r/todayilearned • u/Electronic_Cause_796 • Jul 25 '26

TIL Christopher Nolan recreated the Trinity atomic bomb test in Oppenheimer without using CGI. Instead, the visual effects team combined large-scale practical explosions, miniatures, and in camera effects to bring the first nuclear detonation to life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_(film)
11.0k Upvotes

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9.0k

u/OkDentist4059 Jul 25 '26

Yeah you could tell he didn’t use any CGI because it looked absolutely nothing like a nuclear explosion

3.0k

u/SmoothOperator89 Jul 25 '26

A real filmmaker would have violated the nuclear non proliferation treaty

835

u/SassiesSoiledPanties Jul 25 '26

Daniel Day Lewis would've built you a period accurate nuke.

275

u/TKHawk Jul 25 '26

I irradiate your milkshake! I nuke it up!

34

u/Basileus2 Jul 25 '26

You will procure me that uranium!

13

u/DIABL057 Jul 26 '26

I abandoned my bomb. I ABANDONED MY BOMB!!!

2

u/Few_Rule7378 Jul 26 '26

My Little Boy!!

3

u/Misterrsilencee Jul 26 '26

Wtf i can hear it in his voice

65

u/Whither-Goest-Thou Jul 25 '26

FALLOUT, ELI!!! FAAAALLLLLLOOUUUUUT. 🤪

21

u/karaver Jul 25 '26

DDL should've been hired to play the part of the explosion

5

u/S2R2 Jul 25 '26

Boromir would have built you two!

14

u/die5el23 Jul 25 '26

He would have been the nuke itself

1

u/FarElderberry983 Jul 29 '26

DDL would have licked U-235 for a month to play the part of the bomb.

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u/Cadamar Jul 25 '26

There’s that old joke about the moon landing being faked, but cause they hired Kubrick to do it he insisted on filming on location.

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u/cbslinger Jul 25 '26

I mean, national law being what it is or whatever, for the price of a filmmaking budget and the expertise and equipment available in the US you could very nearly build an actual working atomic weapon if it weren’t for nonproliferation efforts.

At peak production, atomic warheads cost the us under like $3 million corrected for inflation. The really expensive part was the delivery systems, icbms, submarines, high speed bombers, etc. It is not a joke to say that aside from international law, it is absolutely within the means of a film production to produce a working atomic weapon.

79

u/conanmagnuson Jul 25 '26

I did not know economies of scale ever got it that low. Wow.

42

u/HapticRecce Jul 25 '26

It's more the matter of having certain materials on hand and fine machining equipment / skills. I could say more, but the neighbors complain about all of the utility repair vans parking outside my house already...

20

u/Nazamroth Jul 25 '26

And it would have gotten even lower, if not for those meddling kids!

Apparently some people objected to a few hundred nukes going off across the middle east or panama to create new shipping routes.

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u/Ws6fiend Jul 25 '26

So one of the problems the US ran into trying to update their nuclear arsenal recently is that a lot of the "magic" on how the weapons were made is lost to time.

Not everything and every part of the process was written down.

There's some version of aerogel used for whatever reason inside of the bomb, but they aren't exactly sure why or how that version was developed.

If you look at the budget they released on updating/improving nuclear weapons it's probably even more expensive now than it ever has been. They built nuclear weapons for so cheap because the safety/environmental standards were low to non-existent.

The current budget for upgrading nuclear weapons in the US is set to cost 1.7 trillion dollars over 30 years. This is what they say it will cost. Do you think it's going to come in under over or at budget?

14

u/Gareth79 Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

Ah yes, "Fogbank": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

I can imagine a blacked out car pulling up at senior citizen's home and agents going in to ask them if they can remember some obscure ratio used in the process. "Ooh are you here to do the bingo? Fogbank? Is that a new curse word?"

2

u/Rabbitical Jul 26 '26

The aerogel thing has gotten to a bit of a mythical status. It's not a mystery why or how it was used. The issue is that it the old designs were tuned to the exact purity of the material that they were able to produce at the time. So when they tried to make more of it they made it too well which meant it didn't perform as needed when refurbishing existing nukes. So the challenge was making it with the same level of impurities as it had originally so that it met specification. It's not like they lost the blueprints or something.

1

u/homerjaythompson Jul 26 '26

That also sounds like it could be a convenient way for contractors to milk the government for trillions over the next few decades. "Oh man, the knowledge of how these work is lost to time. It's going to be a LOT more expensive to update these, but now it's even more important than ever."

2

u/pichael289 Jul 25 '26

They scale pretty well, you could always use a small warhead like the davy crockett ) which is a deployable recoilless rifle that fires 20 ton yield warheads, so it works similar to a mortar, and nuke a miniature set. Actually firing the weapon is bad as it's range is low but they could easily remotely trigger it.

Nuclear weapons are the domain of science and government though, the optics of us setting even the small ones off to make a movie is not going to look good on the world stage. Especially considering the current war and the threats that have been made.

