Before Christopher Nolan, Oliver Stone Could’ve Made Oppenheimer

Stone continued his praise, tweeting: 

“[Nolan’s] direction is mind-boggling and eye-popping as he takes reams of incident and cycles it into an exciting torrent of action inside all the talk. Each actor is a surprise to me, especially Cillian Murphy, whose exaggerated eyes here feel normal playing a genius like Oppenheimer.”

Stone, however, being familiar with the history of J. Robert Oppenheimer, wanted to point out that Nolan did fudge history a little bit (as all biopics do anyway). Stone created and directed a documentary TV series in 2012 called “The Untold History of the United States,” which sought to expose the more sinister machinations of American history and the deceit regularly committed by those in power. The series was accompanied by the publication of a book authored by Stone and historian Peter Kuznick. Stone pointed out that some of the American propaganda about the atomic bomb was subtly reinforced by subplots in “Oppenheimer” and he wanted to set the record straight. 

For one, “Oppenheimer” stated that the American military justified their dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a show of strength; the Generals wanted to prove that America could indeed wipe out entire cities. As Stone corrects, America had been already fire-bombing Japanese cities for months and had already killed 800,000 people in the Tokyo fire-bombing alone. The Japanese government, Stone points out, already knew that America had the ability to wipe out cities and that they were merely calculating acceptable losses prior to the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings.