Netflix premiered Anthony Philipson's docudrama Einstein and the Bomb on February 19. Irish actor Aidan McArdal played Einstein for the third time in his career, having previously done so in the 2005 feature film Einstein's Grand Formula and in the documentary Einstein's Big Ideas: New Star. Now his hero is looking for an answer to the painful question of whether it was worth discovering atomic energy.
The film, based on diaries, interviews and archival recordings of the great scientist’s speeches, was produced by the BBC. Like the biopic Oppenheimer starring Cillian Murphy, it explores the great physicist's conflicting emotions surrounding the discovery of the atomic bomb.
The viewer comes to the story of Einstein's participation in the Manhattan Project in the last third of the film, although Philipson leads to this throughout the plot.
One of the key questions of the film becomes, whose role is the father-inventor of the nuclear bomb – Einstein or Robert Oppenheimer? The group of scientists, the film tells, was led by the latter, but Einstein urged Franklin Roosevelt to get ahead of the Germans in creating nuclear weapons, having learned that the Germans were able to split the uranium atom in 1938.
“I do not believe that civilization will be destroyed in a war with the use of an atomic bomb. “Perhaps two-thirds of the world's population will be killed, but there will remain enough people capable of thinking and enough books to start anew, and civilization can be restored,” Einstein wrote in a letter to the US President.
Read more in the exclusive material from Izvestia:
This is a bomb: was the drama about Einstein a response to Oppenheimer?
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