First, I'll get out of the way my one and only criticism. Could they not find ONE German and ONE Danish actor to at least affect the accents, instead of two Brits? I love both of these guys, but come on... ok done.
For the first one-third of the movie, I had the feeling I was watching an ambitious after-school special, written to introduce high school AP physics students to this pivotal moment in 20th century quantum mechanics. And two of its major creators, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. As a practicing physicist, I knew the topics they discussed well, but I was not aware of this meeting between the two. So it seemed like a clever way to introduce a bunch of actual physics principles, using the 3 (and only 3) characters, to avoid the clutter of unrelated melodrama.
After I let myself sink into the story, I realized it was much more - a quietly poetic take on the tremendous political upheaval of that awful time, the ethical choices that brilliant people had to make in weighing moral, national, and family priorities. And the tantalizing pull of one of the towering achievements in modern science, which united the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys'.
The unsettling realization that had the Nazis not looked down their noses at 'Jewish science', this all might have very easily, and very nearly did, go the other way.
A sobering thought.
For the first one-third of the movie, I had the feeling I was watching an ambitious after-school special, written to introduce high school AP physics students to this pivotal moment in 20th century quantum mechanics. And two of its major creators, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. As a practicing physicist, I knew the topics they discussed well, but I was not aware of this meeting between the two. So it seemed like a clever way to introduce a bunch of actual physics principles, using the 3 (and only 3) characters, to avoid the clutter of unrelated melodrama.
After I let myself sink into the story, I realized it was much more - a quietly poetic take on the tremendous political upheaval of that awful time, the ethical choices that brilliant people had to make in weighing moral, national, and family priorities. And the tantalizing pull of one of the towering achievements in modern science, which united the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys'.
The unsettling realization that had the Nazis not looked down their noses at 'Jewish science', this all might have very easily, and very nearly did, go the other way.
A sobering thought.