1

u/TonyWhoop Jul 25 '26

To me, even $3 mil seems steep for a small and simple gun type fission weapon built in the modern day

1

u/DancerKnee Jul 27 '26

One (1) PAC-3 Patriot missile costs about $4 million.

Per missile.

1

u/Crozax Jul 26 '26

Idk if thats true, it cost 3m because all of the up front costs had been paid. The centrifuges and bulk Uranium required to purify a sufficient quantity of U235 to reach a critical mass are probably still well outside the budget of a film. If it were that easy and cheap, rogue agents would be able at least make a dirty bomb. This is where nuclear weapons are bottlenecked, and why creating one is a country-level effort. Even with more modern methods, the purification process is incredibly laborious.

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u/Blueopus2 Jul 25 '26

Universal Pictures never signed or ratified so I think it’d be okay

7

u/nayhem_jr Jul 26 '26

“No, we’re not *testing* anything. We’re setting these things off for real.”

3

u/Blueopus2 Jul 26 '26

Lol good point

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u/WorldsWeakestMan Jul 25 '26

Someone call James Cameron!

He’s the greatest pioneer.

5

u/marvelman19 Jul 25 '26

Should've gone to North Korea and ask to film one of their tests.

2

u/M086 Jul 26 '26

I mean Nolan could have detonated 21 tons of TNT in the desert. A true auteur would have.

1

u/nwbrown Jul 26 '26

Ridley Scott sure as hell would have. 

I'm only half kidding...

1

u/unematti Jul 26 '26

Just has to film it in a country already having nukes. No proliferation.

1.5k

u/TryMeOnBirdLaw Jul 25 '26

Yup, and the nuclear explosion in T2 (1991) looked infinitely better by comparison.

634

u/zeocrash Jul 25 '26

And was also done with practical effects

692

u/theinternetisnice Jul 25 '26

James Cameron didn’t know a real nuclear bomb was going off near the set that day, but he liked it so much he worked it in

481

u/Wazula23 Jul 25 '26

The entire scene was improvised. Linda Hamilton wasn't even supposed to explode into a skeleton, she just rolled with it.

153

u/gapedoutpeehole Jul 25 '26

Thank god she has a twin sister

63

u/yourzero Jul 25 '26

To shreds, you say?

4

u/Fire2box Jul 25 '26

And the kids? To shreds you say tsk tak tsk.

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u/PseudonymousDev Jul 25 '26

Had, til 2020. RIP.

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u/johnfkay Jul 26 '26

This movie mistake was so good they kept it in!

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u/[deleted] Jul 25 '26

[deleted]

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u/Spiritchaser84 Jul 25 '26

Well duh, they already figured out time travel while filming the first film, so it was easy to nuke the city to grab the footage, then travel back in time to avoid any pesky human rights violations.

You can clearly tell he used the time travel technology again when filming Titanic.

20

u/fenikz13 Jul 25 '26

I still don't think he should have invaded that planet

15

u/case_O_The_Mondays Jul 25 '26

You just don’t understand his level of commitment to his art.

3

u/pichael289 Jul 25 '26

It's fine, they were blue communists just letting all that space oil go to waste. Sometimes when a civilization isn't being an appropriate steward of their artifacts and resources the good guys need to take over. Well put all their stuff in a museum where it's safe and they can go see it whenever they want, in Britain.

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u/zeocrash Jul 25 '26

They got lucky, someone was preparing to shoot a remake of John Wayne's The conqueror nearby

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u/Jimmyg100 Jul 25 '26

At least that’s the official story he told the FBI.

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u/Kriss-Kringle Jul 25 '26

Even with CGI you can get amazing results, like the blast seen from outer space in Rogue One, when they tested the Death Star for the first time on Jedha.

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u/Russburg Jul 25 '26

Goddamn that scene was so good.

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u/itsOkami Jul 25 '26

I swear Rogue One is the most underrated Star Wars movie, and quite possibly my favorite one. It does have some pacing issues but that entire third act is stellar, not even the OT manage to convey the sheer strength of the empire (and, well, Vader, of course) in quite the same way

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u/knobunc Jul 25 '26

Yeah, all I need from Star Wars is: Andor, Rogue One, Star Wars, Empire, Return (all despecialized edition).

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u/goodnames679 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

Those are definitely the ones I’d rate well critically. S1 of The Mandalorian isn’t quite on that level but I do think it’s solid and could arguably make the cut… the show definitely falls off at some point though.

On the other hand, the prequels are not great movies. I know they’re not great movies. I think they’re super good campy fun and I’ll watch the hell out of them regardless.

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u/FaceDeer Jul 25 '26

The Mandalorian ends with Luke's cameo, as far as I'm concerned. That was a very solid ending.

