I didn't have a chance to Oppenheimer in the theater last summer. I am very impressed with this film, specifically the way the screenwriter and director make the story accessible.
I have always felt a little intimidated about trying to understand the history behind the atomic bomb, perhaps because the scientific part seems incomprehensible. I've had a vague sense of the names -- Oppenheimer, Neils Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller -- but no understanding of how they tie together in a larger narrative.
Oppenheimer helps me begin to fill in that narrative, by showing the interactions between the various people. For example, Neils Bohr is (eventually) brought to Los Alamos from Europe, and he warns Oppenheimer about the long term ramifications of the bomb.
I still don't understand Bohr's scientific contribution to the atomic bomb, but I do see that he was a kind of mentor for Oppenheimer -- a mentor whose recommendations provide an alternate path that could have been taken, by Oppenheimer (and perhaps by the nation at large?).
In addition, the depth at which the film explains the science is right. For example, there's a recurring image of a fish bowl being filled with marbles that represent the uranium being enriched in Tennessee; only once the bowl is full will there be sufficient uranium for a bomb. I don't understand why uranium is the key chemical for a fission bomb, but I do now have a sense of the link between the work in Tennessee and in New Mexico.
Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.) is also a clever addition to the narrative, because he enables an exploration of the paranoia about communism that was so prevalent in the late 1940s and 1950s. Without this political overlay, the film wouldn't have worked as well for me.
