The box office success of the film Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, cannot be denied. Three weeks after the biopic inspired by the biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer was released, its box office sales brought in over half a billion dollars. Oppenheimer tells the story of "the father of the atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons and went on to detonate the first nuclear weapon near the Latino village of Tularosa and the Mescalero Apache Reservation on July 16, 1945."
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Any film that is based on historical events, has the potential to educate and acknowledge previously unacknowledged wrongs. But that's not what the film has done for some residents of southern New Mexico, who are still dealing with the literal fallout of the radiation from the detonation of that bomb generations ago. As Tina Cordova, cofounder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, writes in an opinion piece for the New York Times: "One film can't do it all, but I can't help feeling that the retelling of this story, as it stands, is a missed opportunity." Thankfully, there are people like Cordova, who refuse to be "left out of the narrative." Let's dive into that narrative and how it "has had devastating health consequences."