Oppenheimer Trailer Analysis

The upcoming epic thriller based on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.
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I thought it would be a good idea to have a dedicated thread for analyzing the trailers released so far -- a place to collect anything you spot in any of the trailers for its historical accuracy/inaccuracy, what it might be relating to, what changes it could represent between history or the book and the film, etc.

I have at least been on a bit of a tireless search to find corresponding photos or information about different parts of the trailers.

The trailers, for reference:
Announcement
Trailer 1
Trailer 2 (the IMAX prologue, download only)
Trailer 3

Announcement: Trailer 1:
  • The rain on the ground and window, the designs look similar to the buildings on the Princeton University campus.
  • The shot of Oppenheimer with an envoy walking across a football field
    Image
    seems to suggest we're walking across the football field relevant to the story -- Stagg field. But Stagg field had quite different stands, they needed to fit a nuclear reactor under them, after all! Ok. those ones might have worked too...
    Image
  • We can see the bomb being assembled in a tent at the base of the tower
    Image
    mirrored by an actual photo
    Image
    here is some archival footage of the assembly under the tent!
  • When the bomb is being hoisted up the tower, there seem to be far fewer pieces of tape on it!
    Image
    Image
Trailer 2:
  • Oppenheimer scaling the tower in a windstorm is apparently directly taken from the book!
  • The entry gate in front of Los Alamos was, funnily, reconstructed in the movie far more accurately...
    Image
    Image
    ...than the replica at Los Alamos:
    Image
  • Someone, with badge 73, is applying sunscreen lol. Is that Edward Teller?
Trailer 3:
  • We see the counterpart to the scene of Oppenheimer walking across the football field: him being shown the Chicago Pile!
    Image
    However, a few details such as the shape of the platform and the shape of the pile are slightly different than it actually was.
    Image
    Image
  • Did this style of "painted over concrete bricks" and that light switch exist this way in the 1940s? Image
    For some reason, those features didn't look right to me.
TV spots:
  • Strauss holds up a graph, saying "they just set off a starting gun". I had read elsewhere that this meeting with Strauss likely occurred in 1949, which made me think that Strauss is referring to some data confirming Russia's first successful nuclear test. physicshistoryguy filled me in on the details:
    physicshistoryguy wrote:
    June 4th, 2023, 2:01 am
    Yeah, that scene with Strauss makes the most sense for the GAC meetings in 1949, with the "starting gun" almost certainly referring to the first Soviet bomb as you said. My guess is that chart is showing radioactivity (from material collected on filter papers attached to B-29s) as a function of time, with a peak representing the Soviet test, but I can't be sure as a lot of the documents from this period aren't available online (the closest thing I could find is on page 4 of this paper, but they used a slightly different means of measuring radioactivity, using rain samples rather than filter paper, so I don't think it's what Strauss is showing in this scene: https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/r ... genumber=4).
Few open questions:
  • The shot of Oppenheimer donning his hat looking out a window in the announcement trailer -- that seems to be in New Mexico, in either a cabin or an unfinished house, but it's in black and white. What could this be, set back there but in the "objective" POV? Are those shamrocks on the window?
  • Where is the notable shot of the explosive lenses being assembled into the gadget taking place?
    Image
    A few sources I read mention that this took place at "V-site". Here is a historical image: Image
    though documentation says the process wasn't photographed... Perhaps this is a part of the tests of the lenses themselves? Here's a short video going over V-site, or what remains of it.
Despite my search, my historical knowledge on the Manhattan project is fairly limited, so if anyone has anything else to add it would be greatly appreciated! Pieces of history, small details about how the footage and promotional images we've seen so far tie in with the book or the events, questions, or answers about anything else, feel free!

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Hey, this is great so far! I'll add some of my thoughts on the items you've collected above.

Unfortunately, although it would've been great to see those stands at Stagg Field, I think they were torn down decades ago, so they had to make do with what they had.

Props to them for making the Los Alamos gate look right, but I think it's much too close to Los Alamos itself (I mean, you can see the Tech Area from there!).

