Universal Studios has released another trailer for Christopher Nolan's forthcoming film Oppenheimer, which is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Cillian Murphy stars as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, marking the sixth time Murphy has worked with Nolan. Universal Pictures describes the film as "an epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it."

Industry watchers will note that this is the first film Nolan has made without partnering with Warner Bros. since 2002's Insomnia. Chalk the falling out to the impact of the COViD-19 pandemic on Hollywood, notably Warner Bros.'s controversial decision to release all its 2021 films simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. The studio followed this strategy for Nolan's 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet, which grossed just $365 million worldwide against its $200 million budget. While this technically made Tenet the fifth biggest film of 2020, by industry standards, it was a box office failure.

Nolan was deeply unhappy with this arrangement, particularly since the studio hadn't conferred with him prior to making the decision about Tenet. So when he decided to write and direct Oppenheimer, the director approached several other studios about partnering with him on the project, eventually signing on with Universal.

The cast includes Matt Damon as Major General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project; Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer; Robert Downey Jr. as Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chair Lewis Strauss; Florence Pugh as Oppenheimer's mistress, Jean Tatlock; Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence; Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush; Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg; Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs; Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman; David Krumholtz as I.I. Rabi; Devon Bostick as Seth Neddermeyer; Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge; Danny Deferrari as Enrico Fermi; Benny Safdie as Edward Teller; Gustaf Skarsgård as Hans Bethe; and Tom Conti as Albert Einstein. In addition, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Jack Quaid, David Dastmalchian, Alex Wolff, Scott Grimes, James D'Arcy, and Casey Affleck will appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

It's not hard to fathom why Nolan would be drawn to this material. As we've previously reported, Groves chose Oppenheimer to lead the secret weapons laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Groves felt the physicist had the breadth of knowledge to bring together physicists, chemists, engineers, and metallurgists (among other disciplines) whose expertise would be crucial to the success of the project.

Just before sunrise on July 16, 1945, at the secluded Alamogordo Bombing Range in the Central New Mexican desert, a prototype nuclear bomb nicknamed "Gadget" was hoisted to the top of a 100-foot tower and detonated. The blast vaporized the steel tower and produced a mushroom cloud rising to more than 38,000 feet. The heat from the explosion melted the sandy soil around the tower into a mildly radioactive, glassy crust now known as trinitite. The shock wave was powerful enough to break windows 120 miles away. Oppenheimer later recalled that it reminded him of a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."