Two new documentaries available to stream this week are riding the wave of anticipation for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, out in cinemas next Friday. Lest Nolan’s Cillian Murphy-starring biopic of atomic bomb creator J Robert Oppenheimer not serve the facts diligently enough, then Oppenheimer: The Real Story (from 17 July) and To End All War: Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (Now TV) are on hand to fill in any gaps. They join a long line of documentaries on the subject and its adjacent concerns; the surprise is that it’s taken this long for Oppenheimer himself to be the protagonist of a major Hollywood drama.
But the legacy of the atom bomb, from its development to its impact to its all-round political aura, is a rich one, spanning everything from esoteric arthouse films to genre B-movies. For decades after the horrifying outcome of the Manhattan Project, through the long-lingering chill of the cold war, anxiety over nuclear warfare was the driving force behind any number of thrillers and war films. Comedies, sci-fi and even the odd film noir – see Robert Aldrich’s blistering Kiss Me Deadly (1955; Internet Archive), which culminates in a literally explosive allegory – got in on the paranoia.
