A Japanese version of Christopher Nolan’s nuclear controversy drama Oppenheimer will screen next year, a local distributor said on Thursday. The launch had been in doubt amid criticism that the film, which is set during the Manhattan Project, largely ignores the devastation of the atomic bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This event led to more than 200,000 deaths, according to some estimates.
Since its July opening, Universal Pictures’ “Oppenheimer” has grossed over $950 million globally. But it faced a backlash in Japan, where a local distributor backed out of the release after a public debate about the film’s perceived insensitivity towards victims of America’s 1945 atomic bombings.
The indie distributor Bitters End will now handle a theatrical release in the country where the bombings occurred and where many of those who were killed were from. The company will work to make the film as appropriate for Japan as possible and is considering cultural adaptations of the movie that may include additional historical context or sensitivity warnings for viewers, it said in a statement.
Critics say the film depicts Oppenheimer as heroic but fails to address the moral issues surrounding his bomb invention. It also doesn’t show the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which have been the subject of intense outrage in recent months because of their catastrophic impact on the cities’ inhabitants, who were mostly civilians.
Nolan himself has defended the choice not to depict the bombings in the film, saying that physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer never witnessed them and instead learned about the bombings on the radio. He has also argued that the movie is not a documentary but an art film about a scientific process and its moral implications.
But critics say the film plays into a larger pattern of whitewashing both the history and threat of nuclear weapons by depicting scientists as heroes and overlooking the experiences of those whose lives were devastated by the bombs. Many of those people were from Japan, and the film’s omission of their voices and stories is particularly troubling, they say.
The film shows the atomic explosions only through stylized visual effects. For instance, when Oppenheimer imagines the consequences of his invention during times of great personal crisis, the explosions are described in audio, but we don’t see them.
The omission has drawn criticism from some viewers, who have noted that the United States and other nuclear powers continue to test their weapons in Indigenous lands and territories. For example, the US has tested in New Mexico, the British in Algeria, the Russians in Kazakhstan, and China in Uyghur territory. Activists say that the film could help raise awareness about those communities and encourage discussion of the need for an end to nuclear weapons testing. This is especially important at a time when nuclear arms are being stockpiled again, with the heightened risk of conflict and war in the region.
