Director Christopher Nolan has created a blockbuster film, Oppenheimer, on the physicist and nuclear weapons adviser J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the A-bomb.

That movie, according to Nolan, draws on the prize-winning Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus (2005), by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. But Nolan’s film very often reaches well beyond that book to present many fictionalized scenes and much fabricated dialogue.

So far, such presentations in the movie have usually escaped comment by most reviewers. Most reviews have been highly favorable, even enthusiastic, and usually uncritical.

For many millions of viewers, that film will probably define much of what they know about Oppenheimer himself, wartime and early postwar U.S. nuclear history, the Oppenheimer-headed Los Alamos laboratory (where the 1945 bombs were devised), and some of the scientists involved with the secret wartime A-bomb project.

Very distressingly, among the troublingly fictionalized events in the movie is the markedly ahistorical treatment of a

Los Alamos meeting on “The Impact of the Gadget [the A-bomb] on Civilization.” American Prometheus, relying on the reports by physicist Robert R. Wilson, who headed the cyclotron group at Los Alamos, describes Wilson putting up notices about, and organizing, such a meeting some months before the atomic bomb test (Trinity) in mid-1945. The noted experimentalist Wilson, later the founder of Fermilab, recalled in multiple postwar interviews his great concern, months before Hiroshima, about the A-bomb.

Though a former student of Oppenheimer, and an admirer at Los Alamos and often later of Oppenheimer, Wilson was troubled that Oppenheimer, as the Los Alamos lab director, opposed Wilson’s holding such a meeting. Nevertheless, Wilson reportedly went ahead with it; the attendance has been variously estimated at roughly between 20 and 50, and involving mostly senior scientists at the lab — presumably all men.

Strangely, Nolan in his film never even mentions Wilson in connection with that meeting. Instead, Nolan creates an unnamed female scientist at Los Alamos who organizes and holds such a meeting.

That never occurred. It’s pure and unacknowledged fiction. There was no such female scientist. Not only has Nolan markedly rewritten events and fully fabricated a person who never existed, but Nolan also obscures something very important: crucial gender matters at Los Alamos in particular, on the wartime A-bomb project in general, and overall in 1940s America.

The high-level scientific-technological work at Los Alamos was almost entirely male-populated. There were almost no women at the Ph.D. level in science at the large lab; reportedly, there were only four (three physicists and a biologist) among the more than 150 male scientists with Ph.D.s.

Put in context: Only about 3%, or slightly fewer, of the holders of Ph.D.s in physics during World War II in the entire U.S. were women. To recognize that set of gender-specific facts is important. To think about what it means, and why, is significant — and necessary.

Not to critically understand the very limited participation of women in the upper levels of science-technology at wartime Los Alamos, and on the overall

A-bomb project with its more than 135,000 employees, is a serious mistake.

Director and script-writer Nolan and his producer (Emma Thomas) should explain why they chose to obscure, and thus to distort, this important history, and instead to create a very false gender-related history.

In addition, one might ask a related question that both American Prometheus and Nolan’s movie ignore, but that physicist Edward Teller, in his anti-Oppenheimer years, occasionally raised in interviews: Why hadn’t Oppenheimer recruited to Los Alamos two skillful women physicists, Oppenheimer’s former Ph.D. student and collaborator (Melba Phillips) and his former Gottingen classmate (Maria G. Mayer), who later won the Nobel Prize? Teller’s postwar questions, perhaps spurred by his anti-Oppenheimer attitudes, might nevertheless have enriched, and complicated, Nolan’s portrayal of Oppenheimer and of gender issues in this rather flawed film.