In an interview with Deadline, James Cameron has shared his candid views about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. Admitting that he is not a fan of criticising a different filmmaker's work, Cameron said that Oppenheimer is a "moral cop out" and that it "dodged the subject" at the heart of the story.
Cameron was responding to a question about why he reckons that his upcoming film, based on Charles Pellegrino's book Ghosts of Hiroshima, is likely to become the lowest-grossing feature in his filmography.
The interviewer tried to counter Cameron's view about his film's commercial prospects with Oppenheimer's tremendous box office success and Academy Award wins, highlighting these as indicators of the global popularity of the subject matter.
In response, Camerson said that while he loved Nolan's filmmaking for Oppenheimer, the film itself did not explore its subject deeply enough.
Cameron referred to a scene in Oppenheimer where Cillian Murphy's character, J Robert Oppenheimer, delivers a speech to an excited crowd after the infamous bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
During this scene, Oppenheimer experiences a horrifying hallucination or vision, including that of charred bodies in the audience. Cameron suggested that the film tells the story purely from Oppenheimer's perspective and shied away from exploring the issue deeply enough, considering its sensitive nature.
"I do not know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they did not want to touch," said the Terminator and Avatar filmmaker.
Meanwhile, he stated that with his upcoming film Ghosts of Hiroshima, he intends to "go straight at the third rail," meaning he plans to directly and unflinchingly depict the horrific reality of the atomic bombings and their impact on the victims, a subject that he feels Oppenheimer largely "dodged".