Christopher Nolan comes back into theaters with his newest film Oppenheimer. Based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the film tells the story of Oppenheimer, as he takes part in the Manhattan Project, the creation of the atom bomb, and goes through rigorous Communist trials.
Grandson of the real life Oppenheimer, Charles Oppenheimer, expressed his own feelings on the film in an interview with Time Magazine and mentioned a certain bit he would have omitted from the film.
“The part I like the least is this poison apple reference,” he said, according to Hollywood Reporter. In the film, Oppenheimer is seen trying to kill his professor with an apple, injected with cyanide. But, before his professor could eat the apple, Oppenheimer snatched it back, and got rid of it.
Similarly, Charles didn’t particularly like that segment of 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.” His argument can be boiled down to historical inaccuracy, saying there was never any concrete proof that this happened.
“Sometimes facts get dragged through a game of telephone,” he said. “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.”
While Charles Oppenheimer may have expressed distaste over the moment in the film, he was overall pleased with the dramatization of his grandfathers work. “As a dramatized representation of the history, it was really largely accurate,” he said. “There are parts that I disagree with, but not really because of Nolan.”
In regards to Nolan himself, Charles said, “he’s an expert, he’s the artist, and he’s a genius in this area,” much like how his grandfather was in the field of physics.
Oppenheimer is now playing in theaters.
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