Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Einstein and the Bomb’ on Netflix, a Docudrama Detailing a Side Story of the ‘Oppenheimer’ Saga

Einstein and the Bomb (now on Netflix) exists in the fallout zone of Nuke Fever ca. 2023, incited as it was by the massive critical and commercial success of Oppenheimer. This new film is a “documentary,” and those quotation marks are load bearing, considering large chunks of its 76-minute runtime are reenactments and, as an opening title card explains, the script is drawn verbatim from Einstein’s words, culled from letters and speeches. So consider it a somewhat conceptually experimental docudrama – but is it a viable hybrid of styles?

EINSTEIN AND THE BOMB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Einstein’s theory of relativity states that time is elastic, not static, and passes differently depending on your place in time and space – famously, he simplified the notion with the humorous assertion that an hour spent with an attractive woman rockets by, while an hour with your ass on a hot stove feels like an eternity. (I’m paraphrasing here.) Perhaps Einstein and the Bomb director Anthony Philipson and writer Philip Ralph therefore believe a time-hopping narrative is a justly poetic way to tell this story, which opens in 1955, then jumps back to 1933, which will be the primary return point as it jumps back again to 1895, then to 1933, and back to 1919, back to 1933, and then to 1920, back to 1933, and then to 1922, and so on, working its way to 1955, and then, eventually, to Einstein’s words echoing on the present day here in 2024. 

Got that? A lot happens in these somewhat needlessly complicated 76 minutes, but maybe it’s worth hanging with it, since the fate of humanity shifted during the course of this story. Einstein is played by Aidan McArdle in various progressions of old-age makeup. In 1955, the “father of the atomic age” is reflective. He’s 76 and will die soon, but he doesn’t know that; on his face is an expression of contemplation tinged with regret. In 1933, he fled his home country of Germany – as both a Jewish man and an outspoken critic of Hitler’s toxic nationalism, he had a price on his head. He holed up in a remote cabin on the eastern coast of England, flanked at all times by a pair of female bodyguards with shotguns. Those weapons are symbolic – Einstein is a self-described militant pacifist, but as Hitler ramped up his forces for war, the scientist became a part-time realist. “Organized force can be opposed only by organized force,” he begrudgingly laments.

The flashbacks within this flashback chart Einstein’s fame in the wake of E equals em cee squared, and the rise of fascism in post-World War I Germany – all presented with a mixture of archival footage, still photos and reenactments. It builds specifically to Oct. 3, 1933, when Einstein, despite both his discomfort in wielding his influence and his reluctance to speak on politics in a public forum, gave a speech in support of Jews being persecuted in his homeland. He’d come to the conclusion that inaction was complicity. He then moved permanently to the U.S., becoming a scholar at Princeton, where he struggled to accept the comfort he lived in there, knowing his people were suffering greatly overseas. His peripheral involvement in the Manhattan Project at last emerges in the final third of the film, when his theoretical science – that a small mass could release an enormous amount of energy – became a sudden and surprising reality when other scientists split the atom. He feared the Nazis would invent the atomic bomb soon, and urged U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to start a nuclear weapons program. His advice stemmed from his own logic – remember what he said about one organized force opposing another? How could you ever forget?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The period reenactments and subject matter bring to mind Marie Curie discovery-of-radioactivity biopic Radioactive; it’s also a companion piece to Oppenheimer, which featured Einstein as a key supporting player in the heady, heavy drama.

Performance Worth Watching: There are a couple of other roles for actors here, but McArdle is the only one really worth noting, so this ribbon of merit is his by default.

Memorable Dialogue: Einstein’s lament: “The war is won. The peace is not.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: As far as pithily encapsulating Einstein’s role in the development of the atom bomb goes, Einstein and the Bomb gets the job done. The History Channel-circa-the-’90s reenactments – read: they’re more than a little bit hokey – prompt one to wonder why they didn’t just make a full-blown fictional film, casting, I dunno, Anthony Hopkins as Einstein or something. I guess that would be too expensive and time-consuming; after all, Oppenheimer’s coattails are about to dissipate in the wake of its probable Oscar-night glory. McArdle is acceptably fine as the legendary scientist, despite being asked to sell text from speeches and letters as dramatic dialogue. In one goofy scene that reenacts a photo of Einstein in the English countryside, one of his female bodyguards undermines her authoritative status as a fierce protector when she ditzily asks, “When did you start thinking about time and space and all these things, professor?”, which is the type of cheeseball line that all but dares you to leave the room.

But for the most part, the film works through its occasional clunkiness, and insightfully probes the ethical dilemma that haunted Einstein late in life. You can take issue with a few storytelling components here: The jumbled timeline is just disorienting enough to have us contemplating the grayness of Einstein’s hair in order to determine what year it might be, and large chunks of the movie feel like rote summaries of pre-World War II history. But it dutifully contextualizes Einstein’s role in the conflict and its fraught resolution, and concludes with a smartly realized sequence that interprets an exchange of letters between Einstein and a Japanese journalist as a kind of self-contained stage play. Einstein and the Bomb could use a few more similarly inspired moments to elevate it above a visual version of Wikipedia, but the movie maintains its functionality nonetheless.

Our Call: Einstein and the Bomb is a touch better than your average cable-grade historical quasi-doc, and offers a worthwhile corollary to those whose interest in the subject matter was piqued by Oppenheimer. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.