James Cameron thinks Nolan’s Oppenhemier is ‘a bit of a moral copout’

Killing innocent people with two nuclear bombs is the work of retarded beings and the most grotesque thing in history.
As opposed to incinerating them with fire bombs, blasting them into pieces with high explosives, starving them to death through blockades, shooting them with machine guns, bashing in heads with buttstocks, beheading them with swords, stabbing them with spears, raining down arrows on them, driving them off cliffs, drowning them as their ships are sunk underneath them, etc etc etc?

What Japanese people are innocent (in the context of being considered a legitimate target in WW2)? The government there had the full support of the people even after YEARS of war. Where did the humans come from to feed the war machine if not from the population at large? Who made the planes, bombs, tanks, rifles, ships? The entire nation was fully engaged.

Sure, 80 years removed we can sit back and armchair general this thing all day. But in the moment, after years of total war, millions dead, entire civilizations at risk, dropping 2 relatively low yield nuclear weapons seems a small thing. Go look at the casualty figures of Finland, china, russia, SE asia, poland, france etc etc japan is middle of the pack.
 
As opposed to incinerating them with fire bombs, blasting them into pieces with high explosives, starving them to death through blockades, shooting them with machine guns, bashing in heads with buttstocks, beheading them with swords, stabbing them with spears, raining down arrows on them, driving them off cliffs, drowning them as their ships are sunk underneath them, etc etc etc?

What Japanese people are innocent (in the context of being considered a legitimate target in WW2)? The government there had the full support of the people even after YEARS of war. Where did the humans come from to feed the war machine if not from the population at large? Who made the planes, bombs, tanks, rifles, ships? The entire nation was fully engaged.

Sure, 80 years removed we can sit back and armchair general this thing all day. But in the moment, after years of total war, millions dead, entire civilizations at risk, dropping 2 relatively low yield nuclear weapons seems a small thing. Go look at the casualty figures of Finland, china, russia, SE asia, poland, france etc etc japan is middle of the pack.
The Japanese were clear they had lost the war, but they needed honor in surrender.

The nuclear bombs were horrible And inhuman.

They no longer wanted to fight, but to end the war without dishonoring their country.

And we don't need to look back... Just look at the state of the world today.


The Japanese today are very unique people with good values.
 
The Japanese were clear they had lost the war, but they needed honor in surrender.

The nuclear bombs were horrible And inhuman.

They no longer wanted to fight, but to end the war without dishonoring their country.

And we don't need to look back... Just look at the state of the world today.


The Japanese today are very unique people with good values.
Clueless
 
The Japanese were clear they had lost the war, but they needed honor in surrender.

The nuclear bombs were horrible And inhuman.

They no longer wanted to fight, but to end the war without dishonoring their country.

And we don't need to look back... Just look at the state of the world today.


The Japanese today are very unique people with good values.
still refer to us like magic elf people。weird。

私たちの代弁はやめてくれ。

my grandparents have no pride in that war。
 
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Research Bushido culture.

And you'll learn the depths of its culture.
Nah. instead, l'll research various sources and read and analyse various interpretations from historians regarding the atomic bombing including for/against, traditionalist/revisionist and come to my own conclusions.

Better than relying on feelings and ma honour.

Lol, lmao even.
 
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Here's Nolan talking about his reasoning behind not showing it

GueT0_FagAAZGbU
 
The Japanese were clear they had lost the war, but they needed honor in surrender.

The nuclear bombs were horrible And inhuman.

They no longer wanted to fight, but to end the war without dishonoring their country.

And we don't need to look back... Just look at the state of the world today.


The Japanese today are very unique people with good values.
well, guess what. Had they swallowed some pride and just capitulated when we asked, maybe they coulda kept a few cities. The japan of today is a direct result of the EXTENSIVE reworking of their culture by the US and themselves.

Same with Germany. LOTS of effort went into making these nations the examples they are today.
 
Nah. instead, l'll research various sources and read and analyse various interpretations from historians regarding the atomic bombing including for/against, traditionalist/revisionist and come to my own conclusions.

