Legendary Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron criticized acclaimed Hollywood filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning biopic, Oppenheimer, for not depicting the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. The Avatar filmmaker called Oppenheimer a “moral cop-out” for not showing the atomic bomb’s aftermath in the movie.
In an interview with Deadline, James Cameron, who is currently developing a film based on the Hiroshima bombing titled ‘Ghosts of Hiroshima,’ said, “Yeah, it’s interesting what he stayed away from. Look, I love the filmmaking, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop-out. Because it’s not like Oppenheimer didn’t know the effects. He’s got one brief scene in the film where we see — and I don’t like to criticize another filmmaker’s film – but there’s only one brief moment where he sees some charred bodies in the audience, and then the film goes on to show how it deeply moved him. But I felt that it dodged the subject.”
In earlier interviews, Christopher Nolan had defended his decision, saying that Oppenheimer is narrated entirely from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s subjective viewpoint. Nolan explained that deviating from this perspective would have disrupted the film’s emotional and narrative integrity. Incidentally, like James Cameron highlighted, Oppenheimer had a haunting scene in which J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) looks to devastating images of post-bomb catastrophe. This, Nolan said, conveys the weight of the consequences without graphic depictions.