So not looking to ORNL: The Drama being filmed with new Missouri Film Incentives. “You keep usin’ affinity columns makin’ em red hot instead of the dry method. That’s a hobbli’n.”
Maybe the Oppenheimer Blu-Ray will be mostly how he’s a sensitive lover super overthinking the Nuclear Trade Unionists? It’s like Koyanniiquatsi until you see the MC bite his lower lip, then fissile material job description and workup move like racing desert cats in the cool night. The cats in Redline maybe, not just Ford and Ferrari but with whiskers and hold the hate dip plus at least 3x as cute as a historically achievable thing.
OhHai> I recommend reading it.
[Script in hand, stares vacantly into near distance.]
So like he’s a hesitant Pollyanna for the DOD Everycontractor?
Of course it’s conservative filmmaking (James Woods is an executive producer), but I’d also like to point out that Christopher Nolan writes women (when he writes them at all) like the most stereotypically bad male writers. Every woman in this movie that isn’t window dressing is either a drunk or mentally unstable.
Someone on t’internet observed that (with a couple of exceptions), Nolan basically makes the same film again and again: two men (and it’s always men) who are perhaps best described as conmen in that they are trying to establish their version of the ‘truth’ as the dominant one in a scenario where this may not really be possible - from Memento, through The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception - and Oppenheimer is just another iteration to the formula.
Having said that, I still enjoyed it a lot more that this reviewer.
There’s probably a cracking movie waiting to be made about the Tizard Mission of 1940 in which the British gave America the designs for gyroscopic gunsights, proximity fuses, plastic explosives, jet engine, cavity magnetron and the World’s first nuclear bomb project.
Which was called MAUD and had already worked out how to separate uranium isotopes using uranium hexafluoride and thermal diffusion (developed at the University of Liverpool), gaseous diffusion (Oxford) and centrifuges (Cambridge); that U238 could be bred into a fissile synthetic element 94 and that thorium could be converted to fissile U233; before anyone had even attempted isotope separation it even estimated the critical mass of U235 needed for a Little Boy bomb:
It is a property of these super-bombs that there exists a “critical size” of about one pound. A quantity of the separated uranium isotope that exceeds the critical amount is explosive; yet a quantity less than the critical amount is absolutely safe. The bomb would therefore be manufactured in two (or more) parts, each being less than the critical size, and in transport all danger of a premature explosion would be avoided if these parts were kept at a distance of a few inches from each other. The bomb would be provided with a mechanism that brings the two parts together when the bomb is intended to go off. Once the parts are joined to form a block which exceeds the critical amount, the effect of the penetrating radiation always present in the atmosphere will initiate the explosion within a second or so.
The Frisch-Peierl memorandum (as it is called) is incredibly prescient. In March 1940 they had already worked out MAD:
If one works on the assumption that Germany is, or will be, in the possession of this weapon, it must be realized that no shelters are available that would be effective and that could be used on a large scale. The most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar bomb. Therefore it seems to us important to start production as soon and as rapidly as possible, even if it is not intended to use the bomb as a means of attack. Since the separation of the necessary amount of uranium is, in the most favourable circumstances, a matter of several months, it would obviously be too late to start production when such a bomb is known to be in the hands of Germany, and the matter seems, therefore, very urgent.
I thought it was out of focus. Turns out Nolan was so intent on shooting using IMAX lenses in low light he had almost no depth of field in key scenes. The actors moving just a fraction of a centimetre meant they were out of focus. Once you see it, you can’t miss it.
And the ‘love transcends everything’ handwaving exposition would embarrass Russell T Davies.
It’s like the Persistent Stalker Wannabe-Boyfriend trope, that somehow still gets the girl, in every TV show and movie for decades, but he’s also a really old, serial murderer.
That’s more red flags than Tiananmen Square.
