A Blast from the Past

Christopher Nolan's eagerly awaited historical blockbuster Oppenheimer blows the competition away, topping the national box office on its opening weekend, Xu Fan reports.

On the penultimate day of this year's bumper summer movie season, iconic director Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated movie Oppenheimer made its mainland debut, becoming the latest blockbuster to contribute to the recovery of the domestic film market.

Thanks to a string of critically acclaimed and commercially successful blockbusters like Interstellar and Inception, Nolan has accumulated a lot of fans in the country.

During his visit last month, marking a six-year hiatus since his 2017 tour to promote his war epic Dunkirk, eager Chinese fans flocked to the two preview screenings in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively. Despite the scorching noon heat during the Beijing event, which was partly held outside Universal CityWalk Cinema, a huge crowd greeted the director, with hundreds vying for his autograph.

As of Tuesday, the three-hour-long film has grossed more than 240 million yuan ($32.9 million), replacing the Chinese blockbuster No More Bets over the weekend as the country's latest box-office champion.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the movie skillfully intertwines multiple narrative threads to portray the life of its titular character, the famous American theoretical physicist, and explores his journey to become the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, where he led the development of the world's first atomic bomb.

Recalling his inspiration to write the script for the movie, Nolan revealed that he is acquainted with the story of Oppenheimer, who is often referred to as "the father of the atomic bomb".

However, what captivated him the most was a historical moment filled with drama. Even before Oppenheimer and his team of scientists prepared to press the button, detonating the world's first nuclear explosion in July 1945, they couldn't entirely eliminate the possibility that there was a slim chance of triggering a chain reaction capable of destroying the planet.