James Cameron is no fan of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Cameron, who is developing his own atomic bomb movie, Ghosts of Hiroshima, adapting Charles Pellegrino novel To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima which explores the devastating ramifications for the Japanese, criticizes Nolan’s film as a “moral cop out” for refusing to do the same.
Cameron told Deadline…
“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. I don’t know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they didn’t want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail. I’m just stupid that way.”
Cameron continued, acknowledging that Ghosts of Hiroshima might not be a commercial success, but he hopes to capture the same level of authenticity as Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. The story focuses on a real-life man, Japanese marine engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi who survived both atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. He lived to the age of 93 and died in 2010.
“You’re dealing with something that’s on a whole other level. Look, this may be a movie that I make that makes the least of any movie I’ve ever made, because I’m not going to be sparing, I’m not going to be circumspect. I want to do for what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what Steven Spielberg did with the Holocaust and D-Day with ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ He showed it the way it happened. He and I talked about this, and he shared this with me. When he was making that film, notwithstanding whatever the studio wanted from it, he said, I’m going to make it as intense as I can make it, because my limitation as any filmmaker — and he’s the best out there — is that I can’t make it as intense as it really was. That was an object lesson. You’ve got to use everything at your cinematic disposal to show people what happened. We all love our horror movies, and horror movies love to outdo each other. This is true horror, because it happened.”
To be fair, this criticism of Oppenheimer isn’t new. The film was a huge hit, earning $975M and winning seven Academy Awards, but many have noted the limited perspective and Nolan’s focus on the man J. Robert Oppenheimer rather than the repercussions of what he built. Clearly, the movie Cameron is making is not what Nolan had in mind, and that’s okay.
There’s room for the visions of both filmmakers, and Cameron prefers to issue warnings directly. His Terminator was a dire warning about the threat of nuclear holocaust, while Avatar warns of environmental disaster. It’s what he does. And while he fears Ghosts of Hiroshima could be his least successful movie, if played right it could be just as much of a hit as Oppenheimer.
