Movies About the Atomic Bomb: How Filmmakers Have Dramatized the Nuclear Age

The atomic bomb changed history in an instant. It has taken filmmakers decades to explore what that change meant.

Movies about the atomic bomb have approached the subject from remarkably different directions. Some take us inside the secret effort to build the first nuclear weapon. Others put us among the people who experienced its destruction. Some explore what happened to survivors afterwards. And as the nuclear age continued, filmmakers began imagining something even more terrifying: what might happen if the bomb were ever used again.

For a screenwriter, that variety illustrates something fundamental about historical storytelling. An enormous historical subject isn't necessarily a story in itself. The story emerges when the filmmaker decides where to put the audience.

Here are six very different ways filmmakers have done that.

OPPENHEIMER: The People Who Built the Bomb

Christopher Nolan's OPPENHEIMER could have been a panoramic movie about the Manhattan Project, World War II and the bombing of Japan. Instead, Nolan largely confines the story to the experience of one man: theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

We see scientists recruited. We experience the secrecy of Los Alamos. We watch the Trinity test. We see Oppenheimer wrestle with the consequences of what he helped create.

What we don't see is equally important.

OPPENHEIMER does not recreate the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The decision generated debate when the film was released, but it is consistent with the movie's determination to remain largely within Oppenheimer's experience. He didn't witness the destruction of those cities, so neither do we.

It's a useful demonstration of the power of perspective.

A filmmaker tackling an event as enormous as the invention of the atomic bomb cannot show everything. Choosing what the audience doesn't experience can be as important as deciding what it does.

Nolan makes the atomic age personal by asking us to experience its birth largely through the man whose name would forever be associated with it.

FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY: The Race to Build It

Roland Joffé's 1989 film FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY visits much of the same historical territory but finds a different source of drama.

The movie focuses on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and particularly the relationship between its military leader, General Leslie Groves, and scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The destination is already known. The bomb will work.

That doesn't eliminate the drama because history supplies events, not necessarily the dramatic conflicts that make those events work as a movie.

Scientists and soldiers have different priorities. Scientific discovery collides with military secrecy. Moral questions grow more urgent as the theoretical possibility of an atomic weapon becomes something frighteningly real.

The Manhattan Project wasn't simply a scientific undertaking. It brought together brilliant people under extraordinary pressure to achieve something that had never been done before.

Put characters with different personalities, responsibilities and beliefs inside that pressure cooker and history begins to generate drama.

BAREFOOT GEN: The People Beneath the Bomb

Move the audience thousands of miles away and the same historical subject becomes an entirely different movie.

BAREFOOT GEN, adapted from Keiji Nakazawa's manga, experiences Hiroshima through the eyes of a young Japanese boy.

Nakazawa himself survived the Hiroshima bombing as a child, and his story approaches the atomic bomb not as a scientific achievement, military strategy or political decision, but as something that suddenly descends upon ordinary people.

The contrast with OPPENHEIMER could hardly be greater.

One story looks toward the bomb from the laboratories where it was created. The other looks up at it from the city where it explodes. That change in perspective transforms everything.

Scientific questions become questions of survival. Political calculations disappear behind immediate human needs. The enormous machinery of nations at war is reduced to what happens to individuals, families and children caught beneath it.

The historical event hasn't changed. Our position inside it has.

BLACK RAIN: What Happens After History Happens?

Historical movies naturally gravitate toward major events. Battles. Assassinations. Disasters. Victories. Defeats.

But sometimes the most revealing story begins after the event everyone remembers.

Shohei Imamura's BLACK RAIN follows survivors of Hiroshima as they attempt to rebuild their lives in the years after the bombing. Radiation, illness and social stigma continue shaping their lives long after the explosion itself has disappeared from the sky.

The bomb is therefore both an event and a shadow hanging over everything that follows. That's another important way filmmakers can approach history.

The moment recorded in textbooks doesn't necessarily have to provide the climax of the movie. Consequences can generate stories of their own.

What happens after the armies leave? After the headlines disappear? After the event officially becomes history?

For survivors, history doesn't always end when historians say it does.

DR. STRANGELOVE: What If the Only Response Is to Laugh?

By the 1960s, the cinematic question surrounding atomic weapons had changed.

The bomb already existed. The United States and Soviet Union possessed nuclear arsenals capable of catastrophic destruction. The question was no longer how humanity could create such a weapon. It was whether humanity was foolish enough to use one again.

Stanley Kubrick found an extraordinary answer in DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB.

He made a comedy.

A rogue American general orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and politicians and military leaders desperately attempt to stop machinery designed specifically to make an attack difficult to stop.

The prospect of nuclear annihilation becomes absurdist satire. That choice demonstrates how little historical subject matter dictates genre. Nuclear weapons can provide the basis for biography, war drama, survivor story, political thriller or black comedy.

Kubrick's characters are ridiculous. The situation isn't.

In fact, the terrifying possibility underneath the comedy is precisely what makes the comedy work.

FAIL SAFE: The Same Nightmare Without the Jokes

Sidney Lumet's FAIL SAFE arrived in 1964, the same year as DR. STRANGELOVE, and the similarities between their premises are striking.

An American nuclear attack on the Soviet Union is mistakenly set in motion. The people in charge discover that their own systems make stopping it extraordinarily difficult. Political and military leaders race to prevent catastrophe.

But Lumet doesn't play the situation for laughs. FAIL SAFE is a deadly serious thriller.

The pairing of the two films provides perhaps the clearest demonstration of how dramatically perspective and tone can transform similar subject matter. Kubrick looks at humanity's elaborate machinery for destroying itself and sees grotesque absurdity.

Lumet looks at essentially the same nightmare and sees terror.

One makes us laugh. The other tries to make us sweat.

Both ask what happens when human beings create systems capable of consequences they may no longer be able to control. The subject is similar. The movies could hardly feel more different.

One Bomb. Many Stories.

OPPENHEIMER asks what it was like to help create the atomic bomb.

FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY finds conflict among the people racing to build it.

BAREFOOT GEN puts us among the civilians beneath it.

BLACK RAIN asks what happened to people who survived it.

DR. STRANGELOVE turns the possibility of nuclear war into savage comedy.

FAIL SAFE turns a similar possibility into a nightmare.

None of these approaches is the story of the atomic bomb.

That's precisely the point.

History is larger than any movie. Every filmmaker approaching it has to decide which fragment of that history contains the story they want to tell, whose experience will carry it and what the audience will be allowed to see. Sometimes the most interesting possibilities can be found beyond the parts of history that have already been dramatized.

Finding Another Story in the Atomic Age

More than eight decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atomic age continues to offer filmmakers different ways into one of history's most consequential subjects.

For screenwriter Phil Parker, the inspiration for the WWII thriller THE THIRD BOMB came not from retelling the creation of the atomic bomb or recreating its destruction, but from research into the uncertainty surrounding the final stages of the Pacific War.

That research revealed another dramatic world of secrets, incomplete intelligence and decisions carrying extraordinary consequences.

The result was THE THIRD BOMB, a multi-award-winning WWII atomic bomb thriller inspired by historical events.

Explore THE THIRD BOMB.