5 Great Invention Films to Watch While Waiting for “Oppenheimer” to Be Released

There are inventions and discoveries that changed the course of history, and there are movies that are responsible for telling the stories of what happened behind those inventions. On May 8, the premiere of “Oppenheimer”, the new film by acclaimed film director Christopher Nolan, was announced. The film will star Cillian Murphy accompanied by Florence Pugh, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. It is based on the book "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" and will narrate the process of inventing the atomic bomb in the middle of World War II. It will be released on July 21, 2023.

For this reason, we decided to bring you 5 movies about inventions that changed the course of history so that you can prepare for Nolan's new work.

“The Imitation Game”, 2014

This biopic directed by Morten Tyldum revolves around the life of Alan Turing, a British mathematician and cryptanalyst who was the key to deciphering the Enigma Machine, an invention of Nazi Germany that was used to send encrypted messages in World War II. Turing and his team were in a race against time to crack more than 3,000 encrypted naval messages. Despite his immense contribution to ending the war and being considered the father of artificial intelligence, Turing suffered discrimination for being homosexual. 

“Creation”, 2009

This English film directed by Jon Amiel focuses on Charles Darwin, who proposed the theory of evolution. The story narrates how, after the writing of "The Origin of the Species" in which he denies the theory of creationism, the English society of the time and his own wife refused his ideas. In the film, we see a Darwin conflicted between his love for science and his love for his wife.

“Hidden Figures", 2016

The film directed by Theodore Melfi is based on the homonymous book by Margot Lee Shetterly and focuses on the American mathematician Katherine Johnson and her two co-workers Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. The three women worked in the Segregated Computer Division of the West Wing of the Langley Research Center and were instrumental in helping the United States win the space race. Thanks to them, John Glenn became the first astronaut to fully orbit the planet Earth.

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“Radioactive”, 2019

This tape was directed by the famous cartoonist Marjane Satrapi and narrates the life of Marie Curie, the first woman to win two Nobel Prizes in different areas: physics and chemistry. The film focuses on Curie as the one who discovered the properties of radioactivity and whose lifelong work led to her death, as well as her struggle with society at the time to have her work taken seriously despite to be a woman.

“The Current War”, 2017

The film directed by Alfonso Gómez-Rejón tells of the war that took place between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse that would define which electrical system would be adopted by the United States in the 19th century. In the midst of the battle, Nikola Tesla comes to the United States to work with Edison, but their differences lead him to bond with Westinghouse. The tape approaches the reasons behind each of the characters and the fight at the advertising level behind one of the most revolutionary inventions of humanity.