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Hollywood: Oppenheimer.

History: Dozens of elite physicists and engineers.

EDIT:

Similarly...

Hollywood: Steve Jobs.

History: Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ives, hundreds of engineers.

Fame is an industry. Like Kim Kardashian. They pick someone and generate a story, and that sells.

I didn't really get that sense from the film. At one point, Teller even says (paraphrased) to Oppenheimer, "You're not a scientist anymore, you're a politician now." He is portrayed as a manager, not a lone genius.
yeah I definitely got the "collaborative" effort from the film.. its just that they made the film a biopic of one guy in that collab effort
A significant scene was just about Oppenheimer going on an Avengers style recruiting mission, getting the who's who of scientists on board. I don't think any endeavour before that or after that comes even close to matching the number of brilliant minds working under the same roof to solve a problem. The closest might be Bletchley Park perhaps, though there the only household name amongst those scientists is Alan Turing.
Tommy Flowers, Bill Tutte, Joan Clarke, ...

These names were known in an Australian household in the 1970s.

I can add more but they get increasingly obscure - but Flowers was as well known as Turing in the commonwealth in the 1980s.

Early peak Turing was when the Andrew Hodges book ('83 IIRC) got mainstream appeal later that decade, from there the myth grew.

It's probably fair that Turing is the only world famous name, but I don't think the BP museum or authors etc. generally do others any great disservice - the names you mention should be familiar to anyone who's visited.

I can't remember the film though, can believe it was more Turing-oriented.

The Alan Touring movie was also ugly by assigning credit of many people straight to him.

I wonder if Hollywood writers just can't imagine having accomplishments that required work of many great people.

>Hollywood writers

I'd wager the writers are just pandering to the mores of their audience, who currently seem more inclined to an affinity for cult-like behaviour than sustaining an actual interest in the reality of history.

Exactly. Without diminishing their work, what they do has more in common with word freelancer than historian.
> The Alan Touring movie was also ugly by assigning credit

Not just the movie, many books and articles. They often give him credit for what a team of people did (in the war-time code cracking efforts) and barely at all mention the work for which he was uniquely¹ responsible. He deserves huge credit for his life's work, no one of a sensible mind would argue there, but many give him sole credit for the wrong things at the expense of acknowledging those he worked with. From what I know (or I am lead to believe, to be more accurate) of his character I think he would be rather miffed by this.

[1] “standing on the shoulders of past researchers/thinkers” arguments aside, in some places

Yes, but it is that way because these stories are what people want to buy movie tickets for.
What would the Bollywood treatment of this be like?
While the movie was to my reading relatively accurate, what struck me most was how little was devoted to the context of the pacific war and why it was desperate to build that bomb, despite that Germany was (or almost) defeated.

The horrors of the island wars against the japanese, and more to the point their immense almost religious commitment to opposing the US was a big factor in developing and using the bombs.

It wasn’t a “should I build this bomb and kill n civilians, it was a real consideration and waying of lives, both civilian and military.

Dan Carlin’s podcast about the pacific war kinda opened my eyes how dire the circumstances were really. Even more so it must have looked immensely so through the lenses of propaganda at the time … while the movie did touch a bit on all of that, it didn’t seem to me it did it justice, making it harder to empathize with Oppie, which in my mind is kinda a shame. Otherwise great movie!

> what struck me most was how little was devoted to the context of the pacific war

In almost every way that matters (save at the end) the pacific war had little to do with the Manhattan Project and building of the bomb.

President Roosevelt approved the atomic program on 9 October 1941 and agreed to coordinate the effort with the British and maintained correspondance on that with Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

This was after a long sustained effort by commonwealth (UK, Canadian, Australia, New Zealand) and european nuclear scientists to convince the US nuclear scientist and DoD that a nuclear weapon was actually possible and feasible and likely being worked upon by the Germans.

Once started the project was a behemoth, a monster rolling downwards under it's own weight, with mining, processing, seperation, fabrication, testing, security and some 150,000 (IIRC) employed across multiple sites.

The only thing that prevented atomic weapons being used in the carpet bombing destruction of German cities was the surrender of Germany just a few months prior to the first protype being ready for testing.

The reasons for a new US President to sanction further testing of the new weapon he had only just barely first learnt about on two pristine Japanese targets remain somewhat hotly debated to this day.

Much has been written about this after the bombs fell.

I'd point out that anybody that has been exposed to massive projects understands one of the prime unspoken reasons, you cannot spend a massive proportion of GDP on a military project and not expect to see it used.

