People malding because they discussed his romantic and sex life is really weird. Like, yh, so what? It’s a biography. That aspect of people’s lives is actually very important and tells you a lot about them, and it says a lot about people’s media literacy that they didn’t catch, even as communists, the significance of how the problematic aspects of his relationships to both women and communists interwove there.

On people wanting to see more of the (presumably technical) details manufacture of the bomb: okay how do you actually do that, narrative-wise? You have to jettison pretty much anything else in the plot unless u want a 5 hour movie. And even if you did it, guess what, you will almost certainly just be left with a something that for most people is a snore-fest and which would only be of interest to nerds like you, me and couple others.

It’s a drama. It’s true that there were many dramatic events in its development but it’s not clear how to integrate that in the script. An actual good script in this kind of movie which is tightly-structured in terms of its narrative risks having its tempo, speed and the developments of its themes upset if another distinct storyline is introduced without reason. Not saying it couldn’t be done, or that it isn’t important, but saying that this is, by definition, intrinsically more worthy of screen time that his personal relations with his communist lovers, is pretty weird and comes off as puritanical, or ignorant of romantic love and how it can feature in biographies, to seems to me.

In any case the technical details of atomic weaponry is not the focus of the film, that’s for textbooks. The focus was on his tragedy, the philosophical connections between his scientific thought and his life, and his personal, romantic and political faults and betrayals.