Why Oppenheimer's Nuke Explosion Was Filmed With Practical Effects And Not CG
gamespot.comBatman director Christopher Nolan's next movie, Oppenheimer, tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb. The story will include a depiction of the Trinity Test, which represented the world's first atomic bomb explosion in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. You might think this would be depicted via CG in Oppenheimer, but Nolan wanted it to be as real as possible.
In a new behind-the-scenes featurette, Nolan said for the scene to look believable and «nightmarish» like it was in real life, it needed to be filmed practically and not with computer graphics.
«We did a lot of experimentation. We came up with some very interesting analogue methods of how to approach this, all of which was leading to the Trinity Test, which had to feel nightmarish and terrifying in a way that computer graphics never really is,» he said. «What we were able to get into the finished film, to me, is extraordinarily beautiful but also frightening.»
It's not immediately clear how Nolan and his team pulled it off, but in one scene from the video, you can see a crew member filling a 55-gallon drum with what looks to be gasoline. And just to be crystal clear, Nolan did not detonate an actual nuclear bomb for Oppenheimer, but instead an explosion that was meant to look like an atomic bomb had just gone off.
In real life, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan a month later, killing hundreds of thousands of people and contributing to the end of World War II.
Following the bombings, Oppenheimer reflected on his military mission and quoted from Bhagavad Gita, saying, «Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.»
Oppenheimer the movie is based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph
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