Yeah, Mr. 73 absolutely has to be Teller, haha. He was the one who brought the suntan lotion and first put it on before passing it around at Compania Hill. I've also noticed that they put Lawrence and Feynman together for the test; they both had the same idea of watching the blast through the windshield of a car, in Lawrence's case, or the army weapons carrier which carried the radio, in Feynman's. Feynman stayed in his vehicle when the gadget went off, but Lawrence stepped out right at the moment of detonation.

I'm not sure what that picture of the explosive lenses is from; I've seen it before, but it doesn't look right for the Trinity gadget to me. And yeah, V-site was just outside of Los Alamos if I remember correctly, from which the explosive assembly was transported to Trinity three days before the test on Friday the 13th (an intentional move by Kistiakowsky to buck superstition).

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physicshistoryguy wrote:
June 6th, 2023, 11:47 am
Hey, this is great so far! I'll add some of my thoughts on the items you've collected above.

Unfortunately, although it would've been great to see those stands at Stagg Field, I think they were torn down decades ago, so they had to make do with what they had.

Props to them for making the Los Alamos gate look right, but I think it's much too close to Los Alamos itself (I mean, you can see the Tech Area from there!).

Yeah, Mr. 73 absolutely has to be Teller, haha. He was the one who brought the suntan lotion and first put it on before passing it around at Compania Hill. I've also noticed that they put Lawrence and Feynman together for the test; they both had the same idea of watching the blast through the windshield of a car, in Lawrence's case, or the army weapons carrier which carried the radio, in Feynman's. Feynman stayed in his vehicle when the gadget went off, but Lawrence stepped out right at the moment of detonation.

I'm not sure what that picture of the explosive lenses is from; I've seen it before, but it doesn't look right for the Trinity gadget to me. And yeah, V-site was just outside of Los Alamos if I remember correctly, from which the explosive assembly was transported to Trinity three days before the test on Friday the 13th (an intentional move by Kistiakowsky to buck superstition).
Thanks, heh! It's the best I can do without much history knowledge, but it's something that I could kick a thread off with!

Yup, Stagg field is sadly no longer around. But I was curious if they would dress existing locations to look like it.

I found it a bit difficult to track the development of Los Alamos around this time period. This article has some brief history, but I've seen a few different photos and I wasn't sure whether it was the same site built up more later on or if they're 2+ different sites. This gallery includes photos of the tech area. The DoE also has a super-extensive gallery on the Manhattan project. See, I don't know what this place is that looks more similar in scale to the town shown in the trailers is; it's usually referred to as the "base camp":
Image

By the way, the article I linked above from AHF mentioned testing the gun type design. Maybe that's what was being shown in the TV spot?

The lenses are a double mystery now! Maybe it's too much to look for an exact room that resembles the ones we see, but between all the historical locations the story takes place across, I wonder what is being referenced for them? After all, V-site looks like a shed, not the pristine lab in the trailer, but it's a lot smaller than "building V" in the tech area. Are they different?

The move to transport it on the 13th is great, I love that detail! But perhaps it was too much for Apollo 13...

Thanks a lot for the information!

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The Tech Area gallery and map is going to be very useful when the film comes out to see how closely they got, not just the buildings, but the relationships between the buildings. I'm pretty sure the passage between buildings A and B, for example, is visible in Trailer 2 in the background (at 1:12 and 2:22), and likewise with a sign for Trinity Drive (at 2:21), so they certainly made an effort to get some details right at least.

The base camp you posted a picture of was at the Trinity site in Alamogordo; on a map, it's just south of the bunker from which Oppenheimer viewed the test.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the shot of the hollow cylindrical projectile approaching the camera in the latest TV spot (coinciding with Strauss saying "they just fired") is Little Boy. I personally don't think it could be the Gun Site mentioned in the article since the shot looks too much like Little Boy itself, though I could be wrong.

As for the explosive lenses and where they were constructed, the V building in the Tech Area is different from V site, which was just outside Los Alamos. Personally, I'm fine with Nolan and his crew not getting everything exactly right, like here with V site. If it's basic stuff they messed up (like Chicago Pile 1 having too many bricks), then I'll be sure to point it out if I catch it, but in the final film I'm much more interested in changes to the historical narrative. I just remember for instance that, after First Man came out, a lot of spaceflight enthusiasts complained about the Gemini and Apollo interiors looking dirty and grimy rather than the pristine spacecraft they actually were on takeoff; sure, it would've been nice if they weren't filmed as grimy, but it didn't bother me too much because everything else looked so spot on.

