THE APOCALYPTIC OPTIMISM OF CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

The director says his new biopic, Oppenheimer, might just terrify you. At the very least, it'll force you to ask questions about history, fear, technology-all of it

- MARIA STRESHINSKY

WHEN WIRED HEARD that Christopher Nolan and his producer—and wife—Emma Thomas were coming out with a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, we were perplexed. At least for a moment. It is hard for WIRED to resist a Nolan–Thomas film. Nolan has a real love of science, just like us. (We know this because, well, it’s pretty obvious in some of his movies, but also because Nolan guest-edited an issue of wired back in 2014 when his film Interstellar came out and we got him to geek out over physics.) Add to that, the duo like to bend their audience’s minds. And their eyeballs. They make superhero movies! It's so much chum for WIRED.

So, Oppenheimer. A biopic, a look back at history. Alas. WIRED parlance is more often about looking ahead. (Not that we didn't like Dunkirk.) So we kinda thought maybe we weren't the magazine to dive into this one.

But we couldn't get the idea out of our minds, because so many conversations in the office and in meetings and around technology were about the potentially apocalyptic time we are living in. Climate, war, yes. But also, generative AI. Over and over, I was hearing people compare this moment to the mid-1940s, when we stepped across the threshold into the nuclear age, or to the years when Oppenheimer was heading up the project to build the bomb in New Mexico.