that movie, we were given a tease for a possible sequel featuring a Predator/Alien hybrid. Sadly, that neat stinger is better than all of Requiem .

Requiem is a poorly lit disaster of a movie that is a slog to watch, assuming you can even see what’s happening. The movie is too dark, which is a problem when the aliens in the film are dark in color and vanish into the background during many scenes. And AvP: Requiem features some human characters who are about as memorable as gray paint.

I’ll admit that AvP: Requiem does include some decent action scenes featuring the new “Predalien” hybrid, but don’t watch this movie. Instead, save yourself the trouble and just look up the six or so cool moments on YouTube and forget this trainwreck of a film ever happened. I mean, the creative team behind the ongoing Alien and Predator film franchises have done that. So you should too! — Zack Zwiezen

8. Alien vs. Predator (2004)

AvP isn’t a cinematic masterpiece. It’s fan service pretending to be a movie and designed solely to give fans what they had wanted for years: A live-action fight between Xenos and Yautja, something we had only previously seen in comic books and video games. And the movie does that. The fights between the Aliens and Predators are great and feel ripped out of some silly comic book from the ‘90s.

However, AvP is quietly a really solid, well-paced, and fun sci-fi action film, too. That’s the secret to why so many people give this film a pass. Though its sequel, as mentioned, was a hard-to-watch, overly gory, and canon-destroying mess of a movie that nobody should suffer through.

But AvP is a mostly self-contained adventure that ends up doing something impressive, considering this is more fan service than a movie. By the end of AvP , I was actually invested in a friendship between a large lizard alien with dreads who doesn’t talk and a human woman using parts of a Xenomorph as weapons. Huh? Weird! Yeah, it’s not nearly as good as even the “bad” Alien sequels, but it’s a tad bit better than you might expect. Which is a big improvement over Requiem . — Zack Zwiezen

6. Alien 3 (1992)

Hoo boy, this is a pretty bad movie, though it is the source of the iconic Alien meme. Alien 3 was directed by David Fincher, which is such a bummer since he makes some great movies ( Se7en, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Zodiac, Gone Girl —it’s an impressive filmography), but even he can’t save it. And even he hates it. The threequel already had the cards stacked against it, having to come after the fantastic Aliens , which offered a completely unexpected sequel to the original film—and then it was bad to boot.

Alien 3 starts off in an absolutely baffling manner, with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) crash-landing on a prison planet and both her lover (Hicks) and her sort-of adopted daughter (Newt) dying off-camera. And it doesn’t get better from there—it’s bleak, cruel, and badly written, and clearly suffered from being needlessly rewritten to death. It at least looks pretty good, but deciding to end it with Ripley sacrificing herself after fighting for so long is just depressing. — Alyssa Mercante

5. Alien: Covenant (2017)

Alien: Covenant looks pretty good on paper: a sequel to the also pretty good Prometheus , starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, and Billy Crudup, with tons of throwback references to Alien lore that even includes an appearance by Peter Weyland of Weyland-Yutani fame (played by Guy Pearce). Ridley Scott even directed it (he’s only otherwise done the original Alien and Prometheus ), so people were hopeful the 2017 film would be rock solid. And there are some shining moments in this film, particularly in Scott’s clear determination to ask and examine existential questions that the original movie only briefly touched on.

Unfortunately, Alien: Covenant tries too hard to be both an Alien movie and a Prometheus sequel, which results in it kind of feeling like neither. Though many people can (and do) argue that Prometheus sticks out like a sore thumb in the Alien pantheon, I think it’s more egregious to try and make a film that fits in both buckets. Covenant is by no means a bad movie, but it just falls a little flat, especially if you watch it back-to-back with Prometheus . — Alyssa Mercante

4. Alien: Resurrection (1997)

The fourth main entry in the series, Alien: Resurrection could have played it safe and hoped that it could bring in the money and fans via the iconic name, some xenomorphs, and Sigourney Weaver as Ripley. Instead, Resurrection is very weird and at times uncomfortable, but it’s never a bland sci-fi romp, and it has some genuinely clever moments and ideas.