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physicshistoryguy wrote:
June 6th, 2023, 11:47 pm
The Tech Area gallery and map is going to be very useful when the film comes out to see how closely they got, not just the buildings, but the relationships between the buildings. I'm pretty sure the passage between buildings A and B, for example, is visible in Trailer 2 in the background (at 1:12 and 2:22), and likewise with a sign for Trinity Drive (at 2:21), so they certainly made an effort to get some details right at least.

The base camp you posted a picture of was at the Trinity site in Alamogordo; on a map, it's just south of the bunker from which Oppenheimer viewed the test.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the shot of the hollow cylindrical projectile approaching the camera in the latest TV spot (coinciding with Strauss saying "they just fired") is Little Boy. I personally don't think it could be the Gun Site mentioned in the article since the shot looks too much like Little Boy itself, though I could be wrong.

As for the explosive lenses and where they were constructed, the V building in the Tech Area is different from V site, which was just outside Los Alamos. Personally, I'm fine with Nolan and his crew not getting everything exactly right, like here with V site. If it's basic stuff they messed up (like Chicago Pile 1 having too many bricks), then I'll be sure to point it out if I catch it, but in the final film I'm much more interested in changes to the historical narrative. I just remember for instance that, after First Man came out, a lot of spaceflight enthusiasts complained about the Gemini and Apollo interiors looking dirty and grimy rather than the pristine spacecraft they actually were on takeoff; sure, it would've been nice if they weren't filmed as grimy, but it didn't bother me too much because everything else looked so spot on.
Perhaps, it's a bit difficult for me to spot the exact details because that bridge is shown a bit briefly. Nolan has mentioned rebuilding the town in interviews, and the film's official site has a rendering of some of the sites which it flies through and shows stills of characters in those locations. It is similar to a "map". It even references the Prometheus quote at the start.

Just curious, what indicates to you that it's Little Boy if we're viewing the inside of the gun mechanism?

I agree generally about getting the narrative right over very small details. I'm just curious on the filmmaker's choices when certain things are known precisely through photographs, maps etc. However, I do agree about First Man. I think they were trying to really sell the "tin can" angle and make the danger more apparent. But them being clean would have made more sense.

I still generally loved the movie and the accuracy of each of the missions. The Gemini 8 sequence felt both so pretty and accurate, but I couldn't find out for sure how fast it spun on the stuck thruster. Archival footage that showed it seemed to have been filmed at a slower speed, and it might have rolled a bit too fast, yet it otherwise feels accurate to how spinning in an out of control spacecraft would feel! I love it when people make those side-by-side comparisons between historical footage and movies in these cases (I've seen one for First Man, but it could have been more thorough).

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Fair, yeah, the bridge (or what looks like the bridge) is only on screen in the trailers for a very brief moment in the background, but that passage is visually interesting enough that I'm sure Nolan will give it some prominence in the film itself. The "map" on the interactive site is a bit too difficult for me to make out in order to compare with the actual map of the Tech Area, and I don't know if I'd count on it being a reliable source for how Nolan's Los Alamos looks in any case. Maybe the Prometheus story will be in the film explicitly? But perhaps that would be too cheesy and on the nose, so I'm not sure.

With Little Boy, it's just a gut feeling frankly. With only three hours to use, Nolan's going to have to focus more on the implosion experiments since it's the more narratively exciting story (what with implosion being the underdog mechanism, the feuds between Neddermeyer, Kistiakowsky, and Parsons, and so on), so I doubt Little Boy's development will get more than a brief mention by necessity. So if the interior of Little Boy is being shown, my money's on it being Little Boy in use. Plus, I can't imagine Nolan wasting such a dramatic shot on a mere test of an anti-aircraft gun at the Gun Site, haha.