Further discussion on the breadth of the nuke or not debate: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-us...

> I'd point out that anybody that has been exposed to massive projects understands one of the prime unspoken reasons, you cannot spend a massive proportion of GDP on a military project and not expect to see it used.

The Soviet Union - and 8 other countries, to a lesser extent - also poured great resources into their atomic project, and then found the restraint not to use it in anger.

The case can be made that the US did not bomb H & N out of any particular sense of additional anger, that they bombed H & N to test two orthogonal designs and that they barely squeezed those tests in ahead of the already scheduled destructtion of H&N following the complete destruction of 72 Japanese cities prior to the H&N bombings.

The other countries that joined the nuclear club all made prominent demonstrations of their ability to build and detonate atomic weapons .. there were > 2,000 detonations following H&N.

Many of those tests, including tests by the British, the French, and the Soviets, killed innocent civilians.

The only demonstrated restraint that I can see was the pivot to full blown MAD strategy .. and that came close to unravelling on multiple occasions.

> despite that Germany was (or almost) defeated.

You forget that Germany started the war together with Russia. In 1939 Russia has also invaded several countries and unleashed terror. There were plans to drop nuclear bomb on Moscow after Hitler was defeated, but instead the US and the UK thrown Eastern European countries under the bus and the war was frozen.

I wonder if Russia had received the same treatment as Japan, that we would have this ongoing threat for decades and now the invasion of Ukraine.

Soviet Union was an ally, and it is widely accepted that Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a necessity to delay a looming war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, because Soviet Union was weaker but developing faster.
No Soviet Union wasn't an ally, comrade. You are spreading Russian propaganda.
Equating the Soviet Union's role to that of Germany during the second world war is certainly uhhh.. one of the takes. It's not as if the US sent tons of food, aircraft, and hundreds of thousands of vehicles to the SU as part of lend-lease.
The priority was to defeat Hitler and sending Western troops to the East wasn't feasible, so helping Soviet Union with lend-lease was seen as a lesser evil. The idea was then to defeat Soviet Union afterwards. However, the West was too tired fighting and since Stalin didn't look to move westwards, the war de facto got frozen.
> and since Stalin didn't look to move westwards,

Pardon my French, but WTF are you talking about? Stalin took half of Europe.

It confounds me how people think WW2 ended with a success when millions were killed or enslaved as a result of the "victory".

The point is the west didn't care about Poland, the Baltics and other states that fell under Russia.

In their mind it was the "price" to pay for relative stability in the west.

The status quo was sealed once Soviet Union has developed their own nuclear weapons using stolen IP. Had this not happened, most likely Stalin would have been pushed back.

You're right, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
They are usually considered allies in the context of WW2. The Von Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was evil, though, and it doesn't look like the USSR would have attacked Nazi-Germany if they hadn't invaded. So in that sense, it was an ally only out of necessity.

IMO the discussion often boils down to definition of words and emotional attachment to those words. I don't think people here disagree on the (most prominent) facts.

It was indeed an ally. In fact, after the war surveys showed French people overwhelmingly credited it with winning WW2. It was decades of american propaganda that reversed that.

The western front was already lost. The game was over. Germany won. Britain was pinned back and had no chance of invading France. If the soviets hadn't won at Stalingrad, turned the whole war and then slowly pushed back Germany... it was over. The US would've done absolutely nothing about it.

More Russians died at Stalingrad alone than Americans in the entire war. WW2 was, for most of it, just Germany v Russia. That's where all the losses were. Thats where all the fighting was. D-day was only in 1944... what was happening from the french surrender in 1940 until 1944? Who was fighting?

Honestly, Americans drinking their own kool-aid is mad to me. This is all basic history and a few hollywood films won't change that.

From France 24: "Just after the European fighting ended in May 1945, a poll by the French survey group Ifop found that 57 percent of the French thought Moscow had contributed the most to the war effort, compared with just 20 percent who named the United States.

But by the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings by Allied forces in 2004 -- when Russia was represented for the first time, by Putin -- the figures were reversed, with just 20 percent putting the Soviet Union first.

Instead, 58 percent lauded the US, even though its total losses of 400,000 in both the European and Pacific theatres were just a small fraction of the dead in the Soviet Union.

"In 1945, the great ally was Stalin and the USSR -- their role was absolutely clear for the French," said Stephane Grimaldi, director of the Caen Memorial Museum for World War II in Normandy.

