Guns don’t kill people, people kill people – or so goes a common phrase trotted out by those of us who are skeptical of gun control measures. But even though it’s usually invoked to argue that we should focus on preventing certain people from buying guns rather than preventing everyone from buying guns, it can also be twisted in such a way to support the opposite position. If humans, as a species, have shown themselves capable of killing each other, and if a gun, untouched by a human hand, is by itself harmless, then why not prevent humans from ever touching guns in the first place? Why should we trust humans to be around guns at all?

Either way you use it, this phrase rests on the idea that we can control gun possession one way or another. And that’s true – while they may not always be successful, policies can be drafted and laws can be passed that prevent people with a history of mental illness or domestic violence from purchasing firearms and making themselves dangerous. This is possible because guns exist outside of people themselves – one is not inherently a gun owner, one becomes one.

However, the same is not true of intelligence or ambition. They cannot be purchased in a store, and – as argued in Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s recently released magnum opus about the father of the atomic bomb – these things might be even more dangerous than guns. Much of Oppenheimer’s three hour runtime is spent pondering the implications of the Manhattan Project and the ensuing bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but, fittingly for a movie named after a book titled American Prometheus, the most destructive force in the film isn’t nuclear fission, but man’s hubris and ego. The drive to distinguish oneself from others, to attain true power, is the driving force in the film behind not only the development of nuclear weapons, but also the petty fights that lead to the downfall of both Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his adversary Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). The scale of the destruction ranges from entire cities to two men’s careers, but either way, the damage is total and unspeakable, and the world, it seems, may never recover.

Oppenheimer’s arrogance is apparent early on the film’s runtime which, because this is a Christopher Nolan movie, covers events closer to the end of the film’s story. Years after the close of World War II, Strauss offers Oppenheimer a position at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and their ensuing meeting highlights the discrepancies between the two men. Oppenheimer is larger than life, the scion of a wealthy family who also happens to be a genius, somebody who needs no doors opened for him because he forces them open himself. Strauss, on the other hand, is the personification of the American dream, someone who attained wealth and success not through elite education and superior breeding, but through his own wit and hard work, and developing his own connections. 

As a result, the two are incompatible. While Oppenheimer claims he can relate to Strauss’ status as a “self-made man” because “my father was one,” he really can’t, and the kinds of things Strauss might do to impress someone else (like introduce them to Albert Einstein) don’t work on Oppenheimer (who has known Einstein for years). Even their senses of humor are out of sync – when Oppenheimer teasingly expresses his astonishment that Strauss began his career as a “lowly shoe seller,” Strauss insists that he was “just a shoe seller,” and he wears the pain from this comment as Oppenheimer leaves him to speak with Einstein. Even though Strauss brought the two men to Princeton, he still feels looked down upon and shut out, which breeds a resentment that will lead to both of their undoing.

Far from a self-made man, Oppenheimer is portrayed as something of an intellectual demigod, his preternatural understanding of physics as almost heaven sent. We’re told that he isn’t a particularly talented mathematician or lab worker, but that he can “hear the music” of physics, as Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) puts it, a perception that is portrayed by the swirling particles he sees while laying heartbroken and homesick in bed while attending Cambridge. His brilliance is innate, and that brilliance begets an arrogance that begets a complicated sex life. It also makes him a myopic dilettante – he attends Communist Party meetings but never joins, seeming to enjoy the social aspect of the meetings more than the ideology. Even his support of FAECT, the emerging faculty union at Berkeley, is portrayed as another way for him to peddle influence for influence’s sake – the second he realizes it will prevent him from working on the Manhattan Project, he leaves the group.

While Oppenheimer claims his pursuit of developing the atomic bomb is portrayed in part as an attempt to exact revenge against the Germans (“It’s not your people they’re herding into camps,” he tells a non-Jewish colleague), it quickly becomes another way to satisfy his ego. Part of this is driven by his own embarrassment – his theories and equations tell him nuclear fission is impossible, but his more experimentally-focused colleagues, such as Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), prove him otherwise. But this stumble doesn’t discourage his own inflated self-perception – if anything, it reinforces it, and he more or less wills himself to the head of the Manhattan Project despite his political baggage. 

