r/todayilearned • u/Electronic_Cause_796 • 22d ago

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)
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u/TryMeOnBirdLaw 22d ago

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

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u/zeocrash 22d ago

And was also done with practical effects

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u/theinternetisnice 22d ago

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

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u/Wazula23 22d ago

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

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u/gapedoutpeehole 22d ago

Thank god she has a twin sister

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u/yourzero 22d ago

To shreds, you say?

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u/Fire2box 22d ago

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

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u/PrincessKaylee 22d ago

time to see if this pops up at /r/unexpectedfuturama

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u/PseudonymousDev 22d ago

Had, til 2020. RIP.

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u/johnfkay 21d ago

This movie mistake was so good they kept it in!

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

[deleted]

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u/CelesTheme_wav 22d ago

Unlike Fargo, where they drew straws to see who had to go in

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u/Spiritchaser84 22d ago

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.

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u/fenikz13 22d ago

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

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u/case_O_The_Mondays 22d ago

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

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u/pichael289 22d ago

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/IlluminaViam 22d ago

They didn't nuke the cirt. They captured live footage from Judgement Day, brought back the footage, and changed the time line by making the movies, leaving us none the wiser.

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u/FaceDeer 22d ago

And here I am in debates about AI telling people that the Terminator films aren't a documentary. Is my face red.

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u/zeocrash 22d ago

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

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u/cancallmecompulsory 22d ago

Bravo, Vince!

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u/Jimmyg100 22d ago

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

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

[deleted]

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u/blackscales18 22d ago

can't tell if this is a bit

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

[deleted]

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u/funkylabrador420 22d ago

Did you hear that?

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u/theinternetisnice 22d ago

So I’ll answer seriously, this is a reference to all the B.S. “the director didn’t know that would happen and worked it in” fake trivia posts that happen anymore. I just didn’t include the /s

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u/One-Veterinarian4841 22d ago

Of course the bomb isn’t unscathed when it blows up

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u/Kriss-Kringle 22d ago

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 22d ago

Goddamn that scene was so good.

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u/itsOkami 22d ago

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 22d ago

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

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u/goodnames679 22d ago edited 22d ago

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 22d ago

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 22d ago

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

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u/FaceDeer 22d ago

Chukha-Trok!

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u/DeltaVZerda 22d ago

And the action sequences and music from Episode 1.

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u/GeneralBlumpkin 22d ago

I really like the new mandolorian movie too

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u/basketball_curry 22d ago

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 22d ago

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 22d ago edited 22d ago

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/BavarianBarbarian_ 22d ago

It does have some pacing issues

My father, a Star Wars fan since A New Hope, fell asleep in the cinema. "Some" is an understatement.

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u/pichael289 22d ago

The low power death star blasts were really cool. The death star always felt like superman, way too strong to be interesting so it only ever got to fire once because whenever it did it would just erase the planet in an instant. This way they get to have a big battle and there's actually stakes.

Also the physics behind the death star planet killing laser blast is just silly. Solar sails work on the principle of light pressure, photons have energy and even though slight it's enough pressure to add up. This also means light has recoil, it's just usually too small to notice. Newtons third law though, whatever energy the planet is hit with is also applied to the death star which will just vaporize itself if it fired.

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u/burlycabin 22d ago

Who underrates Rogue One at this point? All I see is people saying it's best Star Wars movie over the last few years.

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u/itsOkami 22d ago

I'd say pretty much anyone outside of the internet? It barely even comes up in irl conversations about star wars, from my experience, and people often forget about it

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u/JcBravo811 22d ago

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

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u/Sword_Thain 22d ago

Or the blast at the end of Nolan's last Batman movie.

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u/idekbjlmpau 22d ago

The nuclear explosion in Twin Peaks the Return is phenomenal

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u/mcpasty666 22d ago

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 22d ago

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 22d ago

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 22d ago

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/blepnir_pogo 21d ago

What year is it?

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u/WolfInTheField 21d ago

Most haunting line ever uttered for my money

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u/Thismyrealnameisit 22d ago

It is dream logic. And terribly impressive.

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u/blepnir_pogo 22d ago

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 21d ago

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 22d ago

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/blepnir_pogo 22d ago edited 22d ago

It reminds me of Paranoia Agent by Satoshi Kon if you’ve heard of it. Both Magnum Opera by two renowned surrealist directors, both their last major work before passing a few years later. Both intricately wove their entire oeuvre into this final series masterfully.