Better than relying on feelings and ma honour.

Lol, lmao even.
Yes, I invite you to try it.

In any case, researchers will agree with Bushido.

Surrender was considered dishonorable, and many soldiers and officers preferred to die rather than surrender.

That's why Japan has prospered and recovered, due to its great culture and values... Something that should be learned in other countries.
 
lmao "Yo allies, can you throw a few more hundred thousand guys into the meat grinder so we can surrender with honor?"

That isn't how war works, and that was the mother of all wars.
 
well, guess what. Had they swallowed some pride and just capitulated when we asked, maybe they coulda kept a few cities. The japan of today is a direct result of the EXTENSIVE reworking of their culture by the US and themselves.

Same with Germany. LOTS of effort went into making these nations the examples they are today.
Japan has its own unique, spiritual people with strong values.

They are noble people with high values who do everything to succeed.

Despite this, their values have been preserved.
 
Japan has its own unique, spiritual people with strong values.

They are noble people with high values who do everything to succeed.

Despite this, their values have been preserved.
The U.S. just shot themselves in the foot. I don't know how much the rest of you know about Japanese culture (I'm an expert), but honour and shame are huge parts of it.

It's not like it is in the West, where people can just surrender and live with it. In Japan, they had the Bushido code, which meant death before dishonour. When the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs, they didn't just end a war — they committed the greatest cultural crime in human history.

You think Japan deserved it? Clearly, you haven't studied their deep warrior ethos like I have. The Japanese didn't surrender because they were weak — they surrendered to protect their honour.

What this means is the Japanese public, after hearing about this (even today), still live with the shame forced upon them. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but America alienated an ancient and noble people with that move.

The U.S. needs to publicly apologise for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or they can kiss their credibility as a civilised nation goodbye.
 
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan demonstrated an existential threat to the world. Japan's a lovely place now with a great people and beautiful culture but they were not the victims of WW2.
 
The U.S. just shot themselves in the foot. I don't know how much the rest of you know about Japanese culture (I'm an expert), but honour and shame are huge parts of it.

It's not like it is in the West, where people can just surrender and live with it. In Japan, they had the Bushido code, which meant death before dishonour. When the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs, they didn't just end a war — they committed the greatest cultural crime in human history.

You think Japan deserved it? Clearly, you haven't studied their deep warrior ethos like I have. The Japanese didn't surrender because they were weak — they surrendered to protect their honour.

What this means is the Japanese public, after hearing about this (even today), still live with the shame forced upon them. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but America alienated an ancient and noble people with that move.

The U.S. needs to publicly apologise for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or they can kiss their credibility as a civilised nation goodbye.
Exactly, they should apologize to Japan.

Those bombs should never have been dropped on them.
 
Japan has its own unique, spiritual people with strong values.

They are noble people with high values who do everything to succeed.

Despite this, their values have been preserved.
Well, hopefully a lot less of that "rape of Nanking" and "POWs should be executed" stuff sticks around. Otherwise they might find that Godzilla isn't just a metaphor should they step out of line again.
 
Hiroshima and Nagasaki barely qualified as military targets, and both cities suffered massive civilian casualties. And don't even get me started on the utterly absurd myth that these bombs saved American lives. Japan was firebombed to hell and the Russians were invading in the North. They were going down, period.

Just for context:

On March 10, 1945, General Curtis LeMay's XXI Bomber Command sent 334 B-29's to Tokyo, loaded with 1,669 tons of incendiary bombs. The resulting firestorm killed over 100,000 Japanese and injured over a million. A quarter of the industrial production in Tokyo was destroyed.



- Gen Curtis LeMay


And Hiroshima and Nagaski were yet to come.

I don't disagree with your assessment of Imperial Japan...the war crimes they committed against China were as bad, if not worse, than what Germany's Third Reich did to anyone they deemed less than perfect; specifically, Jews.