It’s in this position, where he makes one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in human history, that he also makes his biggest mistake – he overestimates his own value to the United States.  Despite literally building a town on the high mesas of New Mexico and the weapon that will end the war, he’s not wanted in Washington when the bomb is dropped. In fact, he has to find out the results of the bombing with the rest of the world as they listen to Harry S. Truman’s radio address. By leading a project that literally harnessed the power of the sun, Oppenheimer was able to delude himself into believing that he was the most important person in the world. But he comes to learn that he was actually just one cog in a larger machine that only cared about what he produced, not his skill or intellect.

It’s after that humiliation that Oppenheimer finally grapples with the enormity of what he’s done. What was once a career advancement opportunity has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. As such, his dreams about the beauty of physics turn into nightmares. As he gives a rather half-hearted but celebratory speech to the Los Alamos workers, the swirling particles he used to dream about are replaced with nightmares of nuclear war. He can see nothing but charred bodies and melting flesh, while the rapturous screams of his audience become cries of anguish, their tears of joy profound grieving, and alcohol-induced vomit the grisly side-effects of radiation sickness. The sick irony is that this newfound humility is lost on a large segment of the scientific and political establishment. Manhattan Project colleague Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) pushes for the development of the hydrogen bomb, and Truman (Gary Oldman), dismissive of both Oppenheimer’s guilty conscience and fears of an arms race, arrogantly insists that “Russia won’t get the bomb.” The United States government cared what Oppenheimer thought when they were working towards the same goal – but once their paths diverged, he was no longer a trusted advisor, just a “crybaby” standing in the way of further military dominance.

The back third of Oppenheimer shifts the focus away from the titular scientist and back on to Strauss, who’s been nominated by Dwight D. Eisenhower for Secretary of Commerce. During his confirmation hearings, numerous questions are raised about his relationship with Oppenheimer, with whom he worked as chair of the Atomic Energy Council and whose security clearance renewal was denied in a controversial process, allegedly because of his proximity to communism. While Strauss initially plays innocent about Oppenheimer’s security hearings, his conversations with an Eisenhower aide (Alden Ehrenreich) slowly reveal the truth – he had engineered Oppenheimer’s clearance denial because Oppenheimer had humiliated him in a different congressional hearing regarding the export of isotopes, and had clashed with him over the necessity of developing a hydrogen bomb. 

It’d seemed shrewd at the time – it not only removed a key political opponent from a position of influence, but would also allow Strauss to claim a (allegedly) communist scalp to satiate a nation gripped by McCarthyism as he sought to advance his career in government. But Strauss is so sure of himself he refuses to follow his own advice. “Amateurs chase the sun and get burned,” he tells the aide. “Real power stays in the shadows.” Of course, chasing the sun is exactly what Strauss is doing by seeking a cabinet position, and that sun begins to beat down harshly on his past treatment of Oppenheimer. Thanks, in part, to negative testimony given by David L. Hill (Rami Malek), he becomes the first cabinet nominee to be rejected since the 1920s. After hearing the news, Strauss rails against Oppenheimer, claiming that he turned the scientific community against him, beginning with his conversation with Einstein at Princeton. “It’s possible they weren’t talking about you at all?” the aide tells him, pointing out and smashing Strauss’ paranoia and self-importance. “Is it possible they were talking about something more important?”

Ironically, they were and they weren’t. The film ends with that conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein and Princeton, during which they both express their concern that, by helping develop the atomic bomb, they’ve created something that could destroy the world. But the bulk of the conversation concerns their reputations – how Oppenheimer and his colleagues treated Einstein as a relic of a past age, and how Oppenheimer may soon meet the same fate. “When they’ve punished you enough, they’ll serve you salmon and potato salad, make speeches, give you a medal, and pat you in the back telling all is forgiven,” Einstein says, as scenes from Oppenheimer’s eventual Fermi Award ceremony flash across the screen. “Just remember, it won’t be for you. It would be for them.” 

Despite kickstarting an international arms race, it’s impossible for them to not discuss themselves. J. Robert Oppenheimer may have invented the thing that could eventually destroy the world, but the hardest thing for him to grapple with may not be the death and destruction he made possible, but how it will change the way people think of him. No matter how much we try to play god, we still can’t escape our own petty, human concerns.