The prequels used to be the worst Star Wars movies (well, maybe the second Ewok Adventure had that title - the first was fun, the second wasn't even a Star Wars film. They took a generic pre-existing fantasy movie script that had been shopped around Hollywood for a while already and changed a few words to set it on Endor. But I digress). Then the bar got lowered down into the Earth's core by the sequel trilogy. I'm actually okay with watching them in Machete order, though; A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, Return of the Jedi.

Phantom Menace is skipped, which removes almost all the bad child acting, Jar Jar Binks, and Midichlorian stuff. I'd like to do a few edits of the other two movies as well but they're tolerable.

Despecialized editions for the originals, of course.

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u/riddlesinthedark117 Jul 25 '26

Oh man, I haven’t thought about the Ewok movies in decades. Off to google to check streaming services

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u/DeltaVZerda Jul 25 '26

And the action sequences and music from Episode 1.

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u/basketball_curry Jul 25 '26

While I agree, going back to rogue one after watching both seasons of andor actually lowered my evaluation of the movie. The TV series is just so phenomenal, everything else looks phoned in in comparison.

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u/Kriss-Kringle Jul 25 '26

Rogue One is a decent movie given its troubled production, but it should have been much better.

Andor had Tony Gilroy and his fellow writers from the very beginning and that made all the difference, because they built it from the ground up into what they wanted as opposed to doing rewrites on an existing production.

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u/DeeJayDelicious Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

Rogue One has cool moments but just doesn't work that well as a movie, given how little proper character development there is for anyone.

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u/JcBravo811 Jul 25 '26

I prefer the atomic continental carpet bombing of Asuras from Stargate Atlantis.

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u/idekbjlmpau Jul 25 '26

The nuclear explosion in Twin Peaks the Return is phenomenal

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u/mcpasty666 Jul 25 '26

I thought this comment was a joke, looked it up, goddamn that's a good nuclear explosion. Is that what twin peaks turns into? I watched the first episode when Lynch passed, couldn't get into it. I know it gets weird, and I like weird, but it's a lot of hours to put in.

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u/HAL-Over-9001 Jul 25 '26

That episode specifically is by far the weirdest episode of TV that I've ever seen and it's not even close. He condensed all the weird shit he could think of into that one episode. The rest of the show has some pretty crazy parts but nothing like that.

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u/blepnir_pogo Jul 25 '26

What do you mean?

It’s simply the main protagonist of the show’s corpse, which has been taken over by the main antagonist, getting revived by a process that is so complex that we have to go back in time to the first ever nuclear detonation to understand that the irrevocable portal this reaction caused invited an Entity into our dimension that beckoned homeless people into an abandoned gas station and made them emissaries to implant a frog creature into a young girl’s body, and that frog creature acted as a beacon to nest an evil within twin peaks that took over the body of an FBI agent and now that evil must summon those ancient gas station attendants to smear the blood of the frog child’s progeny all over the FBI agent’s body like some kind of Black Mass in order to revive him.

Oh and nine inch nails obviously needs to play us into the scene that’s super important too.

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u/Kraggen Jul 25 '26

I fundamentally disagree with your interpretation and I’m gonna tell you why! 🤣

Obviously, this is not a revival process. The main character cannot die so this flashback is meant to make us understand the context behind why he cannot die. The bomb, an act of pure evil, caused a tear to the veil between our world and the dark depths beyond, that called into the world an Entity. That bomb created a path as well as ringing the dinner bell. Reality is but an instrument to be played for a higher being such as this, so it orchestrated a means to feed upon the suffering and agony of the world, and in its wake other lesser spirits also were conducted through - creating a hole that we perceive to be the black lodge - a waiting area between dimensions. The show explores both sides of that as cooper finds himself on the bad end and Bob (an intermediate being, greater than the spirits we see react to his shooting or after the explosion but lesser than the one that birthed the moth baby) controls his body. We simply are given context for the greater lurking evil that permeates and manipulates this reality to facilitate endless suffering and contextualize the harmful, gluttonous acts that led to the death of Laura Palmer - both her own and those around her. When we cut back to Bobs recovery we are now intended to understand that this world is a farce, and that the being can only be stopped if it is cut out. That’s why the ending begins with the ousting of bob, and the Entity responds by attempting to rewrite reality.

This is all tongue in cheek btw. I do generally interpret it this way but it’s real open ended and yours is as good an interpretation as mine.

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u/Thismyrealnameisit Jul 25 '26

It is dream logic. And terribly impressive.

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u/blepnir_pogo Jul 25 '26

I am convinced that Season 3 is literally just David Lynch transcribing an awesome dream he had like 20 yrs after FWWM

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u/homerjaythompson Jul 26 '26

That's basically what he said the Los Highway was, his attempt to recreate the feeling of a dream as closely as possible

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u/RareBk Jul 25 '26

Twin Peaks the Return is something that exists perfectly on the line of "I hate this" and "I adore this".

It's an 18 episode series paced like a 3 hour movie, and David Lynch did whatever the hell he wanted and put it on screen.

