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:
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:
- The quote "The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed ..." is from Truman's statement after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. This was apparently first submitted as a press release, then separately filmed for the media, here is a video of him giving the remarks.
- 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
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...
- We can see the bomb being assembled in a tent at the base of the tower
mirrored by an actual photo
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!
- 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...
...than the replica at Los Alamos:
- Someone, with badge 73, is applying sunscreen lol. Is that Edward Teller?
- We see the counterpart to the scene of Oppenheimer walking across the football field: him being shown the Chicago Pile!
However, a few details such as the shape of the platform and the shape of the pile are slightly different than it actually was.
- Did this style of "painted over concrete bricks" and that light switch exist this way in the 1940s?
For some reason, those features didn't look right to me.
- 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 amYeah, 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).
- 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?
A few sources I read mention that this took place at "V-site". Here is a historical 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.