Written by: Belle McIntyre

Everyone who was fascinated by Oppenheimer should appreciate this up close and personal deep dive into the backstory and point of view of one of the major contributors to the development of the atomic bomb. Einstein, the man, was given little more than a glancing cameo in the film Oppenheimer. This remedies that in a more intimate manner using only Einstein’s own words whether in archival footage or spoken by Aiden McArdle, doing a remarkably believable portrayal of the twinkly-eyed, wild-haired theoretical physicist.

There are fascinating flashbacks of Einstein as a brilliant misfit student concocting his controversial ground breaking theories regarding the relativity of time, equating mass and energy, and stars bending light. He was a source of despair to many of his professors who were certain he would never go anywhere. Meanwhile as a lifelong passionate pacificist he was one of four German intellectuals to sign a manifesto opposing Germany’s entry into WWI. In 1919 his theory of the cosmos was presented at the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society as a revolution in science, overturning Newton’s ideas. He was now accepted world-wide as a physicist, the successor to Isaac Newton. Shortly after that, in 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

The film opens in 1932 when Hitler was already on the rise and terrible actions were being taken against the Jews, targeting in particular the scholars and scientists, in Germany. At that time Einstein already had a bounty on his head. When he fled, he was housed in a nondescript one-room shack in rural Norfolk as the guest of Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson (Andrew Havill), where he was guarded by two female sharpshooters, who were on duty at all times. In 1933 he came out in public and gave a speech at the Royal Albert Hall to an audience of 10,000 souls denouncing the evils and danger of Naziism and Hitler. Immediately, he set sail for the United States, never to return to Europe again. He had secured a professorship in Princeton, NJ, a place he felt safe and grew to love.

When he became aware that his theories and experiments were being utilized to create the atomic bomb, he was horrified at the possibilities. Yet, as Hitler’s war machine moved on causing staggering death and destruction, (shown using archival footage of pogroms, military parades and rallies, scenes of Jews being rounded up and incarcerated into concentration camps) he became fearful that the Germans were working to create the bomb and might accomplish that before the Americans. That inspired him to write to Roosevelt encouraging him to support the Manhattan Project. It was not until the US bombed innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that it became source of massive regret and shock at what had been released.

This is not a perfect film but it is a relevant capsule in the sad and sorry history of wars and their cycles, of cause and results, and of man’s imperfect impulses and actions.