I began watching this series with the hope that it would be technically and/or scientifically interesting to see how the world's first atomic bomb was developed. Instead I watched with each passing episode how it was slowly devolving into what is basically an over-the-top Spanish soap opera with very little science involved. And now, by the thirteenth episode, it's pretty much jumped theI began watching this series with the hope that it would be technically and/or scientifically interesting to see how the world's first atomic bomb was developed. Instead I watched with each passing episode how it was slowly devolving into what is basically an over-the-top Spanish soap opera with very little science involved. And now, by the thirteenth episode, it's pretty much jumped the shark.
Where to begin? Hard to say, there are so many places this farce just got everything wrong.
The biggest part they got wrong was the faux hostility that the gun vs. implosion teams have for one another. Yes, there was competition, but like Feynman says "nature cannot be fooled". So, they admitted to themselves that rather than put all their energies into one idea that in the end might have an insurmountable problem attached to it (which the gun method did), they should explore other ideas just in case the other idea doesn't work out. They certainly weren't going to lie or steal resources from the other to do that. Nor were they going threaten to kill members of the opposing team. No, they openly agreed to try multiple approaches. Oppenheimer wasn't hell-bent on the gun method working, he was open to whatever might work because nobody really knew back then what would actually work and what wouldn't without exploring those ideas first. Roosevelt and Truman didn't give a damn which method was being used so long as it worked.
Which brings me to the portrayal of Oppenheimer. Who in the world decided to play him as a brooding, anti-social, stuck up, unpersonable, autistic-type person? He didn't single-handedly build the bomb through his gargantuan intellect, he brought together the greatest minds of the time to do it for him. He was bright but was also good at bringing hugely talented people together. In order to bring people like that together you have to be a person that gets along fairly well with other scientists. The Oppenheimer in this film, however, treats his fellow scientists like they're common peasants, like they should feel lucky to even be able to talk to him. What a bunch of nonsense. You don't achieve the levels of professionalism that he did in his field by being that way. You're not going to get good ideas out of people by ridiculing them.
The writers treated the idea of compartmentalization as though violating it amounted to a death sentence for those who violated it, when in reality nobody really gave a flip because you can't get science done that way and they knew it. It was impossible to develop the bomb in the time they had if scientists were not freely allowed to discuss their work with other scientists. Oppenheimer got that dead right and even explained to Groves why it wouldn't work. It's why they brought them all to Los Alamos and put them all within the same fence in the first place, so they could at least control them a little bit that way. This movie got it dead wrong. The scientists rebelled at being compartmentalized and the brass knew they'd be up a creek if they started trying to silence them because all the scientists were in agreement.
By now the series has grown men with PhDs in physics, men at the tops of their field basically lying to one another at every opportunity with the intention that if they keep lying, their ideas will eventually work. People like that don't get invited en masse to projects like this. People like that put out press releases for cold fusion and get called out on it when other scientists notice it has holes in it. If there was a problem with the gun method, there wouldn't be just one or two people that knew it wouldn't work. EVERYONE would have known because they were all freely talking to one another about it. The people who built the bomb didn't covet the idea to the extent that it would destroy their careers to follow it any further and certainly didn't kill themselves over being chosen to investigate a method that turned out to not work.
And, of course, since this is an American film, there are various subplots of this person sleeping with that person which is what you get when you know you have nothing else to say. There is so much fluff in this film that seems designed simply to fill space because nothing interesting is actually going on. The subplots of infidelity, of conspiracy, of treason, of homosexuality, ad nauseam.
Go watch Oppenheimer (1980). I couldn't find anywhere I could stream it online so I just bought the DVDs from Amazon. Much more interesting series without all the soap opera drama that plagues Manhattan. Oppenheimer goes into exquisite details explaining things at some points and the geek in me just loves it.… Expand
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