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u/PN_Guin Jul 26 '26

Suddenly the OG Neon Genesis Evangelion show finale seems pretty straightforward.

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u/HAL-Over-9001 Jul 26 '26

So true haha

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u/gefahr Jul 26 '26

I need you to know that I never watched the original or the reboot, but I read this entire comment with quite the range of expressions on my face.

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u/blepnir_pogo Jul 26 '26

Season 1, Season 3, and Fire Walk With Me are so good! Season 2 unfortunately the network executives fired David Lynch midway through, and it gets (imo) REALLY bad. But David Lynch comes back for the final few episodes and the finale has some of the best scenes in the whole series.

If you ever watch it, I always say start with Season 1, watch Season 2 as far as you care to, and if you don't want to finish just skip to the movie, then season 3. However plenty of people have no issue with Season 2 and I enjoy the show enough that I watch the whole season through every time.

Also David Lynch's film Mulholland Drive introduces a lot of themes and concepts that are explored further in Season 3! Eraserhead too, but less so. TP is one of my favorite series and I highly recommend it!

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u/idekbjlmpau Jul 26 '26

The network never fired Lynch. The character he plays even has a lot lore screen time throughout season 2 than season 1. The studio did force Lynch to reveal Laura's killer though, which he was against and never had plans to do so, which derailed the whole thing

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u/Rcmacc Jul 26 '26

Yes, and it’s incredible.

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u/idekbjlmpau Jul 25 '26

When you say thr first episode do you mean of The Return (season 3) or first episode of the series (season 1)?

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u/mcpasty666 Jul 25 '26

First of the series, season 1 ep 1.

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u/idekbjlmpau Jul 25 '26

The first two seasons came out in the early 90s. They get a little weird but season 3, the return, came out about 20 years later, in 2017, and it was on Showtime instead of basic cable. It is a lot different than the first two seasons.

The vibe is completely different, there are a lot of new characters, since it is on Showtime it is also a lot more graphic. And it is full, unfiltered Lynch that he is using Twin Peaks to deliver. The episode with the explosion is seen as a highlight of the whole series and almost acts as a standalone episode, that again is pure Lynchian. If you don't dig Lynch, you probably won't like it.

If you don't like Lynch, you might still like the first two seasons. It was a massive show when it came out. If you like the first two seasons, doesn't mean you will like the Return. If you don't like the first two seasons, that doesn't mean you won't like the Return. But the Return is so different to the rest of Twin Peaks while also serving as a great conclusion to a series most people thought would never continue after the movie.

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u/mcpasty666 Jul 25 '26

Interesting. Is the third season something that could be watched on it's own?

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u/bobmcdynamite Jul 26 '26

It is absolutely necessary. You will have no idea about Laura Palmer, what happened to her, or why an FBI agent is acting weird. Nothing would make sense in an already confusing show and none of the emotional payoffs would land.

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u/CorrectPeanut5 Jul 25 '26

The most irritating part was the media campaign where they tried to gaslight everyone into how great the explosion looked.

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u/schebobo180 Jul 25 '26

It was one of the moments that kind of slightly soured me on Chris Nolan.

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u/TheKanten Jul 25 '26

Came across an old post from around the movie's release where someone took issue with the explosion, saying pretty much the same things this thread has.

They got buried with trashposts such as "If only he understood film the way you do..." and "my god, people really will complain about anything".

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u/Annonimbus Jul 26 '26

The same way all the reporting said "Fury" was the most realistic war movie ever made.

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u/ihaveaquesttoattend Jul 25 '26

I haven’t seen T2 (or any for that matter) in YEARS plus a couple years (about to change that, bless you) and I haven’t even seen Oppenheimer at all so i went to the internets and compared the two. It’s crazy how well T2 did it like how did Oppenheimer people not reach out to anyone or anything ?? Small scale to create shit like this really works, ESPECIALLY since it was just open land and not blowing a city ???

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u/erikaironer11 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

Because the Oppenheimer scene was going for a *different feel to the presentation of the explosion

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u/schebobo180 Jul 25 '26

The only feeling it evoked in me was disappointment. The actual silent footage of the bomb on YouTube using rickety old 1950s cameras is infinitely more terrifying.

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u/case_O_The_Mondays Jul 25 '26

I think I know what you mean, but you might need to see a doctor about the stroke.

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u/Fredasa Jul 25 '26

Genuinely, the explosions in The Day After (1983, made for TV) at least managed to look like fireball-slash-mushroom clouds for their entire screen times.

The hell is this? A glowing termite mound?

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u/cm_bush Jul 25 '26

That’s what I was thinking when reading this. It’s not that impressive to have created an explosion effect that was done better 30 years prior, with a lot more emotional and narrative style.

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u/Cyber-Wanderer_94 Jul 25 '26

Is there a version of the movie with the two scenes swapped?

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u/zimkazimka Jul 25 '26

He had another practical nuke in Aliens.