"But 50 years later, it's the US that won, for the very simple reason that in the meantime we had the Cold War," he said.

Hollywood also helped change perceptions with a string of hit films starting in the 1960s showing brave Americans fighting far from home.

"If you look at way it has been portrayed in popular culture, it's all about the battle in France and the Battle of Britain, but World War II was overwhelmingly Germans and Russians killing each other," said Jeremy Shapiro from the European Council on Foreign Relations."

You're overlooking the war in the Pacific. Hitler hoped that Japan would keep the US busy, and wanted a free hand to attack lend lease shipping. US Atlantic supply was key to keeping the UK and USSR alive and fighting. The UK shipped Churcill tanks via the Arctic convoy. The US sent Shermans, Jeeps and much infra. All key to the eventual victory at Stalingrad.
> In fact, after the war surveys showed French people overwhelmingly credited it with winning WW2. It was decades of american propaganda that reversed that.

Contributions aren't judged by polling random people.

Russia would have lost if it wasn't for American supplies. In fact the biggest US mistake was feeding 10 million reds a day during the 1921 famine[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Relief_Administration...

> and it is widely accepted that Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a necessity to delay a looming war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union

Citation needed. Stalin did things for his own reasons, and he didn't bother explaining them, so where are you getting this from? And if that were the case, why did the Soviet Union export so many crucial things (oil, tungsten, etc.) to Germany up to the very morning of Operation Barbarossa if they knew there will be used against them in the near future? And also, why was the Soviet Union caught off guard with the attack if they were expecting it and had mountains of intelligence showing it was imminent?

Also, invading Poland, Finland and the Baltics was certainly a choice by the Soviet Union. Yes, they're responsible for the start of WW2 because not only did they collaborate with Nazi Germany, they also gave Hitler and Germany a stable Eastern Front allowing them to focus on Poland and then Benelux and France.

> Soviet Union was an ally

Ally of convenience purely and entirely. They needed the other United Nations for the stuff and the other fronts, and the other United Nations needed them against the Germans (let's not forget, Germany lost the war on the Eastern Front). It shows in Soviet intentions and actions against Eastern European nations, like when then set up a puppet Polish government even though in theory they were allied to the actual Polish government in exile.

> it is widely accepted that Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a necessity

What horrible russian propaganda! The pact was about splitting Europe. That's why Russia invaded Poland[1], the Baltic countries[2], Finland[3], and Romania[4] after signing it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_state...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_occupation_of_Bessarabi...

It wasn't a necessity. If Russia/Soviet Union was trying to delay the German invasion then they shouldn't have trained German troops and sent natural resources for it's war machine.
> how little was devoted to the context of the pacific war and why it was desperate to build that bomb, despite that Germany was (or almost) defeated

Because then it would have been an apologetic propaganda piece. It is, in my opinion, precisely much more interesting to look into the political and organizational factors for dropping the bombs, than to whitewash the USA into the world's benevolent savior once more. Enough such movies have been made.

The nuclear bombs were not as deadly as the firebombing of Tokyo. Or the siege of Leningrad.

At that time, nukes were simply a difference of degree, not of kind, from the ongoing use of strategic bombing with incendiaries and explosives against population centres by all sides in the conflict. Perhaps the real crossing of the line into mass murder was at Guernica, in 1937, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica

The problem with trying to pick apart the morality of individual actions in WW2 is that wherever you look for context you find more atrocities.

>Does the Oppenheimer movie include a lot of CGI? >No. Director Christopher Nolan told Collider that Oppenheimer has "zero" CGI shots. This includes the bomb tests, which were recreated without CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery). "I think computer graphics, they're very versatile, they can do all kinds of things, but they tend to feel a bit safe," said Nolan. "That's why they're difficult to use in horror movies. Animation tends to feel a little safe for the audience. The Trinity Test, ultimately, but also these early imaginings of Oppenheimer visualizing the Quantum Realm, they had to be threatening in some way. They had to have the bite of real-world imagery. The Trinity Test, for those who were there, was the most beautiful and terrifying thing simultaneously, and that's where we were headed with this film." Last year, Top Gun: Maverick took a similar approach and it paid off (although a limited amount of CGI was used in the Tom Cruise blockbuster).

