If graphic nudity offends you do not go see this movie. There are two scenes of graphic nudity which, in my opinion, could have been eliminated and yet conveyed the same information with well thought out dialog (though possibly offensive language), inuendo and finally clever filming.
With that out of the way, this is a movie about a true story, that shows the complicated people in the world we live in and compromises that need to be made for a project to have the most qualified man to run it, despite the bureaucratic technical road blocks which common sense is needed to navigate around. This is the reason that we need smart general officers in the military willing to stick out their necks to use their common sense to make decisions that aren’t necessarily according to “the book.” Matt Damon, in my opinion, plays that most intuitive of general officers that makes the hard decisions based on common sense that resulted in the best and fastest outcome for the top-secret project that was known as the “Manhattan Project.” Robert Downey Jr.’s character’s performance is a master class on Machiavellian political strategy with regard to the United States Government Bureaucracy. He shows how conniving ambitious government bureaucrats can possibly destroy good people for their own selfish ends.
If this film is true to life, we see at least one decision Oppenheimer made to insure the United States stayed ahead in the arms race, as well as the strategies and the people he enlisted to insure we had the best people for each part of the job, the best organizational structure for both the efficiency and secrecy of the job and the twists and turns and triumphs which enabled the United States to build the first atomic bomb. It also shows us the personalities and the origin of the drive that gave us the bomb – many of the principals in building the bomb were of Jewish ancestry and the knew the consequences of Hitler getting the bomb first and winning the war.
Traditional Thomistic Catholic 