Regarding Gemini 8, Hansen's biography notes that the spin got to over 360 degrees a second, which tracks with what I remember from elsewhere, although their roll rate indicators only measured up to 20 degrees a second (unlike the one showed in the film). But yeah, it's interesting you bring up Gemini 8, since that's one sequence I remember some spaceflight enthusiasts taking issue with, haha. The dialogue is all spot on word for word, but the scene's way too loud, the spinning's too quick, the centrifugal forces build too rapidly, and so on. As Josh Singer mentions in the annotated screenplay, "We take some license here. The speed at which everything moves to the cabin walls is heightened. The speed at which Earth moves through the windows is heightened too. The lights shorting out is a fiction. But this is all to put the viewer in the cockpit, to convey how intense and dangerous this situation was." Personally, I agree with those changes; one of First Man's goals is to ask again and again if spaceflight is worth it in spite of the cost and the dangers, so the audience really needs to feel that danger viscerally in order to buy into those questions. For that, overwhelming the audience's senses in the way First Man does, and making the spacecraft feel like tin cans as you said, works. And, for what it's worth, First Man is among my favorite films.

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There was a short spot posted on Twitter yesterday, and there was a quick shot of what appeared to be the uranium bullet in the barrel. This would be the gun-type fission weapon, Little Boy, which was used in Hiroshima. We could end up seeing the Hiroshima bombing after all.

The spot has since been seemingly deleted and I can’t find it anywhere.

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Nicewatch wrote:
June 7th, 2023, 7:39 pm
There was a short spot posted on Twitter yesterday, and there was a quick shot of what appeared to be the uranium bullet in the barrel. This would be the gun-type fission weapon, Little Boy, which was used in Hiroshima. We could end up seeing the Hiroshima bombing after all.

The spot has since been seemingly deleted and I can’t find it anywhere.

This one, right? If so, then yeah, that's what we're thinking.

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Oku
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I don't think that we're gonna see the bombings directly; all evidence points to the contrary. What we will be seeing, I assume, is the main character's inner visualizations of the bomb's internal workings, of which that shot is a part. (I mean, Mr. Nolan told us as much--that we would be entering his mind.)

Also, I remember that you praised the shot at 0:03 in that TV spot for rectifying a long-standing inaccuracy of the mass being fired into the cylinder, when it really was the other way around.

But I'm rewatching in slo-mo, and I'm confused. How are you so sure that it's the cylinder being fired at the mass?

Like, the way that that shot is composed, it could easily be the cylinder standing still and the mass approaching/being fired at the cylinder/camera, no?

-

And there is another thing that I would like cleared up/settled.

It's commonly assumed that Mr. Oppenheimer regretted his invention, what with the whole famous "I am become death" speech with his saddened expression and whatnot.

But I vaguely remember reading here or somewhere that Mr. Oppenheimer and co. weren't really horrified at the fact that the bomb was used per se, but rather, they felt blindsided by the fact that it had been used on Japan when they thought the whole point of it all was to race against and use it against Germany?

And that he never regretted his invention as is commonly assumed, but to the contrary, went to his grave firmly believing in the necessity of his invention?

How accurate are these two claims?

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Oku wrote:
June 25th, 2023, 12:46 am
I don't think that we're gonna see the bombings directly; all evidence points to the contrary. What we will be seeing, I assume, is the main character's inner visualizations of the bomb's internal workings, of which that shot is a part. (I mean, Mr. Nolan told us as much--that we would be entering his mind.)
(Testing out my ability to break up a quote into smaller chunks that I can comment on one at a time; interesting that I never thought about whether I could do that before.) Right, if that one split-second shot in the TV spot wasn't there, I'd still be saying that we wouldn't see the bombings depicted (Trinity's arguably the better climax, and if you've shown that, then why show the bombings? It's Oppenheimer's story, and we're nailed to his perspective, so it's better to see the aftermath and the reaction to the bombings). But the inclusion of the shot means we almost certainly will be seeing Little Boy in action over Hiroshima in some form. I don't think we'll be seeing a full sequence depicting the bombings in all their horror, but probably some brief scene with him visualizing the bomb working, as you said. Perhaps a montage flipping back and forth between Oppenheimer hearing the news of the bombing and the bombing itself from Little Boy's perspective (justified as Oppenheimer's imagination, maybe, given how much of himself he metaphorically put into the bombs) with Truman's speech in the background as a voice-over ("The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed!" has gotta be in the film somewhere).
Oku wrote:
June 25th, 2023, 12:46 am
Also, I remember that you praised the shot at 0:03 in that TV spot for rectifying a long-standing inaccuracy of the mass being fired into the cylinder, when it really was the other way around.

