Christopher Nolan’s next movie, Oppenheimer, releases in theaters later this month, but you don’t have to wait a minute longer to see some new footage from the World War II drama.
Universal has released what it’s calling an “opening look” at the movie. The video includes five minutes of footage from various parts of the film. As such, if you’re planning to watch the movie and want to see it with fresh eyes, it might be best to avoid this particular video.
The trailer was edited by Oppenheimer editor Jennifer Lame, and it offers the best look yet at the film and its story and scope. It begins in the 1950s with a black-and-white scene where J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is interrogated by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) on behalf of the US government in the aftermath of World War II and the dropping of the atomic bomb he helped create.
The rest of the movie takes place in the 1940s when Oppenheimer put together a team to help create the world’s first atomic bomb as part of the super-secretive Manhattan Project. The team built a small town where scientists and engineers worked in secret at the Los Alamos Laboratory.
The trailer also shines a ligh on what Oppenheimer might have been thinking throughout the process of developing the bomb. He and the US government wanted a weapon to help end the war, and it seems Oppenheimer knew he was wading into dark waters.
“I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon, but I know the Nazis can’t,” Murphy’s Oppenheimer says in the video.
Oppenheimer will feature a recreation of the Trinity Test, which marked the world’s first atomic bomb explosion in July 1945, and Nolan pulled it off without CG. The next month, the US would drop atomic bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people, many civilians, and contributing to the end of World War II.
In addition to Murphy as Oppenheimer and Downey Jr. as Strauss, the movie stars Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as Leslie Groves Jr., and Gary Oldman as Harry Truman. Florence Pugh, Jack Quaid, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Alden Ehrenreich, David Dastmalchian, and Casey Affleck also appear in the movie.
Oppenheimer comes to theaters on July 21, 2023, which is the same day that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie arrives. It’s Nolan’s first new film since Tenet in 2020.
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