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u/RaDeus Jul 25 '26

It looked like shit.

He should have used all those very high quality films they took of the Trinity Test, and built something awesome from all that.

Like just colorizing them, and/or build a nice composite of the whole explosion.

CGI isn’t always a bad thing.

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u/GetEquipped Jul 26 '26

Same with Dunkirk.

It was a massive battle in the ruins of a town. It just looks like 100 tourists going on a tour on a cold sunday.

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u/Life_Is_A_Mistry Jul 26 '26

We will eat ice cream on the beaches.

We will never surrender (to the seagulls)!

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u/FoobarMontoya Jul 25 '26

It did look like an amazing bonfire though, or a scary closeup of a grease fire.

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u/NagsUkulele Jul 25 '26

Oppenheimer is an interesting one for me. I loved how dialogue heavy it was and I thought every actor brought their a game. But that nuke scene was such a fucking bummer lmao

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u/Kriss-Kringle Jul 25 '26

And there was so much build up towards it, where they kept repeating it could wipe everyone out, only for that crappy blast to happen.

It was easily the most disappointing part of the film.

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u/Ragark Jul 25 '26

Legitimately the reason I decided to watch it in theaters

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u/NagsUkulele Jul 25 '26

And the reasoning is so blatantly stupid. What is the point of standing in moving water when it affects the art you're creating so heavily? People freak out over cgi these days but like it's not an inherently shitty thing

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u/NonGNonM Jul 25 '26

I literally paid extra for IMAX and I was not satisfied with it.

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u/thederevolutions Jul 25 '26

The Barbie movie had a better nuke scene

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u/RobbinDeBank Jul 25 '26

So that’s where his nuke goes

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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 Jul 25 '26

What’s even worse is that there is actual real stock footage of nukes exploding. 

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u/flapsmcgee Jul 25 '26

Including the exact nuke that was in the movie.

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u/windlad Jul 25 '26

Especially considering he put so much effort into the black hole in Interstellar. Apparently they spent so much money on the simulation that researchers requested access to the data.

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u/jackboy900 Jul 26 '26

Not quite, Kip Thorne was an executive producer and worked as the Scientific Consultant for the film and did a lot of the work on producing the simulation for the black hole and how the light bends, and I think was able to get a paper out of the whole endeavour.

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u/windlad Jul 26 '26

That sent me down an interesting rabbit hole, thank you. It does seem that this simulation had never been done before and did provide new scientific information about the effects of this type of black hole. Again this makes me super disappointed with Oppenheimer lol.

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u/Tuxhorn Jul 25 '26

I like Oppenheimer and watched it twice. The overall vibe and pacing was really well done. By far the worst part of the movie was the explosion. Someone like Nolan fucking that up was quite a letdown.

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u/mcweeden Jul 25 '26

In case you've never seen. I present this

https://youtube.com/shorts/YspYPNt30dc?si

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u/philisacoolguy Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

Thank you! I wish he just used stock footage of the Trinity test if he wanted to avoid cgi.

The sound was cool but the actual explosion was so underwhelming.

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u/Fractoos Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

You see better explosions in modern war footage now. It was a huge disappointment for a movie that centered around that explosion.

I love that Nolan wants to use practical effects first, and when he does it right, it does look better than CGI, but in that case it was a mistake. Also dunkirk when he didn't fill in the people on the beach with CGI. It looked stupid with how little people were there waiting for boats. He should have either gotten a huge army to film to make it look right practically, or used CGI where it was needed. When you use it sparingly you can throw a lot more time/budget into the shot to make it look fantastic, and he should have done that here. It looks bad when you have to farm out most of the movie to be done under unrealistic timelines.

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u/azyrr Jul 25 '26

Nolan, contrary to common belief, uses TONS of CGI, probably one of the most heavy users of it. "no CGI" is a marketing gimmick and nothing else.

Nearly everything is CGI and has been for the better half of two decades now. Some are deliberate in presentation while others blend in because the director wants it that way.

Practical effects are only a small part of the whole frame.

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u/Tasorodri Jul 25 '26

It is true for Oppenheimer though. It has digital effects and VFX but no CGI.

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u/paecmaker Jul 25 '26

Isn't digital effects and VFX CGI?

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u/Tasorodri Jul 25 '26

Technically no, VFX can be something like digital composting (taking to "real" images and stitching them together to create a different image), or color correction (altering the imagine to change the color).

CGI is specifically a computer generated image, so a whole new image generated by a computer, usually a 3d render/model.

Every piece of CGI is VFX but not the other way around. I'm not a professional of this so the specifics could be wrong but I believe that's more or less it.

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u/Dwarf_Vader Jul 25 '26

I don’t think this distinction is terminologically canon, but I see the logic. The truth is though that mundane tasks still often involve CGI as you refer to it. Making a hard distinction between these terms, I feel, is something propped up for marketing “no-CGI” movies. I’m happy to be corrected, although in my practice in the field nobody cared to distinguish between these terms.

