So, I just saw Oppenheimer. Since it’s received so much positive press, I thought I ought to go see it. The one word I could think of to describe it afterwards is “terrifying”. Obviously, the film presents us with what were and still are questionable decisions made by the US Government. (Go figure!) But if that’s what you want in a movie, you’re better off watching something like Vice where you can both laugh, marvel, and by horrified by the, dare I say, dubious choices of powerful men. On the other hand, Oppenheimer is a biopic, so I am hesitant to view it as anything other than one person’s story—their achievements, mistakes, and lessons learned—and gosh, oh golly, do we ever see that here!

In the beginning, we see a young Robert Oppenheimer fascinated with physics. This is what he was first and foremost, was it not? A physicist. However, as a world war beckons the United States, he is recruited into a secret program tasked with developing the Atomic Bomb. It felt like this had to be done because one must consider: what if the other side managed it first? You probably know how this story ends. Two bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing “between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians”. While before this point in the film we see people beginning to ask questions about the purpose of their work at Los Alamos (since the Germans had surrendered), they went ahead anyway. It’s then that we began to see Oppenheimer’s real moral dilemmas with the work he did, as when he tells President Truman that he feels he has blood on his hands. Much later on, while being interrogated about his change of heart by a “kangaroo court,” Oppenheimer explains that he feels now that armies will more likely opt to use these weapons when they have them. At first, it’s possible he thought of this work as a kind of peace, and only later did the threat of nuclear weapons loom ever more presently in his mind to a point where he began to imagine the devastation it might wreak even on those who helped create it. For better or worse, they changed the world.

As we know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict. (Thank God!) We are about 77 years nuke-free. So, I needn’t bother lecturing you about how important it is to keep it that way. I think, for the most part, people got the message. What’s much more fitting for this film (because it’s a biopic) is Oppenheimer’s change of heart. He went from his initial idealism to enduring the harsh realities of life and being confronted by difficult choices. Perhaps he did what he thought was right in the moment, but as time wore on, he seemed to realise unforeseen consequences to those decisions, which now haunt him. This is the pity with acquiring practical wisdom: it can only come from experience, and this is a painful way to learn. I’m not expert on the history, but in the context of this film, this is what makes “Oppie” such a compelling and relatable character.

I don’t know about you lot, but I have a lot of regrets, many of which I still struggle with. Thankfully, I never created weapons of mass destruction, but they’re the same stages. We begin with some kind of innocence and are eventually presented with choices in need of our discernment. This isn’t usually so bad, but what do you do when it comes to big life decisions made about complex subjects? You can’t anticipate everything, not even the things you think you know for certain, and eventually you will be glad you made the choice you did or you won’t. If you’re not, it’s unfortunate that you can’t change the past, but it is fortunate that you can learn from it. Perhaps it’s possible to right that wrong. Perhaps you can help others avoid the same mistakes you did. These things are possible to varying degrees. However, none of this is possible without humility. That’s what all mistakes are: lessons in humility, maybe even painful ones.

If there is a victory in Oppenheimer, that is what it is. Sooner or later, we all stand before the Truth, and we can either have the humility to accept the Truth as it is or not. So I ask: how well do I embrace the Truth in my life? How well do you? Of course, like I said, it’s not always possible to know for sure what that is. We can only do our best, and if it is a particularly painful regret, then it might even feel like we, too, are the “destroyer of worlds,” even if that world is merely our own or someone else’s.

Overall, then, I loved the movie. Not that I was particularly interested in the history of the Atomic Bomb, and it was definitely long, but I appreciated the story it told of a man whose questionable work forever changed the world and changed himself. In the end, Einstein says that now Oppenheimer must live with the consequences of his achievement, and throughout the film, we see someone making his best effort to do exactly that.