Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer has been met with rave reviews – but what was the significance of the film’s final scene?
The movie stars Cillian Murphy as Robert J. Oppenheimer, the real-life American physicist who played a pivotal role in the creation of the atomic bomb. The ensemble cast also includes Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, and Florence Pugh.
Although different from much of Nolan’s previous work, in that it’s the director’s first biographical drama about a real historical figure, Oppenheimer still features all the hallmarks of his signature filmmaking style, including the use of non-linear storytelling.
With the film unfolding across multiple timelines, some viewers may be left confused about the significance of the movie’s closing scenes – namely, the final conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti).
What did Oppenheimer say to Einstein?
Towards the end of the first act, Oppenheimer approaches Einstein at a pond and the two exchange an unheard conversation. It’s only in the film’s final scene that we discover what was said.
Firstly, though, it’s important to understand why their mysterious conversation plays such a pivotal role in the story.
Rather than ending with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film’s final act is predominately focused on Oppenheimer’s security hearings, which had been set in motion by Lewis Strauss (Downey Jr.) in an attempt to have the physicist’s clearance revoked.
Later, Strauss’s own motivations for wanting to bring down Oppenheimer are made clear. It transpires that he thought Oppenheimer had badmouthed him to Einstein during their secret conversation.
However, in the film’s closing scene, we learn that Oppenheimer and Einstein had not been discussing Strauss at all, but rather were having an exchange about the wider implications of creating a nuclear bomb.
Oppenheimer reminds Einstein of his biggest fear: that constructing the bomb would set in motion a chain reaction that destroys the world. “What of it?” asks Einstein.
Oppenheimer’s response is the final line of the film. “I believe we did,” he says, before we’re shown a sequence depicting the world being destroyed by modern nuclear weapons.
What he means by this is that, while his work has not directly led to the destruction of the planet, the mere creation of the bomb had set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to a nuclear holocaust. It’s in that moment he realises that he has “become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
In a five-star review of Oppenheimer, NME wrote: “Not just the definitive account of the man behind the atom bomb, Oppenheimer is a monumental achievement in grown-up filmmaking.
“For years, Nolan has been perfecting the art of the serious blockbuster – crafting smart, finely-tuned multiplex epics that demand attention; that can’t be watched anywhere other than in a cinema, uninterrupted, without distractions. But this, somehow, feels bigger.”