![]() ![]() ![]() It’s an astonishingly powerful ending, in part because it gives grim cinematic life to the generational fear that nukes are effectively Chekhov’s gun: a weapon introduced in an earlier act of our lives that will inevitably be used before our story ends. The delayed onset of consequences that people often forget. Perceptive viewers might realize that these final frames echo the movie’s opening images, which were of the young Oppenheimer in close-up, looking at droplets of rain in a small pool of water. The very last image of the film is Oppenheimer’s face in extreme close-up, staring at the droplets in the pond, and closing his eyes. Then, a ring of fire begins to consume the Earth. We see explosions across the surface of the planet, their blast radiuses unspeakably vast. We then see Oppenheimer, stuck inside a plane, watching the night sky lit up with rockets passing above - an image tied to a memory earlier in the film from David Dastmalchian’s William Borden, who recalled being in a plane watching German V-2 rockets headed toward England. (Look fast, and you might notice a sliver of Oppenheimer’s telltale silhouette in the corner of the frame.) Drifting among the clouds, we see vapor trails of nukes being fired through the air. “When I came to you with those calculations,” Oppenheimer tells Einstein, “we thought we might start a chain reaction that might destroy the entire world.”Īs the camera closes in on his face, we cut to an array of modern-day nuclear missiles. As Einstein turns to leave, Oppenheimer reminds him of an earlier conversation they had before the testing of the first atom bomb, when the Manhattan Project physicists were worried that the chain reaction caused by the atomic bomb might never end - that it could proceed to ignite the Earth’s atmosphere and destroy the planet. Now, however, comes the key moment, and the one that strikes the dark note that the film closes on. Safdie told me that when he researched Teller’s life, he discovered that the physicist went home and cried over Kitty’s rejection.) (This is something that happened in real life. But Kitty Oppenheimer (Blunt) refuses to shake Teller’s. “It will be for them.” We see a middle-aged Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), whom we had seen earlier testifying against his old colleague at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, shake Robert’s hand. “Just remember, it won’t be for you,” Einstein adds. Then, he tells Oppenheimer that, in many ways, his time is also passing: “Now it’s your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement.” He predicts that after the scientific Establishment tortures him enough, they’ll give Oppenheimer awards and arrange salmon dinners in his honor: “They’ll pat you on the back, tell you all is forgiven.” As he speaks, we see brief flashes forward of Oppenheimer as an old man, getting presidential awards, being fêted politely by old rivals. “You all thought that I’d lost the ability to understand what I’d started,” he says. Now, Einstein gently confronts Oppenheimer about this sentiment. ![]() Over the course of the film, Einstein has been perceived as an avuncular figure whose theory of relativity helped bring about the world of quantum physics, but who was too stuck in the past to really embrace it. (Robert Downey’s Lewis Strauss, who was looking on from a distance, is convinced that they were talking about him - part of a long list of petty grievances against Oppenheimer that would eventually lead Strauss to destroy the physicist’s reputation.) During our early glimpses of this meeting, we never hear what they say. The two men talk by a pond, as the wind picks up and droplets of rain slowly begin to fall. Robert Oppenheimer and Tom Conti’s Albert Einstein in 1947, when Oppenheimer was offered a job as the head of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. So, what exactly does happen at the end of Oppenheimer? Throughout the film, we see snippets of a meeting between Cillian Murphy’s J. My mouth wasn’t working.” It’s no exaggeration to say that Oppenheimer has the most shattering ending of anything Nolan has made, and maybe even of any studio blockbuster in recent memory. “It blew my hair back,” Emily Blunt said. Even some in the cast and crew told me of similar experiences. One leaned against a wall, head down, sobbing. Upon subsequent viewings, I witnessed others - even some famous faces - who were clearly rattled. When I first saw Oppenheimer, I couldn’t leave the theater afterward for a while I was frozen in my seat, unable to talk or think. ![]() To some, these comments may have seemed like a bit of showmanship on the director’s part. In prerelease interviews and elsewhere, Christopher Nolan has talked about how shaken early viewers were by the ending of Oppenheimer. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures ![]()
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