Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic

USA 2007 / 94min.
Director Jon Else / Producer Jon Else, Bonni Cohen

Personnel in the pre-dawn glare of an atomic test in the Greenhouse Series at Enewetok Atoll, 1951

In June and July 1945, in a desert community in New Mexico, a group of scientists led by the enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer and assisted by the thoughtful Robert Wilson prepared to create and test the world’s first atomic bomb. Those weeks would change the world forever.

Fifty years on in San Francisco, acclaimed but eccentric director Peter Sellars and mild-mannered genius composer John Adams, create, build and rehearse an opera telling the Los Alamos story.

Wonders Are Many delivers these two storylines in charming parallel, comparing the intricate crafting of science and art, of genius and creation, of the past and the future. From the building of the libretto line by line, to the building of the onstage bomb by stage carpenters more used to building the banks of the Nile, this is a film of fascinating personalities, moral dilemmas, rivalries and the power of the bomb realised by a 21st century musical score.

Can an opera about one of the most devastating events in world history rise to the sublime, or is it faintly ridiculous? This intelligent documentary leaves the decision to you, but provides an insightful view of passionate worlds with wide appeal to lovers of opera and history and observers of the bizarre.

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