What could Chris Nolan bring to the saga of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the atom-bomb creator whose life and career came to symbolize moral dilemmas facing the scientist in the nuclear age.

Nolan will probably deliver two or three ribcage-shattering recreations of nuclear explosions, but there have been two or three tellings of the Oppenheimer story and…I don’t know what to think or feel.

I’m seeing a political persecution angle, of course — echoes of anti-Semitism, obvious parallels to today’s woke terror intimidation.

My favorite of all the re-tellings is The Trials of Robert Oppenheimer, the 2009 David Strathairn-starring docudrama, directed by David Grubin for PBS and The American Experience.

Dwight Schultz portrayed Oppie in Roland Joffe‘s Fat Man and Little Boy (’89), but that film was primarily focused on Paul Newman‘s performance as Colonel Leslie Groves, the Project Manhattan taskmaster.

Whatever Nolan may have planned, I’m not sensing a project of landmark importance.