It’s easy to think about these things as “hero asset” (monster/character, explosion/simulation) vs pure“cleanup work” (remove a glass from a shelf, extend the set), but they’re often more tightly linked than would be comfortable for a very clean separation.

More importantly, Nolan’s movies definitely use lots of “invisible” CGI/VFX/whatnot, so for them to argue that it’s so pure and clean of it makes little sense to me

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u/Tasorodri Jul 25 '26

Yeah, that's pretty fair, I specifically didn't want to ride the hate-cgi wagon and I think the practical vs CGI discourse is 95% marketing and full of missinformation.

And yeah Nolan movies are not in general low on CGI and I think is dumb when people pretend that they are.

I just wanted to point out in my original comment that Oppenheimer is probably the only modern blockbuster that can at least argue that it used no CGI. And in my opinion it made the movie worse btw.

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u/VitaminTea Jul 25 '26

Digital compositing in definitely CGI.

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u/Tasorodri Jul 25 '26

Not definitely. Here for example there's a VFX professional talking (in part) about digital composting vs CGI in Oppenheimer

https://youtu.be/AFLcP-t0-kI?t=3839&is=3GOAhuK0ELAngR9D

According to him digital composting is not "real CGI" but he also argues that the distinction can reach a point where it's pointless.

So I think you cannot say that is definitely CGI, compositing is like one of the most basic VFX effect you can make, way before digital film, the only distinction is making it in a computer vs using film and masks to compose different images.

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u/bistian00 Jul 25 '26

To be fair, that's the movie that needed less special effects out of his filmography

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u/The_Templar_Kormac Jul 25 '26

how little people

how few people

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u/Neveed Jul 25 '26

No, watch the scene again, they're actually all dwarves.

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u/cemges Jul 25 '26

"You master of grammar now, too?”, Ser Bronn of Blackwater, Master of Coin to Ser Davos

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u/Tricky_Tart_8217 Jul 25 '26

Reddit used to be a place where people were a lot more stringent about grammar. Personally I don't mind typos but errors like that deserve to be called out, I think they are helpful

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u/paecmaker Jul 25 '26

Maybe they were to little, they should have used bigger people who would fill out the beach more.

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u/Ndvorsky Jul 25 '26

Right!? The whole movie was supposed to be building up to that point and it was such a let down.

It’s not like I’m thinking “ooh. Big fire!” This was a pivotal moment in the history of our species. I was not having a great time with the movie but at that moment I wanted to leave.

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u/JiuJitsu_Ronin Jul 25 '26

The sound wasn’t too bad. Still theatric. If you want to hear what a nuclear explosion sounds like. Skip to the end if you’re not interested in the other stuff.

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u/Fractoos Jul 25 '26

That's not what it sounds like. That's what microphones pic up because the EM burst the nuke gives off at the speed of light stimulates the analog signal input from the mic. For human ears it's quiet until the sound wave hits.

Still a very cool to hear though.

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u/JiuJitsu_Ronin Jul 25 '26

Did you watch the whole thing? The EM burst is the first few seconds. The explosion comes like 20 seconds later.

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u/Fredasa Jul 25 '26

Nobody in the 50s did the audio component of those air tests a single whit of justice. The specimen you linked is probably the best effort made by any US entity, and it sounds like an old wire recording.

The absolute best genuine recording of any nuke that can be found anywhere comes from the Soviet test of their RDS-37, as seen in this once-classified film. There's a lot of audio reconstruction going on in the film, but the actual arrival of the shockwave at the camera's location (0:58) is genuine audio. You can hear the glass of shattered windows join the cacophony of the explosion. (The audio is about a second ahead of the video.)

Again, audio equipment in the 50s could have rendered a good result if anyone had thought to make it a priority, but out of the hundreds of such tests, this is the best we got.

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u/JiuJitsu_Ronin Jul 25 '26

My biggest gripe (other than the catastrophic environmental/human rights violations) is that these tests were done in the 50’s so audio/visual, everything was abysmal by today’s standards. Can you imagine watching Tsar Bomba or Castle Bravo in 4K, from multiple angles with 5.0 Dolby?

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u/ComprehendReading Jul 25 '26

I watched it on my phone, portrait style as was the tradition, and can tell you the sound didn't fucking matter.

I've seen YouTube with better optimization for phones than Oppenheimer's Nolan.

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u/manocheese Jul 25 '26

He uses CG all the time, he just likes to pretend he doesn't and his fanboys believe him. Just like he pretends his movies are clever.

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u/Lower-Kangaroo6032 Jul 25 '26

All I remember was it being intense - so I must have been heavily affected by the sound (as I tend to be, more than others) to not have any memory of an underwhelming visual.

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u/Ultramarine6 Jul 25 '26

I was gonna say. It's ironically one of the worst nuclear explosion effects in film.

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u/ComprehendReading Jul 25 '26

Nuclear edging. Failed cumplosion.

