Hi friends, I hope you had a good summer. Like many of you, I took a break from my summer vacation to watch Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. I'm an unabashed Nolan fan-Inception and Interstellar rank among my top 10 favorite movies-but I'll admit that Oppenheimer required more time for me to digest. The film itself is first-rate: powered by a taut screenplay, its stripped-down elemental cinematography largely validates the director's decision not to use any computer-generated imagery (although a couple of quick CGI scenes from the K-25 enrichment facility or the X-10 graphite reactor would have been really cool). The result is a historically faithful, largely accurate celebration of the brilliant minds that enabled one of the most daring engineering feats of all time. I also credit Nolan for a nuanced portrait of Oppenheimer himself-one that resists dishing out tidy value judgments and instead leaves the viewer to reconcile the morality of Oppen-heimer's beliefs and actions. Of course, the central drama of the story is Faustian: Oppenheimer oversees the creation of a weapon capable of destroying the world, to end a world war that has left tens of millions dead.
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