Oppenheimer 🎥 2023 Movie Info

Plot Summary

In the 1920s, theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer returns to the US after traveling extensively in Europe. He starts teaching at Berkeley, where he befriends fellow professor Haakon Chevalier and psychology student Jean Tatlock, both communists. Robert and Jean begin an affair that ends when Robert meets Kitty Puening at a social event. Despite being married, Kitty gets pregnant by Robert, and they marry after her divorce. In 1939, German physicists succeed in splitting the atom. Berkeley Radiation Laboratory physicist Ernest Lawrence concurs with Robert that this could be weaponized into an atomic bomb.

Robert’s paper on black holes is published, but is overshadowed by Germany’s invasion of Poland, kickstarting World War II. At Berkeley, Lawrence warns Robert to sever communist associations so he can participate in the war effort. Shortly after, Robert is visited by Colonel Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, who previously oversaw construction of The Pentagon. Groves tasks Robert with leading atomic bomb development for the US, and orders a new laboratory to be built at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on Robert’s suggestion. Scientists are brought there to work secretly on the project, supported by satellite activities at Chicago, Hanford, and Tennessee.

Early in the project, an associate of Robert, Edward Condon, quits over the military’s strict protocol of compartmentalization. Robert receives his security clearance and immediately re-establishes contact with Jean. They spend the night at a hotel, and Robert says they will not meet again. Jean is found dead in her bathtub some months later. At Los Alamos, Edward Teller proposes a bomb based on nuclear fusion, predicting it would be more destructive than the fission bombs being developed. A bomb test is scheduled for July 1945, for which Robert recruits his brother, Frank, a former Communist Party member. Following a successful test, US President Truman orders two bombs to be dropped on Japan.

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