But personally, I think it's horseshit not to show the impact of these weapons from the perspective of those living in those two cities. It must have been indescribable.
Japan deserved every bit of the nukes they got. They were murdering Chinese civilians at horrific rates. It is war. And you use the tools you have to win the war.

Anyone else developing nukes prior to the us would have used them too.

I also think firebombing Tokyo killed more than the nuke at Hiroshima.
 
The Japanese were clear they had lost the war, but they needed honor in surrender.

The nuclear bombs were horrible And inhuman.

They no longer wanted to fight, but to end the war without dishonoring their country.

And we don't need to look back... Just look at the state of the world today.


The Japanese today are very unique people with good values.

This is weeb shit.

The Allies/Americans made it clear that there would be absolutely no honour in any Japanese surrender. They weren't in a position to dictate nothing to nobody. It was two civilisations knocking the ever living fuck out of each other and at any other point in history the home islands would have been annihilated.

Imperial Japan was fucking nuts, and they set the terms of what victory would look like with the horrors they inflicted upon the Chinese and Allied prisoners.
 

Well hopefully he'll have got all those nasty testosterone toxins out by then..

It's always funny to me that way back like 10 to 15 years ago, the liberals weren't as crazy as they are now. It's interesting to see how they progressily gotten worse this last decade

As for his Avatar movies, impressive tech but I wish those movie were fun to watch
 
This is weeb shit.

The Allies/Americans made it clear that there would be absolutely no honour in any Japanese surrender. They weren't in a position to dictate nothing to nobody. It was two civilisations knocking the ever living fuck out of each other and at any other point in history the home islands would have been annihilated.

Imperial Japan was fucking nuts, and they set the terms of what victory would look like with the horrors they inflicted upon the Chinese and Allied prisoners.
And what do you say about these current times?
 
The Allies/Americans made it clear that there would be absolutely no honour in any Japanese surrender. They weren't in a position to dictate nothing to nobody. It was two civilisations knocking the ever living fuck out of each other and at any other point in history the home islands would have been annihilated.
Japan most likely would have surrendered around that time anyway, bomb or no bomb. Surrender to the Americans was always preferable to whatever the Soviets would have done to them.

I think the Oppenheimer movie might have made the point that the real target of those bombs wasn't Japan, it was the USSR. It was a demonstration to set up the post-war era, rather than something to end the current war.
 
I mean, seeing as how Cameron's earlier films were all centered around the fear of nuclear annihilation, I understand what he's saying -- but he's also looking at this through HIS lens of historical fear. I mean, Terminator and The Abyss (one of my favorite films of all time) would have fit right in with The Planet of The Apes series of WWIII fear.
 
Here's Nolan talking about his reasoning behind not showing it

GueT0_FagAAZGbU
I see what he's saying but his audience does know. his audience is not the audience of the late 1940s. We have almost 75 years of data, evidence and accounts from first hand perspectives.

I wouldnt call it a moral copout because i hate it when filmmakers try and make anti-war movies and try and shove their politics down our throat. I like that Nolan just tells the stories and lets the audience decide based on the imagery. And that's why i was kind of disappointed that there wasn't much destruction shown in the movie. I would've liked to have seen the hiroshima bombing in ways only Nolan can show.

With all that said, that fantastic ending scene with Einstein is the true point of the movie. Escalation and the world literally on the brink of extinction, all thanks to Oppenheimer. Or at least thats what he believed.
 
I see what he's saying but his audience does know. his audience is not the audience of the late 1940s. We have almost 75 years of data, evidence and accounts from first hand perspectives.

I wouldnt call it a moral copout because i hate it when filmmakers try and make anti-war movies and try and shove their politics down our throat. I like that Nolan just tells the stories and lets the audience decide based on the imagery. And that's why i was kind of disappointed that there wasn't much destruction shown in the movie. I would've liked to have seen the hiroshima bombing in ways only Nolan can show.