If you ask me to mention anything from Alien 3 it’s just that meme everyone knows and the terrible decision to kill Newt from Aliens . But Alien: Resurrection, on the other hand, is a movie that burned many scenes and images into my head. Stand-out moments include the bit where the Xenos attack one of their own to use its acid blood to escape containment, the creepy and sad moment when Ripley (a clone in this movie) has to kill a barely living and different Ripley clone, and when someone kills another person using the chest-burster exploding from their own body like an organic alien spear. Good stuff! And let’s also not forget one of the coolest moments ever captured on film: That time Weaver nailed a behind-the-back basketball shot and made Ron Perlman break character.

Sure, yeah, the ending is wild and depressing. And yeah, at this point the film is arguably not a part of the current Alien canon—though what is and isn’t canon in this franchise is a wild mess that’s not worth thinking about. But whatever, I really dig Resurrection for taking some risks, doing some weird shit, and trying to create something new and not just rehashing the past few films but with some new actors. And while I’m excited to see Romulus , the latest film in the series, I’ll admit that I’m a bit sad to see that the film is so dedicated to perfectly recapturing the look of the old movies while treating the franchise like it’s a precious artifact that can never be broken.

Resurrection shows that it’s often more memorable and interesting to do something weird and take a big swing than just do Alien again and again until the heat death of the universe. — Zack Zwiezen

3. Prometheus (2012)

Though its detractors will point to how Prometheus deviates from the tried-and-true Alien formula, I’d argue that’s what makes the 2012 film so special. Directed by Scott (the first Alien film he helmed since the original), Prometheus seeks to explore the origins of the xenomorphs and humanity—it is more epic tale than horror film, more fable than action movie. It’s an inspired deviation from expectations, and one that I think pays off in spades.

Understandably, this can feel a bit strange in the context of the other Alien movies, but Prometheus is so beautifully shot, so well-written, and so expertly acted that it doesn’t matter. I remember leaving the theater after and furiously scribbling theories on a notepad—and only a good movie can move you to do something like that. Plus, any movie that gets Noomi Rapace on the big screen is a banger in my book. — Alyssa Mercante

2. Aliens (1986)

I nearly put Aliens at the top of this list, which would have sparked some serious conversation. It nearly took the number one spot because, while Alien is a horror masterpiece and perhaps one of the most important movies of all time (its invaluable impact argued expertly by Kotaku managing editor Carolyn Petit on the next page), there’s something incredibly special about a sequel that follows that up by completely flipping the script. Aliens could have been another slow-burn sci-fi horror flick, but instead it offers us a shot of adrenaline straight to the chest.

The 1986 film, directed by James Cameron and starring Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton, is high-octane action from the jump, as a group of highly trained soldiers take on the terrifying xenomorphs with Ripley in tow. Brilliant performances from Biehn and Paxton help justify such a large ensemble cast, and the super-powered action propels you through a runtime that is slightly longer than the original with such force you almost feel like you’re out of breath by the end of it.

It is the quintessential ‘80s action movie, but it is so much more than that—some think of it as a stereotypical shooty film, but if you go back and rewatch it today, you’ll be reminded that no one actually fires a weapon until almost an hour in, and the first chunk of the film focuses on Ripley’s attempts to reckon with the fact that she is the sole survivor of the Nostromo, and over 50 years have passed since the traumatizing event. It also calls into question the morality of the military industrial complex and war in general—think about how quickly the hoo-rah soldiers go from confident to terrified. It’s brilliant, and Aliens holds up incredibly well during a modern re-watch. — Alyssa Mercante

1. Alien (1979)

The first film in the increasingly expansive Alien saga remains, in my view at least, the very best. Though Ridley Scott’s more recent entries continue to expand the lore of the franchise with varying degrees of success, what remains most compelling to me is what he did so well right at the very beginning. As we meet Ripley, Dallas, Brett, Parker and the rest of the Nostromo crew, what’s immediately foregrounded is the mundane reality of their lives as workers in service of a company that’s already exploiting them for little pay and will gladly screw them over in a heartbeat if it sees profit in it. The alien that stalks the crew and picks them off one by one is chilling, but what really makes it resonate is that larger theme of capitalist fuckery, so economically and efficiently communicated by the wonderful line, “Priority one — Ensure return of organism for analysis. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable.”