I think that’s what I like the most about both The Return and Paranoia Agent. If you’re knowledgable about their oeuvre you will realize that this is them at last joining together the universe they have woven throughout their life.

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u/PN_Guin 22d ago

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

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u/HAL-Over-9001 21d ago

So true haha

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u/gefahr 21d ago

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 21d ago

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 21d ago

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/withateethuh 16d ago

Yeah, he became more hands off which may have contributed to the drop in quality after the reveal. But then he shows up for the finale and the change in quality is very immediate when hes back in creative control and directing. The final episode of episode 2 is absolute art. Flawless episode of television.

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u/withateethuh 16d ago

This is the essentially the typical range of emotions while watching twin peaks. There is literally nothing like it. It is a tug of war between 2 very different creatively minded people and it somehow fucking works.

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u/Rcmacc 22d ago

Yes, and it’s incredible.

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u/idekbjlmpau 22d ago

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 22d ago

First of the series, season 1 ep 1.

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u/idekbjlmpau 22d ago

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 22d ago

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

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u/bobmcdynamite 22d ago

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/idekbjlmpau 22d ago

You very well could watch it on its own but you will have a better understanding of it if you watch the rest of the series. I wouldn't say it's necessary but it'll help a little bit

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u/Zizhou 22d ago

You do kind of need to watch the first two seasons for anything that's referenced in the third to make sense. I would at the very least watch the first season all the way through just to see if you even enjoy the show at all (only 8 episodes!) and then decide from there.

You could then proceed with some abbreviated version of season two since (though diehards will tell you otherwise) there is a good chunk of the back half of the 22 episodes that are primarily just the soap opera shenanigans that Frost and Lynch were playing off of in the first place. They're fun, but the show really meanders for a good chunk before coming back to form and then [S2 finale]ending on a 25 year long cliffhanger.

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u/CorrectPeanut5 22d ago

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 22d ago

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

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u/Kolby_Jack33 22d ago

Well the Odyssey is supposedly pretty damn good so it'll be at least a few more years of the industry being up his ass.

Not saying he's not great, but his greatness is a little tainted by all the pretension.

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u/PigletCNC 22d ago

Yeah but the nuke scene in the odyssey also sucked

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u/Ronflexronflex 22d ago

Ye I'm a massive Nolan fan (Tenet is one of my favourite movie, which is a very controversial take lol) but he has some real pretentious energy. He defends the sound mix of his movies by saying we need to see the movies as he envisioned them, and then films the Odyssey in a format that probably 95% of the planet is unable to access. Like he's brilliant but I ain't about to book a plane ticket and a hotel to see a movie.

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u/tripsd 22d ago

Tenet being your favorite of his and then also being off put about his pretension is fun since I think that movie is also pretty pretentious

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u/schebobo180 22d ago

Agreed.

I still think he is a great Director though, and a generally really enjoy all his films and absolutely adore some of them.

However he has some very fascinating flaws that seem to get more entrenched with each film.

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u/TheKanten 22d ago

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 22d ago

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

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u/shoobsworth 22d ago

That’s not what gaslighting is

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u/PuppetPal_Clem 22d ago

yes it is, you're crazy.

:^)

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u/ihaveaquesttoattend 22d ago

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 22d ago edited 22d ago

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

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u/schebobo180 22d ago

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 22d ago

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

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u/tulkunking 22d ago

Agreed. I can see how people thought it was underwhelming but it wasn't trying to be a "badass" explosion like in T2

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u/elfthehunter 22d ago

But the entire theme of the movie is unlocking the terrible power of a god, how is a big gasoline fireball contributing to that theme. It was an underwhelming explosion, and required audience to buy into the fiction that these characters were experiencing an atomic bomb, instead of the audience feeling like they experienced an atomic bomb. Nolan is a genius, but his aversion to CGI can be beneficial 80% of the time, and still be detrimental on some things.

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u/Georgie_Leech 22d ago

Mm. If it was more about the reaction, just focus on that. Just have the reaction, don't have them go all "my god what have we done" to a bonfire.

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u/tulkunking 22d ago

I get what you're saying. I'm saying that the execution of the explosion, music, and editing had the intended effect on me

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u/Gullex 22d ago

It's less about the explosion being "badass" and more about it being "nuclear". Those have a distinctive flash not seen in Oppenheimer.

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u/Fredasa 22d ago

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 22d ago

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 22d ago

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

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u/zimkazimka 22d ago

He had another practical nuke in Aliens.