Moral dilemmas on screen: from Oppenheimer to Passengers

‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’

Father of the Atomic Bomb Robert Oppenheimer once claimed that these words from Hindu scripture’s Bhagavad Gita raced through his mind when he witnessed the first nuclear weapon detonate on July 16, 1945.

Much of Oppenheimer’s life and work are seen through the lens of the moral dilemma he faced in leading the Manhattan Project that developed the deadly bombs (dubbed ‘Fatman’ and ‘Little Boy’) which destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later.

Director Christopher Nolan has chosen the scientist as the subject of his next film, the follow-up to the underwhelming Tenet (2020). Nolan regular Cillian Murphy (Inception and the Batman trilogy) plays Oppenheimer with support from Emily Blunt (as his wife Kitty) Robert Downey Jnr (Lewis Strauss, the Atomic Energy Commission chairman who suspected he was a communist sympathiser) and Matt Damon (Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, who oversaw the Manhattan Project).