Christopher Nolan on Nuclear War

It is a testament to the insane overhyping of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years, the pervasiveness of the tedious Luddite-Frankenstein complex view of AI, and the extreme failings of the media generally (not least its treating tech billionaires as all-knowing oracles), that when Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer came out--a movie about the making of the atom bomb, at a time when with every headline the danger of nuclear war should have been more and more on the minds of the commentariat, what the members of that commentariat all wanted to talk about was . . . the supposed danger of AI research (with this the more foolish because their concern is less the misuse and abuse of AI by human decisionmakers than AI itself somehow becoming malevolent).

Still, if they preferred to ignore the nuclear theme and fixate on their morbid Terminator fantasies (overlooking how it was nuclear weapons that actually enabled AI destroy humanity in that 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger B-movie so many treat as a philosophical treatise on the subject), Christopher Nolan, who often in the past had been evasive about his politics in interviews (lamely telling Rolling Stone that The Dark Knight wasn't political), discussed his views on the subject with an interviewer from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in quite frank fashion before Oppenheimer's release. In the course of said interview Nolan discussed growing up in England in the 1980s, amid what is today remembered as the "Euromissile crisis" and the Second Cold War, and the prominence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as how it pervaded pop culture at the time (Nolan recalling first learning of Robert Oppenheimer from the lyrics of the Sting song "Russians"). Nolan was also forthright--indeed, brave--in pointing to his film's relevance to the present, and not least the war in Ukraine, and how what he hears "not just from Putin" but "from both sides of the political spectrum" frightens him, leaving him "feel[ing] we're in a world now where people are starting to once again talk about those things as some acceptable possibility for our world," with "normalizing . . . atomic weapons" likely to lead to "to larger- and larger-scale conflict that will ultimately destroy the planet" (in a way that few others have pointed out).

Given how much coverage the film has received it is surprising how (relative to it) little coverage these comments of Nolan's have got, the commentariat (at the very least) simply not interested. Still, for his part film critic David Walsh has taken the view that the broader public that made of the movie a near-billion dollar hit--a Batman-like success, especially if one grades it on the post-pandemic curve so many others so readily apply to more conventional blockbusters like Marvel films--has not missed the movie's relevance. Arguing that it has indeed come out for this demanding, dense, idiosyncratically structured and shot, three-hour R-rated biopic in large part because that relevance struck a chord with them, as seen in his latest piece on the subject of the movie's reception a scarce week and a half before Hollywood's Biggest Night, and this movie's likely capturing the Biggest of that night's prizes.