But themes, no matter how well executed, aren’t enough to give a film soul. No, what makes Alien so exceptional is the way its characters are embodied so naturally by its outstanding cast—Sigourney Weaver of course, in a star-making performance, but also folks like Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, and the wonderful Yaphet Kotto—who, as we get to know them in the film’s opening scenes, so well-directed by Scott, interrupt and talk over each other in such a natural, believable way, the sort of thing you rarely see in American cinema after the 1970s. Also, like Spielberg’s Jaws four years before, Alien ’s strength so often lies in what remains unseen, left to our imaginations. The Nostromo, more than many movie settings, feels believably lived and worked in, and naturally conducive to giving the xenomorph stalking the hapless crew plenty of places to hide. Later films in the franchise have been more intense, more elaborate, and more expensive, but the tightly focused humanity and horror of the series’ progenitor remains, arguably, the best the series has ever been. — Carolyn Petit

Will ‘Alien: Romulus’ Continue Disney’s Summer Box Office Streak?

By Rebecca Rubin

Rebecca Rubin

Senior Film and Media Reporter

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“ Alien: Romulus ” is expected to rip into the box office with $28 million to $38 million in its first weekend of release. Rivals and independent tracking services are bullish on Disney and 20th Century’s sci-fi sequel, though, believing that inaugural ticket sales could wind up closer to $40 million or $50 million.

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While “Alien: Romulus” should easily cinch the No. 1 spot, it may be a close race between “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “ It Ends With Us ” for second place on domestic box office charts. The Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman-led “Deadpool & Wolverine” is aiming to add $25 million to $27 million in its fourth weekend of release. Marvel’s superhero adventure recently passed the $1 billion mark globally and will soon surpass 2019’s “Joker” ($1.07 billion) as the highest grossing R-rated movie in history. Meanwhile, “It Ends With Us” is poised for another big weekend after scoring a huge $50 million in its debut. The literary adaptation, starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni (who also directed), is expected to collect $23 million to $28 million in its sophomore outing.

Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe”) directed “Alien Romulus,” the seventh entry in the sci-fi horror franchise that began in 1979 with Ridley Scott‘s “Alien.” Set between the events of that film and the 1986 sequel “Aliens,” the newest installment follows a group of young intergalactic colonists who come face to face with a terrifying life form while they’re scavenging a rundown space station.

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'Prometheus' Ending Explained: How Was the First Xenomorph Born?

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The Big Picture

• 2012's Prometheus , directed by Ridley Scott, serves as a prequel to Alien .
• The crew finds Engineers and black liquid, leading to disastrous consequences.
• The film ends with a sequel setup, but Alien: Covenant would later take a different direction.

Over thirty years following the release of 1979's Alien , director Ridley Scott returned to the franchise with 2012's Prometheus . Serving as a prequel with plenty of Easter eggs connecting the film to its predecessors, Prometheus set out to deliver much more than a mere origin story for the iconic Xenomorphs. Starring Noomi Rapace as Elizabeth Shaw and Logan Marshall-Green as Charlie Holloway, two ambitious archeologists bent on tracking clues supposedly left by humanity's ancestors, Prometheus is rounded out with the stern and avaricious Meredith Vickers ( Charlize Theron ), Captain Janek ( Idris Elba ), and Michael Fassbender 's menacingly convincing take on the android, David.

Having been followed by Alien: Covenant , a sequel to Prometheus and another prequel to Alien , there's plenty to recount from the first of this cinematic universe . Alien: Romulus , which hits theaters this month, is set between the events of Alien and Aliens , leaping away from Scott's prequel-era story. Before we stray too far from the turmoil and revelation of the franchise's origins, l et's break down the culmination of Prometheus' expedition to a remote sector , where the doomed crew set out to meet their maker and were met with something far more devastating.

Following clues to the origin of mankind, a team finds a structure on a distant moon, but they soon realize they are not alone.

What Is 'Prometheus' About?

