James Cameron Just Called Nolan's Oppenheimer a "Cop Out"

In a recent interview with Deadline, Cameron took a moment from his twenty-year residency in Pandora to critique Oppenheimer for pulling its punches. While praising the craft, he took issue with what he sees as the film's refusal to confront the human cost of nuclear weapons.

"I love the filmmaking," Cameron said, "but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop out."

According to Cameron, Nolan's film tiptoes around the aftermath — offering only one brief moment where Oppenheimer is haunted by the horror of what he's done.

"He's got one brief scene in the film where we see... some charred bodies in the audience and then the film goes on to show how it deeply moved him," Cameron said. "But I felt that it dodged the subject."

And then came the kicker:

"I don't know whether the studio or Chris felt that that was a third rail that they didn't want to touch, but I want to go straight at the third rail. I'm just stupid that way."

Cameron's own long-gestating nuclear project is called Ghosts of Hiroshima. It's not an Avatar sequel, and that alone makes it a novelty in his filmography. But he insists it won't be about politics or moral debates — just the sheer, physical horror of nuclear warfare. His words:

"I don't want to get into the politics of, should it have been dropped, should they have done it, and all the bad things Japan did to warrant it, or any of that kind of moralizing and politicizing. I just want to deal in a sense with what happened, almost as if you could somehow be there and survive and see it."

For Cameron, it's about bearing witness. He credits his fixation with the bomb to a high school reading of John Hersey's Hiroshima, a book that gave him, in his words, a lifelong fascination with thermonuclear effects — the kind that showed up in that unforgettable dream sequence in Terminator 2.

Yes, he knows his nukes. And yes, he still wants you to feel the terror of it.

"This is the only case where [nuclear weapons] have been used against a human target," he said. "They've only died in vain if we forget what that was like and we incur that a thousand fold upon ourselves and future generations."

It's a heavy message — coming from the guy who's spent two decades building glowing blue cat people. But Cameron clearly believes Oppenheimer left something out. And he's not content to let the subject rest with abstract guilt and courtroom speeches. He wants faces. Bodies. Fallout. Scorched earth.

Whether Ghosts of Hiroshima ever gets made is anyone's guess. But one thing's clear: James Cameron may live underwater and in space, but his next movie wants to drag us straight into the fire.