This can't be. I had read the statement but the final shot where he and Einstein talked near the pond, where we see the visions inside Oppenheimer's mind, had to have been CGI. Also, though I am not sure how they filmed the Trinity test practically, it had to be a smaller explosion made to look bigger, so it had to have required some compositing work. The rest of the movie did not really have all that much in terms of VFX since almost every other was scene was dialogue heavy and was mostly shot inside closed spaces. The scenes where Oppenheimer was giving a speech and was experiencing visions of an explosion also could have been done 100% practically.

This is not a slight on the movie or on Nolan, cause it would have been much easier for him to do the trinity test or the scene of Oppenheimer dreaming about atoms via CG (which I recently read was done by using an aquarium and glass balls). It was just Nolan doing his best to market his movie, considering the fact the cast nor his writers were available to market the movie.

As a side note, I want to add that I felt the scene with the Trinity test was fantastic, especially the fact that the hall went dead silent for a few seconds,but the actual shot of the mushroom cloud paled in comparison to the actual footage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dfK9G7UDok&ab_channel=atomc...

https://youtu.be/hyiXpECM7eg?t=224

This I felt that whenever we saw the actors reacting to the explosion, they are being bathed by the light from the explosion, but seeing the actual explosion itself did not live up to how Oppenheimer himself said that it looked like a thousand suns shining in the sky at once. But with the excellent music, acting, writing, direction, shot composition etc. it is easy to forgive.

Why can't this be? Lot of FX can be done without CGI.

The director says there is no CGI, why would he lie?

I think maybe he was overstating.. Like the world in flames "visions" he was having have to be CGI..
Yeah the only way Nolan could have done that practically, is if he nuked the whole world. /s

But I am eagerly awaiting the BTS to see how he pulled off that one without CG. I am planning a rewatch very soon in the hall to see if I can figure it out.

No CGI. He did shoot and edit on film, without any digital conversion. You can do a lot of things with normal film editing tricks
How would he specifically show a hundred ICBMs being launched and a vision of a world being engulfed in fire.
For the same reason why 90s directors would lie about miniatures being CGI.
> Last year, Top Gun: Maverick took a similar approach and it paid off

I’m inferring from this statement that the movie was somehow more successful due to its reliance on practical effects. That seems like a pretty good incentive to lie.

Nolan not using CGI is like Tom Cruise doing Mission: Impossible stunts himself. These affirmations are ambiguous and misleading.

In the case of Oppenheimer (and other Nolan movies) they use a lot of practical effects but they are eventually digitally composited, color corrected and edited.

> The director was not attempting to claim that there was no CGI in Oppenheimer at all. He was instead stating that there are no shots in the movie that were entirely created using visual effects.

see https://screenrant.com/how-much-oppenheimer-real-cgi/

There’s a big difference between digital video editing and compositing vs creating completely artificial scenes with computer-generated 3D models and effects.
Yes, the later is what Nolan avoids.

But when he says "the movie is done without CGI shots", he can't ignore that most people will assume the movie is also made without digital editing and compositing.

I was also disappointed by the rather unimpressive mushroom cloud.
Interesting website. I was rather shocked by the Woman King entry - I knew that historical films like to take liberties, but did not think they had the audacity to completely reverse the roles of heroes and villains, or in that case, the pro- and anti-slavery sides.
The "fact" part of the page says that Los Alamos was secluded, which this Twitter thread puts into quite a different light: https://twitter.com/AlisaValdesRod1/status/16821671603644948...
The region of the British atomic tests was equally secluded:

https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/m....

Later tests at tropical islands respected human rights to a similar degree:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9199216

Tests in French Polynesia were just as shady, perhaps more so.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56340159

The two live 3–4-megaton Mark 39 nuclear bombs dropped on North Carolina didn't have quite the same effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

It was relatively secluded. Federal agencies already owned and controlled 90% of the land needed for the site and the local residents were mostly homesteaders granted grazing permits by the Federal government. Landowners for the remaining 10% were compensated through the process of eminent domain.

Utilities and roads were built to access the seized land.

Maybe the process could have been more humane, but it is easy to sit back in the comfort of the 21 century and feign outrage. The nation was facing existential challenges and the war machine required sacrifice from all civilians.

This kind of context would go a long way in fostering better conversations. In regards to this tweet, it would have been nice for the author to acknowledge that while the Hispanos' grazing permits for the land were withdrawn, it was their sacrifice for the war effort.

I don't understand how the government can force something upon its citizens and call it a "sacrifice". It's not a sacrifice if it doesn't come from you.
"Sacrifice" is the term used to whitewash such actions. Just ask the japanese-americans in who availed of Camp 'Sacrifice'.