Set mostly in 2093, nearly thirty years before the events of Alien , Prometheus centers on an expedition led by Shaw and Holloway. Trekking to a distant moon dubbed LV-223, a venture funded by Peter Weyland ( Guy Pearce ), the disjointed crew of the Prometheus vessel is awoken from cryosleep without knowing the purpose of their mission. Upon waking, the crew is informed of their goal: following suspected clues left on Earth by a species whom Shaw and Holloway believe are humanity's creators. They've chosen to call them the Engineers, and Weyland wants his last moments alive to be in the face of his makers . Weyland is thought to be dead, but he's stowed away on the ship while Vickers, his daughter, acts in his stead. The crew does what all science fiction groups inexplicably do -- promptly deboards to explore an alien spacecraft, removing their helmets and encountering, unarmed, whatever untold terrors lie ahead.

The Crew Finds What It Wanted and Pays the Price for It

Despite technically being successful, in that their goal was to meet their presumed creators, the mission swiftly turned sour. The derelict spacecraft encountered in the original Alien , which contained what was assumed to be a member of an alien species designated the Space Jockey, was revealed in Prometheus to be of the Engineer's fleet. The Space Jockey's exoskeleton, which we saw more of in Prometheus , was actually a suit, and inside it were Engineers.

The defensive elements on the Engineer's ship had made quick work of the crew. A snake-like alien killed Millburn ( Rafe Spall ) and, after using its excrement to melt the visor of his helmet, Fifield ( Sean Harris ) face-planted into a pool of the mysterious black liquid. Whatever properties it contained would turn Fifield into an aggressive, rabid mutation, laying waste to several crew members. David, ever inquisitive and suspiciously devoid of empathy, experimented with the black liquid by spiking Holloway's glass with a drop. After drinking it, Holloway and Shaw had sex, and Holloway was soon overtaken by grotesque side effects that caused him to beg to be killed, sparing the crew of contamination and whatever changes were enveloping him. Vickers abides, burning him alive.

Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’ Isn’t Like the Alien Movies, and That’s Why It’s Good

Ridley Scott interprets the source material differently but still gives us a powerful film.

The intercourse between Holloway and Shaw would prove to be sinister, with the black liquid sleuthing its way into Shaw and impregnating her with a foreign body of some kind . That body would grow, and Shaw has to have it surgically removed from her abdomen before it kills her. The creature that formed flails about with sprawling tentacles, and Shaw traps it inside the med-bay room before escaping and returning to the Engineer's ship. There, David and Weyland release the sole surviving Engineer from his Space Jockey slumber and attempt to communicate with him. Counter to their expectations, the Engineer decapitates David and kills Weyland.

'Prometheus' Ends by Crashing the Film Into the Alien Franchise

Although obvious from the beginning, Prometheus never fully played its hand as an Alien prequel until the latter end of the film. It becomes clear to the surviving crew members that this moon is not the Engineer's home; it's a military installation. The mysterious black liquid is a biological weapon, and based on the holographic displays in the Engineer's bay, the ship has its course set for Earth. The wakened Engineer is restarting the ship and resuming its original mission that was thwarted centuries prior when the biological weapon accidentally escaped and ravaged the Engineer crew. They seem to view their creation of humanity as a mistake and aim to wipe it out. Shaw relays this to Captain Janek. If they don't stop the departing Engineer vessel, it will go to Earth and eliminate humanity. In a self-sacrificial final act, Janek and the remaining crew members crash the Prometheus into the Engineer's ship, blowing themselves up and plummeting both ships to the ground.

The falling ship crushes Vickers on its descent, and Shaw makes her way to the med-bay, the only remaining escape pod. However, the Engineer survives and enters the pod before Shaw can leave. When the Engineer attacks Shaw, she releases the organism recently extracted from her abdomen, which has grown exponentially. The giant face-hugger-like creature overtakes the Engineer and injects something into its mouth, killing him. At the tail end of the film, a stinger moment depicts a Xenomorph-like alien bursting from the Engineer's corpse, an early predecessor of the franchise's antagonist .

