A solid movie in a very difficult genre of biopic. But hardly a masterpiece, which was lionized by the BBC's Culture column and other film critics, probably to dampen the strike to the Hollywood bottom line by the strikers, similarly to Barbie. And this tactic worked.
The most interesting for me was the parallelism between Oppenheimer's security clearance hearings and the Lewis' hearings in the Senate for the position of the Secretary of Commerce. For me, still a mystery remains. Why Oppi took the withdrawing of his security clearance so seriously? As a director of the Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, he had all the fun -- including invitation of highly valued by him, and me (anti-Semitic) poet T. S. Eliot -- but with a small fraction of responsibility at the Lab. Probably, his pride was wounded because he forsook a pure science, where he could have earned a Nobel, for the applied government work. The US Government was not as ungrateful to him, as the UK Government to Turing, but in Oppenheimer's eyes it was still a persecution.
One of the former directors of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (a meager P. O. Box 1663 under Oppenheimer), probably Norris Bradbury or Harold Agnew, reminisced that he overheard Teller speaking to Lawrence, or Lawrence to Teller -- the hole in my memory, not his: "Oppenheimer got too much power [on the GAC, the General Advisory Committee]. He must be stopped."