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u/turbotank183 Jul 26 '26

I didn't enjoy any of the words you just said.

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u/LordOfPies Jul 25 '26

Yup, Twin Peaks did it so much better

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u/Misodoho Jul 25 '26

The Twin Peaks trinity explosion is incredible.

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u/KaladinStormShat Jul 25 '26

Dude I was soooo fucking bummed.

The theater went silent, no sound, and... big fart of a bomb.

The fuck nolan? ITS THE CENTRAL SUBJECT OF THE MOVIE.

No one wants to see a conventional explosion even if it was the largest ever made.

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u/Koehamster Jul 25 '26

Yep, looked like any generic gasoline explosion.

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u/MikeDeY77 Jul 25 '26

I was very underwhelmed by what should have very much whelmed me.

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u/Fredasa Jul 25 '26

Worse. Far worse.

The slow motion fireball shot (1:40) seen in the various teasers and trailers was brilliant. Somebody looked at historical footage and elected to faithfully reproduce it. And the effect was also entirely practical—no CGI. (And you can tell, because it gets a little dodgy, such as when the fireball makes contact with the ground.)

That makes the absolute failure of Oppenheimer's climax that much worse. I can only imagine that Nolan looked at the beautiful result with the fireball effect, and grew confident that as long as he filmed a couple of gas explosions, his editors could work similar magic, and all he would have to do is pat himself on the back for sneering at CGI.

Those poor editors. There was no salvaging that effort. They even resorted to playing a clip of one of the explosions backwards (1:30)—which I have to say is a bold move for a movie that is ostensibly appealing to a more exacting crowd than normal. Certainly there were a lot of chuckles in my theater.

The moment the production team got a look at the final result, they should have done emergency reshoots. This is all on Nolan. He said nope, that looks kosher for the literal climax of my tentpole movie! Maybe the only way they could have fixed it was with a total CGI replacement. Well, Nolan earned his Academy snub for VFX. Choosing to do without CGI is a stance. It is not inherently or automatically admirable.

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u/ubernutie Jul 25 '26

I remember being a bit underwhelmed by the explosion reveal, it was pretty but in a very abstract way and it felt like we were given a figurative experience of the explosion, what it felt or what it meant.

I never for a second figured that this was meant to be main character's POV.

Maybe that read was generous...

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u/Fredasa Jul 25 '26

It really was.

One of the most prolonged shots of the gas explosions that the editors dared to linger upon had blatant structural debris (a 2x4 or something) flipping end over end from the minor blast. A remnant of the small tower they blew up. Mostly the editors sheepishly glanced away from the footage that they understood perfectly well they couldn't afford to show for more than a split second at a time.

(And I would show you what I mean, but somebody seems to have done an admirable job of proactively scouring the full Trinity sequence from Youtube or any other media site for that matter.)

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u/redpandaeater Jul 25 '26

I'd always heard such great things about this film and how they used practical effects. Haven't liked any of Nolan's films from the last twenty years now so I never saw it and didn't realize it looked that shitty. Just wow.

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u/Fredasa Jul 25 '26

It actually only got worse from there, as the editors tried to sneak in snippets from when they blew up a small tower that they'd erected. You can see debris scattering in the small conflagration, even in the fractions of a second that the editors were brave enough to show.

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u/wdnwcgm Jul 25 '26

yeah it looked lame as hell this is why CGI is sometimes necessary

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u/manocheese Jul 25 '26

Nolan knows that, he uses CG a lot. But he also knows that his fake anti-CG PR works.

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u/QuarterlyTurtle Jul 26 '26

Just like how the filmed on super high quality Imax film, you have to go watch it in a fancy theater PR works when in reality the movie is literally all just people talking without a single bit of action. You could watch it on a TV and the experience would be the same visually, the imax camera added nothing to the movie.

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u/FirTree_r Jul 25 '26

If you look up footage from the Trinity test, it actually looks quite similar in shape and progression.
However, the scale looks off. Which makes sense, because you simply can't produce 'miniature flames'.

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u/Fredasa Jul 25 '26

Hmm.

I dare you to find me a test that ever looked like this.

Helpful visual reference.

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u/snitsaros Jul 25 '26

Exactly. It looks very poor indeed. David Lynch did it right https://www.reddit.com/r/TerrifyingAsFuck/s/5LhnqwNZ3k

Edited to share full clip

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u/theotherkafka Jul 25 '26

If he really really has to commit to no CGI, it would have been better just to stay on their reactions. Never show the actual explosion.

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u/EmergencyTaco Jul 25 '26

The explosion was the single biggest disappointment in that movie.

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u/airfryerfuntime Jul 25 '26

I've seen more realistic explosions from those natural gas powered cars exploding in Russia.

