Christopher Nolan Thinks Oppenheimer's Pitch-Black Ending Is Inevitable
What can't Christopher Nolan do? He revitalized the entire public conception of Batman at a time when everyone's most recent frame of reference was the disasterpiece known as "Batman & Robin." He made his first "One for me" project after "The Dark Knight" into a big-budget, byzantine dreamscape called "Inception" that had audiences both entertained and struggling to make sense of it for weeks. And finally, against all odds, he somehow turned a stuffy, three-hour biopic about one of the most controversial public figures and events in world history into a genuine pop culture event that's come within a whisker of the hallowed billion-dollar benchmark.
So, naturally, the acclaimed filmmaker has now decided to become the next Nostradamus and take a shot at predicting how the world will actually end. Spoiler alert: He's pretty sure that Cillian Murphy's final line of dialogue in the film is doomed to come true. Between you and me, I'm getting the sense Nolan's not a glass half-full kind of guy.
In all seriousness, the ending of "Oppenheimer" ranks as one of the year's most staggering final scenes and that's due to Nolan making a compelling case that humanity simply can't be trusted with weapons of mass destruction. Sooner or later, the movie argues, we'll destroy ourselves and prove all of J. Robert Oppenheimer's worst fears correct. Having remained neck-deep in such dark and sobering material throughout the production of the movie, it probably shouldn't be a surprise to hear that Nolan isn't feeling all that optimistic about our own current trajectory. In a lengthy profile with Variety, he touched on that exact issue:
"There's a pretty simple argument mathematically for saying the world will end in nuclear Armageddon simply because that's a possibility. Over an infinite timeline, it's going to happen at some point."
Facing the invitable
Remember that moment in the film set on the eve of the fateful Trinity test? Oppenheimer finally informs Matt Damon's Leslie Groves of the fear among the scientific community that detonating the atomic bomb, even in a test firing, could potentially unleash a chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the whole planet. He insists the chances of that are "near-zero," yet the irony is that humanity's capacity for self-annihilation is anything but.
That's the point Nolan seems to be getting at in his latest interview, chock-full of such cheery quotes. (Okay, in fairness, the rest of the profile covers a wide range of topics and it's well worth reading in full.) At the same time, anyone who knows their history is well aware of how close we came to wiping ourselves out during the Cold War — and on more than one occasion, chillingly enough. And given certain world events, it's become increasingly clear that when given the keys to instruments of mass death and destruction, world governments typically won't hesitate to use them.
To his credit, Nolan tries to strike a slightly more hopeful tone in the face of our species' worst inclinations. Key word is "tries," of course. As he puts it later in the interview:
"My optimistic human self has to believe we'll find a way to avoid that, but I don't take a lot of reassurance in the idea that mutually assured destruction has prevented a cataclysm so far. It's the 'so far' that's the problem."
Did you wake up expecting a /Film article to throw you into an existentialist nightmare? Me neither, but that's the 21st Century for you. Of all the things going horribly wrong these days, let's add "death by nuclear hellfire" to the top of the list.