But I'm rewatching in slo-mo, and I'm confused. How are you so sure that it's the cylinder being fired at the mass?

Like, the way that that shot is composed, it could easily be the cylinder standing still and the mass approaching/being fired at the cylinder/camera, no?
So, watching it in slo-mo again, I see little specks on the inner surface of the gun (dust? imperfections in the material that are catching the light?) that remain fixed from one frame to the next, which suggests to me that the camera is fixed and not traversing up the gun barrel.
Oku wrote:
June 25th, 2023, 12:46 am
And there is another thing that I would like cleared up/settled.

It's commonly assumed that Mr. Oppenheimer regretted his invention, what with the whole famous "I am become death" speech with his saddened expression and whatnot.

But I vaguely remember reading here or somewhere that Mr. Oppenheimer and co. weren't really horrified at the fact that the bomb was used per se, but rather, they felt blindsided by the fact that it had been used on Japan when they thought the whole point of it all was to race against and use it against Germany?

And that he never regretted his invention as is commonly assumed, but to the contrary, went to his grave firmly believing in the necessity of his invention?

How accurate are these two claims?
Contrary to legend, Oppenheimer never regretted his work on the Manhattan Project (and, in his final years, he was frustrated at those who assumed he was regretful or sought to tell his story as a simplistic morality tale). He saw it as his wartime duty, although it was something he had terrible qualms about, especially after the war. Think of his confession to Truman where he feels like he has blood on his hands. Or a 1946 speech where he said that America "used atomic weapons against an enemy which was essentially defeated." Or a 1956 comment that the bombing of Hiroshima could have been "a tragic mistake." But these were qualms, expressions of discomfort, misgivings, and not outright regret. In 1960, when visiting Tokyo, he said "I do not regret that I had something to do with the technical success of the atomic bomb. It isn't that I don't feel bad; it is that I don't feel worse tonight than I did last night." And in 1964, he wrote to David Bohm, a former grad student, about a play based on his security hearings, which featured a fictionalized monologue where Oppenheimer’s character expressed Faustian sentiments: "What I have never done is to express regret for doing what I did and could at Los Alamos; in fact, under quite dramatic circumstances, I have reaffirmed my sense that, with all the black and white, that was something I did not regret... My own feelings about responsibility and guilt have always had to do with the present, and so far in this life that has been more than enough to occupy me." So Oppenheimer's attitude towards all this is fiercely complex. Did he regret his role in the making of the atomic bomb? Nope, but neither was he gung-ho about it or felt it was wholly necessary. He saw it as his duty during the war, and it was one he performed brilliantly by all accounts. After all, that's what the "I am become death" speech is all about: the god Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince - Oppenheimer himself, as he saw it - to do his duty and fight in a war he wants no part in. (More on this can be seen in Alex Wellerstein's posts on the subject: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/05 ... imer-gita/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ ... omic_bomb/).

I wouldn't say that Oppenheimer and the others were blindsided by the bombs' use in Japan. The initial motivation for most at Los Alamos was to race the Nazis to the bomb, sure, but by the end of 1944, at least, it became pretty apparent that there was no Nazi bomb to worry about (in fact, they had dropped out of the race a year before Los Alamos even opened), and that gave many scientists the opportunity to really think about the consequences of what they were doing (although only one scientist as far as I know, Joseph Rotblat, quit entirely). Some, mostly in Chicago and Oak Ridge, drew up petitions and reports advocating against nuking cities but Truman never saw them, not that the bombings would have been deterred anyways. But I don't think it's fair to say that bombing Japan was a surprise to those in the project, if that answers your question.

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