Oppenheimer is just over a month away and Christopher Nolan fans are hotly anticipating the new movie. It stars Cillian Murphy as the eponymous theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer who is regarded as the “father of the atomic bomb”. This is due to his role in the Manhattan Project which created the first nuclear weapons. Nolan, known for his use of practical effects of CGI in his previous movies, has made comments that has fans asking “did Christopher Nolan use a real nuke in Oppenheimer?”
The new movie, which follows the career of Oppenheimer including the creation and detonation of the first A-bomb, features a scene recreating the Trinity Test. The infamous test, which took place in New Mexico on 16 July, 1945, yielded an explosion equivalent to 25-kilotons of TNT.
For Oppenheimer, Nolan said he wanted to recreate the world-changing explosion using practical effects instead of CGI.
“Recreating the Trinity test without the use of computer graphics was a huge challenge to take on,” Nolan told Total Film.
““Andrew Jackson – my visual effects supervisor, I got him on board early on — was looking at how we could do a lot of the visual elements of the film practically, from representing quantum dynamics and quantum physics to the Trinity test itself… there were huge practical challenges.”
But how did Nolan achieve this? Did he use a real nuke in Oppenheimer?
Did Christopher Nolan use a real nuke in Oppenheimer?
Did Christopher Nolan use a real nuke in Oppenheimer? The practical effects for the upcoming movie about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life did not include the use of a real nuclear weapon.
The recreation of the Trinity Test was done without the use of CGI; however, the use of a nuke for the movie would certainly go against all kinds of ethical standards.
In 2020’s Tenet, Christopher Nolan did blow up a real-life Boeing 747. Similarly, he flipped a truck in The Dark Knight and built a rotating hallway for Inception.
The nuclear explosion in Oppenheimer is a recreation of such a detonation and not the real thing. Although, if Nolan’s past efforts at practical effects are anything to go by, the recreation will look just as awe-inspiring as a real nuke.
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