‘It’s Really First-Class Work’

This article containers spoilers for the film Oppenheimer.

Few authors have written as insightfully about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer as Richard Rhodes, whose 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is widely regarded as the definitive account of the Manhattan Project. Rhodes’s comprehensive history, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is both a massive work of scholarship—the main text alone runs nearly 800 pages—and a literary feat that he conceived as “the tragic epic of the twentieth century.” Over the years, according to Rhodes, it has been optioned many times, but no film or television version has ever been made. “It’s quite obvious why,” Rhodes told me. “It’s just too big a story.”

Over the weekend, along with millions of other moviegoers, Rhodes saw , Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic of the physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb. The next day, curious about his reaction, I spoke with Rhodes by phone. He was deeply impressed by the film, especially in light of earlier attempts to adapt the same material. “It’s really first-class work,” Rhodes said, comparing it favorably with Roland (“badly done,” from a technological perspective) and specifically praising Cillian Murphy’s performance in the title role. “If anything, he was a little too confident. But Oppenheimer was pretty confident.”