The 'Prometheus' Ending Sets Up a Story For a Sequel We'll Likely Never See

Before introducing our first Xenomorph-like creature, emerging from the remains of the Engineer, the film's final moments moved to set up a sequel that we'll likely never get. Shaw retrieves the still-conscious decapitated head of David and confirms that he'd be able to pilot one of the Engineer's military vessels. The film ends with Shaw and David not returning to Earth -- instead, they set out to find the homeworld of the Engineers. This time, after near-total loss, Shaw wants to truly face her makers and learn what disappointed them so heavily that they deemed humanity unfit to continue.

However, the sequel foreshadowed here never came to be. Alien: Covenant killed Shaw off-screen, relegating her to David's experimentation. The remaining Engineers are wiped out in a brief flashback sequence, and an entirely new crew of spacefarers face David and the budding breeds of Xenomorphs. Largely throwing away a potentially expansive arc, Shaw's (and, by proxy, the entire Prometheus crew's) goal of meeting the creators was squashed. Ridley Scott undoubtedly had an expansive vision in mind and showed no signs of shying away from divulging as much of the Alien backstory as he could. Fans have long wondered how deep the Engineer’s relationship with humanity stretches. In Prometheus , the Engineer’s decision to wipe out their creation is like the shaking of the Etch-A-Sketch. They had an idea in mind, toyed with creation, and decided to wipe it away when unsatisfied with the result. Think of it as though you’re a filmmaker continuing a franchise while ignoring that Alien vs Predator ever happened.

Shaw desperately needed to know why the Engineers changed their minds. Originally, Scott seems to have had a more in-depth answer to Shaw’s questions , revealing that Prometheus ’ sequel was intended to address that very thing. In a 2012 interview with Movies.com , Scott was asked whether the planning stages of the story were geared toward offering more definitive origins. “Well, from the very beginning, I was working from a premise that lent itself to a sequel. I really don’t want to meet God in the first one. I want to leave it open to [Shaw] saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I want to go where they came from.’” Scott went on to describe the Engineers as “aggressive f**kers” who exhibited undeniable brilliance in their creations, despite ultimately deciding on their doom. That aspect, at least – the means of destruction they created to carry out their wrath – has been fleshed out to a fairly satisfying extent.

The 'Alien' Saga Continues, Likely Leaving Prometheus in the Past

It’s a shame that the original narrative has been somewhat abandoned. Say what you will about unveiling too much of the mystery or overextending into backstory; Prometheus exists all the same and laid the groundwork for a rich well of lore that may never be dipped into again. Scott admitted that he had hoped they’d follow the thread, “...because I certainly would like to do another one,” he said in that same interview. “ I’d love to explore where the hell [Shaw] goes next, and what does she do when she gets there? Because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is.” It begins to veer toward Biblical implications, with the idea of the makers harboring disappointment and moving toward subsequent punishment.

An early version of Prometheus ’ script even deemed Jesus Christ to have been an Engineer , and concocting the biological weapon to wipe humanity out was in response to the crucifixion. That was decided to have been “a little too on the nose.” Imagine sitting in a theater in 1979, watching Alien for the first time, and attempting to predict a left-field blueprint like this while Sigourney Weaver wrestled herself away from Ian Holm . The twist of Ash being an android was burdensome enough without having to fathom that it all began in the New Testament.

There's no telling where future Alien iterations may delve , but the franchise’s upcoming projects have diverted from the throughline of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant . Alien: Earth , the forthcoming series from FX, is set to take place about three decades before the original film. That would put it almost exactly in Prometheus ’ orbit, chronologically. Physically, they couldn’t be further apart; as the name implies, the series’ plot will be centered on Earth. The crew of the Prometheus had to enter cryosleep to endure the ungodly distance they’d travel away from the planet. Still, this at least gives a sliver of hope that the story of the Engineers as scorned or regretful creators may be mined once more, but, regardless, there's plenty of room to mourn the loss of Shaw and the Engineer's potential. If David's experimentation was her inevitable fate , could she not, at least, stay around a while longer? Let her decipher the Engineer's intentions before succumbing to David's. Not to veer into fanfic, but David could've turned Shaw into the Queen Xenomorph we meet in Aliens . That's a rant for another time.

Prometheus is streaming on Hulu in the U.S.

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