With all that said, that fantastic ending scene with Einstein is the true point of the movie. Escalation and the world literally on the brink of extinction, all thanks to Oppenheimer. Or at least thats what he believed.
But the point of not showing it is that Oppenheimer didn't see it. He wanted to know more about what was going to happen and was denied that access. He's relegated to an outsider looking in. The audience getting that perspective he doesn't reduces the effect. Part of the story of the film is about the system using him and throwing him away once he's served his purpose. Him finding out how he does is kind of a flat and isolating experience. The emotional distance is intentional. "The father of the atomic bomb" is kept at arm's length from the use of his creation and therefore so are we.

In terms of us having 75 years of data and first hand perspectives, as Nolan says he's not looking to tell an objective story. Those parts are subjective and from Oppenheimer's perspective. The film is intentionally switching between the objective and subjective, something Nolan spoke about as being particularly interested in and is told through the contrasting colour and black & white sections. That's a part he wanted to tell from the subjective side, for the reasons I talked about above. Switching over to data and first hand perspectives is the opposite of what he's going for with it.

Showing the bombing "in ways only Nolan can show" is potentially reducing it to a spectacle, no? Nolan didn't set out to tell the definitive, objective chronicle of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's about Oppenheimer the man. And that informs what's shown and what's not.
 
This guy says Imperial Japan was as bad, maybe even worse than Nazi Germany and he finds it odd we don't hear nearly as much about the Asian Holocaust they carried out.

 
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He's hundred percent correct. Films based on tragedies are insulting when they don't show the victim's suffering as plainly and realistically as possible. It's like protecting the audience from the actual horror that occured.

This was also my criticism against schindler's list. When the jews are stripped naked and go to the gassing chambers, miraculously they're saved at the last minute. This is so insulting to the actual victims. Pretending they're biographies only to cover up the 'bad stuff' is never how you do it. In titanic, every person is shown drowning, the audience feels the pain of losing someone, that's how you make a tragedy.

American blockbuster cinema is incapable of showcasing tragedies in their raw form to get the maximum audience and they're praised to high heavens for that.

Anyways I do think Cameron was one, if not the greatest director of the late 20th century, and its a shame he wasted most of his life creating 'blue people/ generic story/ 3d experiences' so i hope he pops something out different like this before his career or life ends.
 
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This guy says Imperial Japan was as bad, maybe even worse than Nazi Germany and he finds it odd we don't hear nearly as much about the Asian Holocaust they carried out.


If you ever want to read a book that makes you depressed I suggest


The author of this was so emotionally destroyed by what she uncovered and wrote about that she went on to commit suicide
 
This guy says Imperial Japan was as bad, maybe even worse than Nazi Germany and he finds it odd we don't hear nearly as much about the Asian Holocaust they carried out.


I wouldn't call it worse than Joseph Mengele but pretty close. Read some of the stuff they did in ra*e of Nanking.

Doesn't mean that most of the people that died horrifically in the nuclear attack (look at some of the real pictures) had any idea what the hell their government was even doing.

Same thing US did in 'MY lai massacre' (google it) only small scale. Winners write history and they bury their own stuff while highlighting the other's worst and the US was the winner of the 20th century. But every empire's history is usually pure horror.
 
Films based on tragedies are insulting when they don't show the victim's suffering as plainly and realistically as possible. It's like protecting the audience from the actual horror that occured.

The film is called Oppenheimer. It's a biopic about him, we follow his perspective, and he did not personally witness the tragedies you're talking about. To flip the script on perspectives from the other side of the war, the Studio Ghibli film The Wind Rises follows Japanese plane designer Jiro Horikoshi and his life story. The planes he created ended up being very beneficial to the Japanese forces in World War II, including the attack on Pearl Harbor. Horikoshi is not pleased when this happens by any means, his dream was to merely build incredible planes and he does succeed in that despite him also having to live with the regrets of how others used them, but IIRC the film does not really show much, if any, of the WWII battles featuring his planes as that's not the story of the film, it's Horikshi's story and what he personally experiences.

Your Titanic example doesn't work because that film follows individuals who are on the Titanic as it sinks and thus witnesses firsthand the tragedy of that catastrophe.
 