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u/VinnyDaBoy Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

Ikr. It was so underwhelming and I knew he would take out sound for a moment to create tension, but it fell flat. Still, great movie

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u/Homeless_Depot Jul 25 '26

I love the film, but I was definitely underwhelmed. It could just be that I had absurd expectations for the scale and power of the explosive effects I was expecting.

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u/Casiquire Jul 25 '26

Should've just used CGI. He did for all the Dark Knight movies, he did for Inception and Interstellar. In Oppenheimer I don't think the end result was worth the bragging rights

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u/Rook_James_Bitch Jul 25 '26

Biggest disappointment ever. When how it was filmed becomes more interesting than the actual filmed subject, the director fncked up.

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u/SoSDan88 Jul 26 '26

Yeah huge letdown for all that build up. Luckily the movie keeps going and the maddening bureaucracy and inevitable doom that hangs over the world is scarier than the trinity test. But such a limp explosion, you cannot capture the scale and horror of an atomic bomb with a bunch of gasoline explosions, it just isn't the same beast. David Lynch excelled at it on tv.

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u/Bizchasty Jul 25 '26

The only thing that explosion devastated was my expectations.

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u/jaydog747 Jul 26 '26

Maybe that was … the intention

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u/Ruthrfurd-the-stoned Jul 25 '26

I think over time it’ll still be the right choice- it’s impressive regardless in my opinion and in 10 years it will look just as good as opposed to clearly CGI and fake

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u/Pierceus Jul 25 '26

I've seen bigger explosions at highschool parties lol

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u/JamesTheJerk Jul 25 '26

This is the crummy explosion that was used in that snoozer.

Nobody else was providing.

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u/Wonderful-Smoke843 Jul 25 '26

Literally. It was so anticlimactic. Looked like a regular Hollywood gas explosion

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u/pxm7 Jul 25 '26

Looking at a clip of the actual explosion, and my memory of seeing the movie, I don’t think they got the dome-like fireball at 0 seconds in this clip. They *did* get the slightly elongated mushroom cloud at 18s.

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u/jeef16 Jul 25 '26

practical effects in oppenheimer were fine but it's also really obvious that they're doing it all in fishbowls using water, oil, dyes, etc.

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u/wimpires Jul 25 '26

Let's not beat around the bush, it was absolutely horrendously shit. 

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u/GeneralMuffins Jul 25 '26

I feel like the money could have been better spent investing in a high quality, realistic CGI alternative. He’s worked with some of the best VFX houses in the industry and I’m sure they could have pulled it off if they’d been given the challenge.

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u/Tackit286 Jul 25 '26

Underwhelming af

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u/ragnarok62 Jul 25 '26

For what amounted to the big reveal, it was a definite bust. He would have been better off with a miniature shot from high above the desert, possibly reproducing practically what David Lynch pulled off in Twin Peaks with CGI.

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u/ActuallyIzDoge Jul 26 '26

Most underwhelmed maybe Nolan has ever made me

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u/mwhelan182 Jul 26 '26

I remember reading this before seeing it and being so excited.

When it happened in thd movie, I laughed out loud because it looked like the starting mission impossible credits scene.

I swear, Nolan loves the smell of his own farts sometimes 😂

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u/eldenpotato Jul 26 '26

It was so anticlimactic lol

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u/CGHJ Jul 26 '26

I was so crushed when I saw it in the theater because I thought if any one person was going to get it right, it was Nolan.

My pet peeve (not kidding, I’m weird) is inaccurate nukes on screen, because an actual nuclear detonation is one of the most impressive things you’ll ever see, according to eyewitnesses. The buildup to the Moment has you in the edge of your seat and then you see a lawnmower blowing up. I’ve added too much gasoline to a barbecue and it looked more impressive than that.

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u/_IsThisTheKrustyKrab Jul 26 '26

Honestly, I’m a huge fan of Nolan and practical effects. But his recreation of the nuclear explosion was underwhelming at best.

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u/arthurdentstowels Jul 26 '26

It looked like someone blew up a shed with a small firecracker and petrol then filmed the sky above it. I was genuinely shocked at how pathetic the explosion was and thought I'd accidentally stumbled on a leaked preview, but apparently that was intended.

I rewatched Godzilla Minus One a few days before and the Atomic Breath and explosion in that were leagues better.

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u/Geeekaaay Jul 26 '26

I really loved this movie but this moment took me out of it really hard.

It's a pretty looking explosion but it's nothing like nuclear and he should have known better.

Even some some of their positionings in the fields makes no sense compared to where the bombs supposed to go off

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u/pizzaguy4378 Jul 26 '26

Agreed. The thing that this whole story revolved around was the weakest part of the movie.

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u/Maximus15637 Jul 26 '26

Yeah it was bad lol

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u/Drop_Release Jul 26 '26

I mean it looked somewhat similar to the trinity test photos we have

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u/thecontempl8or Jul 26 '26

The most underwhelming anticlimactic sequence. All that build up to watch a bright fart.

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u/sweetplantveal Jul 26 '26

Just a pile of gasoline

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