After its chilling opening title card describing Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and bestowing this gift upon humanity, only to be punished for eternity for the trouble, “Oppenheimer” opens on its eponymous figure observing raindrops falling on a puddle somewhere in the Cambridge campus. Juxtaposed against fleeting imagery of the microscopic world and visuals echoing violent nuclear explosions, it’s as if even a young Oppenheimer was constantly plagued by how his actions could bring damnation onto the entire world. Even nature is no escape.
When the film concluded with a very similar close-up of a much older Oppenheimer gazing out towards raindrops falling on a pond, fans naturally assumed this was another instance of Christopher Nolan’s penchant for parallel and downright poetic filmmaking. It obviously worked out that way, but it wasn’t quite as planned out as most would’ve thought. In an interview with BBC Radio, Nolan revealed how that opening shot came to be:
“It’s not in the script, actually, which for me is very rare. It’s a sort of symbol, a symbolic representation that started to insert itself in the filming. I’m a very controlled and controlling filmmaker, and I don’t often shift something as important as that, but it was something that just kept pulling us in and pulling us in that we kept repeating in the filming. Myself and [director of photography] Hoyte van Hoytema and Cillian, you know, just finding this. And working with Jen [Lame] in the edit suite relatively late, we realized that that’s exactly the opening.”
The haunting bookends play a large part in tying together the whole epic, tragic saga of Oppenheimer, but it goes to show how much the Film Gods can have the final say in things — oftentimes for the better.
Source From: www.slashfilm.com
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