I wouldn't call it worse than Joseph Mengele but pretty close. Read some of the stuff they did in ra*e of Nanking.

Doesn't mean that most of the people that died horrifically in the nuclear attack (look at some of the real pictures) had any idea what the hell their government was even doing.

Same thing US did in 'MY lai massacre' (google it) only small scale. Winners write history and they bury their own stuff while highlighting the other's worst and the US was the winner of the 20th century. But every empire's history is usually pure horror.
Please, the fact that the My Lai massacre is ALWAYS the incident mentioned for US forces for the ENTIRE twentieth century shows just how honorable the US was to an overwhelming degree. Those soldiers were tried within a year or so and it created a massive outcry in the US. To try to compare that incident with the systematic, long standing, and thoroughly permissive horrific treatment of Chinese civilians and allied POWs by the Japanese is insulting to the extreme.
 
Please, the fact that the My Lai massacre is ALWAYS the incident mentioned for US forces for the ENTIRE twentieth century shows just how honorable the US was to an overwhelming degree. Those soldiers were tried within a year or so and it created a massive outcry in the US. To try to compare that incident with the systematic, long standing, and thoroughly permissive horrific treatment of Chinese civilians and allied POWs by the Japanese is insulting to the extreme.
'Honorable'. No one was caught except a measly house arrest to appease the masses but I digress.

You're too far gone if you think the US wasn't straight up the villain of the 20th century. Their support of promoting Islamists in the 20th century to counter communists, which they didn't stop until 911 occured and the cold war ended, has created, by far, the biggest problem of the 21st century. I have grown up in an Islamic country. Women rights are down the drain, these countries are hellholes of superstition, obsession with religion, and because of border controls, we're doomed to spend our lives here. However, I won't go into detail, given this is gaming forum.
 
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In fact, he and his team in New Mexico saved the world from Nazi domination. People have literally forgotten the Manhattan Project was a race with the Nazis to get to the bomb first, a race that the US had to win in order to save the world from the Nazis
Evidently that was not in fact the case, though that was a reasonable position to take without the benefit of hindsight.
 
Where did the humans come from to feed the war machine if not from the population at large? Who made the planes, bombs, tanks, rifles, ships? The entire nation was fully engaged.
You could use this 'nobody is innocent' reasoning to justify targeting civilians in any conflict, as many groups do today. Who funds the military? Civilians do.

I wouldn't even say it's incorrect, but the whole concept of 'war crimes' is a repudiation of using reasoning like this to justify killing civilians. It is taking a position that while it might be a reason to do it, it isn't a good enough reason.

I think if we apply the 'war crimes' standard -which is a Western standard, it's not like we had it forced upon us- then we would have to consider a lot of what the Allies did during WW2 to be war crimes. The reality however is that 'war crimes' are an attempt at applying a moral standard to a scenario (war) where 'right vs wrong' is often a distant secondary concern to survival. It is a luxury belief which can only be afforded by a side which is so dominant that they are not facing an existential threat no matter what happens in the war.

I don't condemn the Allies for those actions during WW2. We would abandon the 'war crimes' standard today and start flattening cities in a second if we considered it necessary to avoid a situation where we would be at the mercy of an enemy. Trying to defend it as 'morally fine' when we do it and 'morally bad' when it's done to us always seems wilfully delusional to me though. I am more willing to accept 'us' doing it to 'them' because I align with the former and not the latter, and I think that is true for most people if they were honest.
 
It was a biopic. It seems James Cameron didn't understand what one is.

That Ghosts of Hiroshima is his first one says it all.

It's a shame that he's acting holier than thou about such a serious topic.
 
I'd have taken scenes showing the nuke going off over another scene of RDJ shouting in a black and white room anyday. Fucking hated the final third of that film.
 
Mate, your films are about blue giants connecting their pony tails to creatures and "unobtainium" "UNOBTANIUM"

That's what you came up with for the element, your opinion is invalid forever. Your ocean diving shit is cool though. Titanic was a good film, especially cause you get to see Kate winslets boobies.
 
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