My good friend David Krugler, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Platteville, has published an impressive historical film review of Oppenheimer, the new feature film by Christopher Nolan about J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the key architects of the atomic bomb.

Krugler is a specialist of the history of the early Cold War and civil defense responses to the threat of nuclear attacks. He critiques the film’s depictions of the Manhattan Project, the Trinity Test, and the development of atomic weapons.

“The test scene is spectacular, but the sustained drama in Oppenheimer comes from its vivid, sensitive depiction of the life and travails of the bomb’s most vital architect. To adapt Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, Nolan makes a daring narrative choice. He centers the story around Oppenheimer’s 1954 closed hearing before a security board of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Despite Oppenheimer’s undisputed accomplishments, his prior associations with communists (which were well-known in 1942, when General Leslie Groves, the military director of the Manhattan Project, recruited him) have made him a target of powerful anti-communists at the height of the Red Scare.”

The full historical film review of Oppenheimer is entitled “Bringing Fire from the Gods,” and is published online on Law and Liberty.